Film and New Media (FILMM-UH)

Sound, Image, and Story is designed to give students the opportunity to explore their creative talent while gaining an understanding of the fundamentals of the art of filmmaking and its essential tools - from generating creative ideas through writing and directing to editing and post-production. As an integral part of the course, weekly workshops will cover the technical aspects of camera, lighting, sound, and post-production as well as methods in digital film production and set-protocol. Each student will participate actively in exercises, both individually and in groups, allowing them to discover and develop their unique artistic voice while gaining technical skills. This is a first-year production course designed for film majors, and open to all students.

This course is an introduction to the basic concepts of film and new media studies. The course provides an overview of the historical development of film as an art, technology, and industry and the role of new media as an extension to and reinvention of models for production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Students are introduced to documentary, experimental, narrative, and new media within different historical and cultural contexts, comparative aesthetics, and the lines of critical enquiry that have been developed for film and new media in dialogue with other fields in the arts and humanities.

Whether narrative or non-narrative, the visceral, emotional, and intellectual power of film depends on understanding the elements that make for engaging and effective screenwriting across forms and genres. This course analyzes and puts into practice principles of different forms of dramatic and dynamic writing: narrative and documentary films as well as various non-dramatic forms, including music videos, video art, and experimental films. No single style or genre is prescribed. Writing assignments include both critical analyses and creative exercises.

This course introduces students to the diverse history of film within the so-called Middle East (Southwest Asia), North Africa, and South Asia as a context for understanding culture and media on the Arabian Peninsula, especially the UAE. By examining pre-cinematic aesthetic, performative, and representational practices, alongside factors such as colonial and state censorship, public and private funding, and social change, the course provides different understandings of films made by Western foreigners, film production from major industries in Cairo, Chennai, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Tehran, and work by independent filmmakers and new media collectives who deconstruct tropes of colonialism, eurocentrism, nationalism, and patriarchy.

Socialism on Screen: Just over one hundred years ago, the USSR set out to launch one of the world's greatest experiments at ending human inequality through a complete reworking of economy and society. Property was to be fundamentally rethought, along with the very concepts of race, gender, family, labor, and the common good. To get there, they insisted, humans themselves should be rebuilt. From the very first days, "soft power" was central to winning the war over hearts and minds. The masses would need supervision, and cinema played a leading role. In the words of Trotsky, cinema would become the government's new church. What was this vast social experiment and what are its legacies today? With a wide-ranging look at socialism on screen, this course introduces students to film theory and criticism, political economy, and creative approaches to egalitarian living. We include key sites around formerly communist Prague to fully grasp the experiential dimensions of all at stake, from some of the city’s oldest churches to its most famous cinema halls, from opera houses of old to today's National Film Museum, and with guest speakers on a youth spent in movie halls under the socialist era’s Prague Spring. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

Film, video and photography play a vital role in preserving cultural memory. The course studies organizations that collect this material and examines the cultural purposes they serve. It presents theories explaining the human habit of collecting and its relation to memory. BA is a fascinating site for learning what role media can play in memorialization. The "Dirty War" (1976-1983) still marks its institutions; its impact of censorship and human destruction still shape the daily work of archivists. While grassroots activity insists on the presence of the "disappeared," cultural institutions, as well as families, can confront the complete loss of an archive. Recently, new laws have supported the establishment of numerous new memory organizations. Museums, artists, and activist groups have found routes to memorialization, through curating or making film; erecting topographies of memory in the physical landscape; building parks of memory at critical sites; and understanding "Things as Bridges" to social experience, e.g. memory and history as graspable through encounters with objects. The course links to broader matters of social justice and human rights.

Filmmaking is collaboration between highly specialized crafts. Students will learn how to operate equipment and direct crew safely in multiple hands-on production scenarios. With these skills at their disposal, students will learn methods for executing creative choices from a technical perspective. By the end of the course, students will have abilities that not only allow them to operate safely and productively, but also allow for artistic growth and flexibility.

This practical workshop offers students hands-on insight into the process of creating drama in a film using the human capacity to respond emotionally to a fictional situation. Students learn how to direct films that have a precise screenplay and a well-constructed plot in a way that brings non-actors to act out a story without being aware that they are being directed according to a pre-written script.

A practical and hands-on introductory course focusing on both the art and craft of cinematography and digital image-making. The course begins with the essential foundations of video and film, covering various video formats, codecs, compression types, and camera sensors and then moves into practical applied use of camera and lens choices, camera types, waveforms monitors, false color and light meters. Both the technical and artistic aspects of film lighting will be covered, with numerous lighting exercises on the sound stage and locations, including specialized situations such as shooting at night, on locations, and green screen work. The class will move on to intermediate skills such as breaking down screenplays visually, multi-camera live event shooting, and techniques of how to move a camera using gimbals, jibs, and dollies. Students will be expected to crew on a working film set during class times. This class is ideal for any student with an interest in becoming a cinematographer or camera operator and will provide you with material for a cinematography showreel.

This course focuses on the duties of a producer throughout a film's life cycle; from development to execution. An intensive seven-week course, 'Producing the Short Film', acquaints students with industry positions, set protocols and gives them critical skills in scheduling and budgeting across digital platforms, including narrative and documentary filmmaking. After completing the course, students will be empowered, as producers, to manage film productions and strategically bring creative ideas to fruition.

The importance of quality sound in film and new media cannot be overstated - it is often said that "sound is seventy-percent of what you see." Production Sound for Film and New Media explores a variety of recording techniques, emphasizing dialogue and capturing the nature and aesthetics of sound on location. This course aims to give students high quality training in the theory and practice of sound recording using state-of-the-art 4K multi-camera. as well boom training. Additional topics include basic sound editing, microphone characteristics, the sound recording chain, and discerning what can be fixed in post versus what can only be done during production.

How do our cultures, experiences, and intersections constantly shape and re-model our perspectives of the world we live in? How do we mine our cultures, experiences, connections and intersections to create stories that offer new ideas, perspective and learnings? What have been the impacts of slavery and colonialism in shaping our cultures, and in guiding our perspectives? This course will provide students the opportunity to storify their experiences of a new culture and see through their perspectives the tremendous cultural coalition going on in their minds and its latent capacities to birth a richer worldview. Students will learn through immersion in cultural and historical spaces, places, sounds, images, and artifacts in a place uniquely recognized as a cultural melting-pot: Accra, Ghana. We will visit Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park & Mausoleum and Elmina Castle in the course of this program. Students will create short films documenting their experiences, which will form an archive of stories around which a future compendium could be created for viewing at festivals and galleries across the world.

Culture and Popular West African Cinema: How do the so-called peripheral cultural expressions navigate and influence global media landscapes and audiences. What are the implications for local cultural identity in such exchange? Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, and Ghallywood, the Ghanaian popular cinema, exemplify this dynamic. Since the early 1990s, both film industries have defined a sub-continental cinema culture, which has made a notable presence in the African diasporas of North America and Europe. Both have also debuted on Netflix, a significant marker of their global reach. This regional cinema has created a popular mode of expression that is distinctively West African, blending local content with an ability to engage with global themes. How do we explain the co-option of popular West African cinema into the media space of the global north? Is it a result of the mere commodification of "third world" cultures in Western media? If so, what has it done right to achieve this status? Students will explore these questions through a close analysis of the grassroots origins of selected films, pointing to the regional similarities in narrative style and themes. Is it possible to discuss this regional cinema as "third cinema"? This course will be offered in June-Term 2025.

Fact may or may not be stranger than fiction, but invariably both exert strong influences in creating narrative. This course explores how documentary and fiction are combined throughout history and in different cultures. The course will include an examination of the work of ten filmmakers who have merged both formats to create singular hybrid films. Dramatic reconstructions, manipulated imagery or fictional interstitials are frequently incorporated into documentaries to elevate realism. Conversely, fiction occasionally crosses over into documentary to create a sense of authenticity or truthfulness. Lastly, the division is sometimes completely eradicated making it difficult to distinguish the reality from the imaginary. Over the course of the semester, students will create their own docu-fiction short films. Students will bring together fiction and non-fiction story elements, reflecting on how each form complements the other.

This course will present an introduction to the history and stylistic range of the documentary film genre with a focus on film language, techniques, aesthetics, structure and other elements of visual non-fiction storytelling. Through the study of selected films, readings, lectures and discussions, we will gain a foundational knowledge of various stances filmmakers take in relation to their subjects and stories. We will also analyze the constructed nature of documentaries, and the problematic notions of representing "truth" and "unbiased" representations.

This course focuses on the practice of Creative Documentary while engaging critical debates in documentary filmmaking. This course enables student to explore their artistic practice to expand the idea of both storytelling and knowledge production. The emphasis through the semester is on developing the students critical ways of seeing and supporting the process to develop artistic choices to express their vision. Documentary filmmaking is anchored around a research question and the use of cinematic language (image, sound and editing) to express the exploration of the subject. Students will be expected to develop, execute and present an independent documentary film project at the end of the semester. Students are required to crew for each other and are discouraged from shooting their own projects in a one-person crew.

Fieldwork with a Camera: Modes of Documentary Filmmaking: What is a documentary film? Does the absence of fiction define what is non-fiction film? Are these meaningful categories? This course offers a practice-based approach to unpacking and engaging critical issues at the core of documentary filmmaking. The class will delve into vibrant debates on documentary filmmaking with a focus on ethnographic film as a genre. Through screenings, readings and feedback on film projects, we will critically examine terms such as objectivity/subjectivity, culturalism/multiculturalism, and relativism/universalism. The ethics of representation is central to engaging with critical theoretical debates in the field. Students will negotiate ethical and conceptual questions within their own research-led, practice projects that they will discuss and screen in class. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.

This course is designed to develop techniques and skills in generating ideas for short narrative films that are shot on digital video and edited on nonlinear editing software. It will focus on strong visualization of story and camera techniques, as opposed to dialogue-based work. Students will develop skills in the elements of visual storytelling through the process of storyboarding and creating shot lists, then working in small crews to direct and shoot the projects. Students will gain knowledge of new photographic techniques, moving the camera dynamically, and the ways in which editing and sound design can be used to support story.

Principals of Post Production focuses on techniques for editing, color grading, and compositing motion pictures. Using industry standard software, students will explore continuity editing techniques and theory, color grading and picture finishing, and compositing effects such as green screen and set extensions. Students will also engage new media technologies such as post for 360 Video, and VR Cinema. The course is designed to give hands-on experience that enable students to work across the production pipeline to meet international standards in the creation of entertainment products and communications media.

This course focuses on practice-led research and research-led practice as methodologies for thinking about art and media in relation to archives and screens. Its central argument is that making and studying are not separate activities that corrupt one another but instead entwined and mutually constitutive activities that augment creativity and curiosity. Assignments encourages students to understand differences between making and studying in non-hierarchical and non-sequential ways. By emphasizing feminist postcolonial transnational indigenous and posthuman approaches the course shifts attention from dominant modes such as flat-on-the-screen time-based commercial films as entertainment to immersive interactive locative auto-generative mobile nonlinear and tactical modes for producing research through arts practice and producing arts practice through research.

In this intensive course, Film and New Media majors will define a research question and explore different iterations of the same theme through different modes of film making. These iterations will be in the form of sketches where students will be encouraged to experiment the same set of ideas/subjects/narratives using different combinations of the tools at their disposal. Different formal choices will lead to entirely new set of explorations and meanings embedded in the same theme. This course attempts to blur boundaries between documentary and narrative film, conceptual and emotive cinema, art and communication. Students are encouraged to reflect on 'what' they want to express and 'how' they intend to express this. But the key motivation for the assignments is to lead students to addressing the question - 'why'. Why am I making this image and what is my relationship with and responsibility towards this image - this is the core concern that students will grapple with. Students are encouraged to locate their research question within Abu Dhabi or the UAE.

This course focuses on developing and producing three short projects: a music video, a short narrative, and a commercial. Students will research the historical development of each project's form as they develop their work. The course will advance the student's conceptual and practical knowledge of directing, cinematography, and film production. The course will formally link students to collaborate in post-production with editors and colorists in Principles in Post-Production, and sound designers in Immersive Audio Storytelling. Students will conclude the course by submitting at least one of the projects to regional and global film festivals.

The Capstone Seminar provides senior Film and New Media Studies majors with the opportunity to research and develop the concept for their senior Capstone Project. Students are encouraged to integrate studies and practice in (a) writing a research paper that explores a historical, cultural, or theoretical question related to film and new media broadly conceived and (b) making an accompanying creative or curatorial project. Such projects must include screen media, such as micro-short films, interactive installations or locative media that involve mobile apps or projection, or take the form of a prototype for multi-level videogames or interactive narrative or documentary projects. Creative projects must engage with the student's academic research into both the content and form of their creative project.

The Capstone Projects course in Film and New Media provides seniors with the opportunity to complete a Capstone project, which ranges in form from a research paper to time-based media (narrative, documentary, experimental) or digital object involving an installation or performance (video art, new media art, video game, mobile app, locative media) or a combination of these forms. The course focuses on identifying and articulating the objective of each student's project through editing, self-assessment, and peer review. Ongoing emphasis will be placed on a writing portfolio, which will include critical analysis of arts practice or a conference version of a research paper. The course prepares students for a defense of the project before a faculty panel and a public presentation of the project. The course also explores topics of interest to future graduates, including festivals, programming, research, and graduate programs.

The Capstone Seminar provides senior Film and New Media majors with the opportunity to research and develop the concept for their senior Capstone Project. Students are encouraged to integrate studies and practice. In coordination with their Capstone adviser, students will develop a proposal to be presented to the faculty.

Required for FNM Practice. Senior FNM students arrive with a Capstone proposal/screenplay. After further development students will produce their Capstone project. Students are encouraged to integrate studies and practice with the intention of creating a time-based media project, including but not limited to single or multichannel, multi-platform documentary, experimental, live action or animated narrative. Students are required to crew on their classmates Capstone shoots.