This course teaches students the basics of videomaking, starting from still images and transitioning into movement, from silence to sound, and from aesthetics to concepts. Through in-class lecture, assignments, and readings, students engage in three crucial activities:

1) Playing with image and sound to gain competence and confidence with them as workable materials;

2) Building awareness of important works of art and writing relevant to photo, film and video-making;

3) Exchanging ideas by reading, speaking with, and listening to one another and other artists and theorists.

Students acquire a basic knowledge of the components of cinema and understand them as workable materials with a complicated and productive relationship to reality.

Assignments introduce and exercise technical skills, including story treatment, lighting, cinematography, mise-en-scène, sound, and editing. Readings and discussions allow students to reflect upon the effect, stakes, and epistemologies of time-based expression and recorded performance in their historical context. Through reading responses, production exercises, and discussion, students identify areas of the above that are of particular personal interest and cultivate their practice in these directions.

The works viewed will be pertinent to each assignment and are not intended to define a “canon.” There will be an emphasis on works by non-European, minority, and women filmmakers. The course will emphasize ecology and the environment, broadly defined, and will consider the role of the media and of the media-maker within it.