Digital Filmmaking

The newly installed digital filmmaking program provides students with a dynamic laboratory for producing new forms of narrative, documentary and expanded cinema applications. The curriculum is designed distinctively to instruct students in the use of new video technologies for fine art, experimental and documentary applications.

The program, while driven by a core understanding of conventional filmmaking theory and techniques, uses digital video to enable students to apply advanced motion-imaging technologies and integrate multiple media and disciplines into both conventional storytelling and new forms of cinematic expressions.

The digital filmmaking program includes workshops and elective courses on technical and theoretical subjects such as film history, film analysis and narrative structures, digital filmmaking toolbox, digital video production and editing, post-production and color correction, video art, visual anthropology and documentary, multi-channel installations, expanded cinema applications, interactive cinema and database narratives.

The fundamentals of producing a feature, set and crew management, research into new screen-based narrative forms, film's relationship to other arts and media and its role as an instrument of social expression are all part of a program that melds cinema and video art history and theory with hands-on filming and computer lab classes. This program is designed to prepare students to be strong visual artists as well as good media managers and communicators.

Digital Filmmaking Electives

Good Old Films

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the history and technique of film in its narrative, documentary and experimental forms. Several renowned film directors and their films will be screened and analyzed both critically and technically. Through a detailed scene analysis the course will look at the various components of film expression (cinematography, editing, sound, set design, acting), developments in screen narrative, film's relationship to other arts and media and its role as an instrument of social expression. The course is divided into screening and critique classes and film lab classes, where students participate in a scene study workshop and work hands-on with alternative versions of previously screened material.

Art of Editing: Exploring Narrative from Filmmaking to Interactive Media

Ever since the Lumiere brothers' first movie camera, le cinematograph, forced the filmmaker to make a raw 50-second linear sequence, narrative has been the crucial element for any time-based form of art. In this class the students will be exposed to a variety of editing techniques and related narrative forms: from basic filmmaking, to action movies, to experimental film and video, to multi-channel video art installation, computational cinema and network narratives. Through the detailed analysis of film sequences, paintings, literature and music references, the students will learn and then experiment with different editing and storytelling styles, approaches and techniques in both conceptual and aesthetic terms.