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 rich and diverse history of film within the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as a context for understanding some of the complexities of contemporary film and new media in the United Arab Emirates. By examining pre-cinematic artistic practices, aesthetic traditions, cinematic styles, political economies of media, and social change, the course provides a context for understanding productions from major industries in Cairo, Chennai, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Tehran alongside work by independent filmmakers and new media collectives from throughout the regions. Students will engage in original research with the NYUAD Library special collection of Gulf film.

This course investigates the relationship of cinema and war from the early 20th century to the present. From the Libyan War of 1911-1912 onwards, film has been integral to shaping public consciousness of military events as they unfold and public memory of wars after the guns have fallen silent. The course looks at feature films and non-fiction, with government and clandestine short films shown as well as commercial entertainment films and independent documentaries. Topics to be addressed include how war's many violences are represented; the filmmakers' circumstances (censorship, political agendas and pressures, physical danger, the politics of funding); national cinemas; the role of sound; the camera as weapon; the uses of history; and the operation of memory. Case studies may include the two World Wars, civil wars (Spain, Lebanon), anti-colonial wars, the fall of Communism, the war in Iraq, Vietnam, the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and the Egyptian revolution.

Taking advantage of the location of NYU Shanghai, this intensive seminar style course serves as a ground-level introduction to the legacy of Shanghai film culture in the Republican Period and contemporary Chinese film industry and media culture in the region. Our approaches will be a combination of in class screenings and discussions related to early Shanghai cinema history (from cultural geography, infrastructure, silent classics to advent of sound etc.) and the cultural politics of contemporary film/media culture formations. The course includes fieldtrips to and investigations of old and new exhibition venues such as the Great World entertainment center and Grand Theater, The Shanghai Film Museum, and media companies. There will also be a visit to a shooting base or a relevant institution near Shanghai. Students are expected to engage in collaborative and individual research related to readings, screenings, and case studies, and give presentations on the findings. This course counts as Film and New Media elective (as well as Asian Film & Media minor elective).

Famously building on Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto of 1848 - Soviet socialism charted a profound alternative to western developmental models of economy, society, and a just world. The goal was to redirect the human energies that had already built so much through industrial capitalism. Property needed to be fundamentally rethought, along with the very concepts of family, labor, and the common good. Humans, themselves, would be remade. To get there, the masses would need to be "escorted into History," and cinema played a leading role. In the words of Trotsky, it would become the government's new church. With a wide-ranging look at socialism on screen, this course introduces students to film theory and criticism, histories of socialism, and creative approaches to political economy. We include key sites around 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 the German WWII camps on the outskirts to today's National Film Museum, and with guest speakers on a youth spent in movie halls under the socialist era's Prague Spring.

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.

Recommended for the FNM Practice Track. A writing workshop designed to develop short screenplays from concept to final draft. Topics include theme, character, research, story, conflict, dialogue, and script editing. Screenings, discussions, and class exercises focus on classical and contemporary examples of the short film from a variety of genres, traditions, and cultures.

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 provides concepts, methodologies and skills for students to conduct ethnographic research using audiovisual media. Taking a hands-on approach and working collaboratively and dialogically with our subjects, the course will explore various aspects of the maintenance, transmission, and transformation of musical knowledge and traditions on Zanzibar. Students will produce a set of short audiovisual documentaries focusing on Zanzibari musical heritage and the people that practice and work to sustain it for future generations.

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.

Rarely do cultural expressions move so quickly and with such force from the presumed media periphery of the south to the north. Such was the case with Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry). It happened after the release of Living in Bondage (1992/3), which remains one of the evergreen Nollywood films of all times. In quick succession, Nollywood became a national brand, a continental affair, and then a notable presence in the African diasporas of North America and Europe. Nollywood recently made its debut on Netflix, a significant marker of its global reach. Like its regional counterpart, Ghanaian popular film, what endeared Nollywood to local audiences was a combination of local content and the uncanny ability to domesticate the foreign. Like old Nollywood, new Nollywood is still decidedly local. How do we explain Nollywood’s cooption to the media space of the global north? Was this due to the commodification of “third world” cultures in western media? Can there be something positive taking place in this field of cultural exchange? Students will confront these questions by engaging in close reading of the grassroots origins of Nollywood and a body of selected Nollywood films. What, for example, has Nollywood done right that the Ghanaian industry has not? What does the emergence of this regional cinema tell us about the theory of “third cinema?”

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.

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.

Critical to the making and studies of film and new media are sensitivities to how audiences, spectators and publics are developed and effectively engaged. This course introduces students to contexts of visual literacies, concepts, methods and technologies of designing and mounting exhibitions for varieties of locations ranging from cinema halls to art fairs, museums, online platforms, public displays and other cultural spaces. Such skills will be developed side-by-side with cultural and interpretive studies of politics and infrastructures of power, various social and historical contexts, models of cultural and art management, artistic practices and social movements and attitudes, and conceptualizing and designing exhibitions.

This course examines migrations of the short format from the silent era through its serialization as episodes in long-format narrative, such as television and web series and multi-level video games. The course explores the aesthetics and politics of looking from peep shows and television flows into video-on-demand and webcam surveillance, focusing professional and nonprofessional productions. Topics may include: exhibition platforms from nickelodeons to social media, music videos, Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas, Indian mythologicals, Nollywood multipart video-films, Turkish and Pakistani dramas, Ramadan serials, K-dramas, vlogs, global talent-shows and reality-television franchises, and animated series.

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.

The first half of the course will be focused on developing and writing screenplays in episodic parts. The second half of the semester will focus on producing the work on a variety of platforms (based on individual experience and skills); it can range from photo montage, video and film, animation, VR, web-based story, social media feeds, or podcasts. Students are encouraged to push the (plat)forms and experiment, such as mixing platforms to tell one story. For example: a podcast begins the story, then transitions to a photographic essay, and conclude with inhabiting a 360 degree immersive storytelling space. Throughout, the focus will be on narrative storytelling (documentary and fiction).

A practical introduction to creating compelling stories in which real people are the characters and real life is the plot. The academic study of classic documentaries is combined with craft training and a review of documentary film styles. Practical exercises are assigned weekly. Working collaboratively in small production teams, each student completes a short documentary portrait. The course includes the introduction of digital filmmaking fundamentals: lighting, camera, and sound recording. The creative role of the editor is also emphasized. Students learn to understand how pacing, transitions, cuts, and continuity can enhance a documentary film.

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 challenges the conventional partitioning of knowledge into discreet academic disciplines and anthropocentrism that fail to acknowledge (and perhaps even contribute to) existential crises for present and future generations of Earth's inhabitants. Environmentalist film and interactive media convey ways to conceptualize ecosystems that are biological, cultural, economic, epistemological, political, social, and, above all, more than human. Work in this class engages thinking within an entanglement of issues, including the Anthropocene, climate crisis, commons, corporate greenwashing, disaster capitalism, earth democracy, environmental justice, extraction, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), habitat degradation, indigenous and local knowledge, industrial farming, informalization of labor, plastics, pollution trading, privatized recourses, public health, rewilding, risk, species extinction and de-extinction, waste and e-waste. The course, thus, asks when humans will demonstrate a sustained capacity to consider their responsibilities to - and dependencies upon - nonhuman life.

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.