Global Arc

This course will give students an introduction to documentary film and video production, with a special emphasis on the practical challenges of producing films in the real world. Students will learn fundamental filmmaking techniques from a professor with thirteen years experience running her own film production company, as well as a handful of guest professionals in the fields of cinematography, casting, and editing. Production and critique of student work will be augmented by film screenings, readings, and discussion of the effects that practical realities can have on the creative process.

This studio course will be equal parts directing and screenwriting, with a special emphasis on social issue-driven material. Students will learn how to bring a script to life in collaboration with actors, production crews, and their fellow students. The course will also critically examine a selection of powerful narrative films and analyze their different approaches to visual storytelling. Specific topics covered will be: the basic tenets of film direction, writing for the screen, effective ways to work with actors, the post-production process, and how journalistic research methods can inform the early stages of the filmmaking process.

An introduction to narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques. This course teaches the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media by providing technical instruction in camera operation, nonlinear editing, and sound design paired with the conceptual frameworks of shot design, visual composition, film grammar and cinema syntax.

Students in VIS 300 will create sculptures that relate directly to the body and compel performance, interaction, and movement. Students in the associated DAN 300 will create dances that are informed by garments, portable objects and props. The two classes will come together periodically to compare notes and consider how context informs perceptions of sculpture as performance and the body as object. A lecture series of prominent choreographers and artists will accompany the courses. One two-hour class and one three-hour class per week; course is open enrollment.

This course is designed to allow students to explore more deeply the process and meaning of painting. Students will complete a set of structured assignments and are encouraged to develop an independent direction. Contemporary critical theory is integrated into the course. Two studio classes, five hours per week. Prerequisite: 203, 204 and instructor's permission.

We begin with a body and spend our lives representing, indexing, performing, expressing, camouflaging, revealing, adorning, contextualizing, and recontextualizing that body. This course will look at how artists have made work to intervene in this process. Alongside other aspects of visual culture, we will take protest as a key site of the political body that we will break down into voice, movement, text, and mass media. Studio work will explore strategies of representation through mixed media, drawing, painting, photography and performance. The course will include visiting artists and a museum or gallery visit.

The Haptic Lab is hands-on studio course in which haptic learning - both physical and virtual - will occur simultaneously. Four fast-paced, materially intensive assignments will be paired with equally intensive digital production. Students not only will engage in making artworks in both realms, but also engage in critical analysis of the dynamic relationship between the two. Materials may include ash wood, silicon rubber, soil, polystyrene, or a recipe for 2,000-year-old cement. Course work will be supported by visiting artists and scholars and accompanied by cognitive self-analysis in the form of weekly photo and journal documentation.