Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• COM FT 578: 3MASTERDIRECTRS
  
• COM FT 582: Writing the Narrative Short
  Writing the Narrative Short class is an intensive writing workshop that focuses on the short form narrative screenplay. Students will write at a pace of roughly one script per three weeks, completing a minimum of FOUR (4) polished short screenplays: a personal film; a character driven film; and two "long shorts" of 10-25 pages
• COM FT 589: Advanced Production Workshop
  The focus of this class will be on story creation, performance, and filming strategies using small crews and lightweight equipment, culminating in the production of six short films. Working from approved scenarios with a core group of actors, directors will explore character and story development through an in-class workshop process of improvisation. Once committed to script form, these short films will be shot with a small crew made up of fellow class members in pods of three; Director, Cinematographer, and Editor. The class will be limited to 6 Directors and 4 to 6 Cinematographer/Editors.
• COM FT 590: 2D Animation Basics
  From TV shows and feature films to webisodes, 2D animation is more popular than ever, but how is it created? This fun yet intensive hands-on beginner course teaches all the fundamental skills needed to create great 2D character animation the way it is done in the industry, with Adobe Animate CC. Through progressive lessons students learn basic drawing and character design, storytelling, and how to make characters walk, talk and come to life. We will cover acting, timing, and facial expressions; drawing "keys and in-betweens," scene composition, color backgrounds, and more. The history of animation and industry trends are also discussed. Students complete numerous projects including a fully produced animated short film that will be shown in the End of Term Screening. Many of the valuable skills learned in this class can also be applied to 3D and experimental animation, filmmaking, art, and broadcast design.
• COM FT 591: Media Business Entrepreneurship
  This course will provide students with the practical knowledge and skills needed to heed the call of entrepreneurship. Classes will include guest speakers from various business sectors including venture capital professionals, angel investors, accountants, attorneys, marketing experts who are skilled in the launch phases of PR, as well as media entrepreneurs who succeeded against all odds. Students will also participate in the development of a core business idea, from concept through the creation of a sound business plan as a final project/presentation.
• COM FT 592: Production Design
  The Production Designer, along with the Director and the Director of Photography, is one of the top three creative decision makers on any film. Of the three, Production Designers are the least heralded; their work is so intrinsic to the storytelling as to be virtually invisible to the lay audience. In this course, we explore this quiet yet powerful source of creative power through collaborative projects, studio tours, presentations and individual design concepts.
• COM FT 593: Introduction to Cinematography
  FT593 is an introduction course to the key fundamentals of Cinematography: Composition, Optics and Lighting. This course also emphasizes on applying those fundamentals in a storytelling context and as tools of on-set communications. This is the gateway course to Intermediate Cinematography.
• COM FT 595: Intermediate Cinematography
  Intermediate Cinematography is focused on the required technical skillsets needed to work on a motion picture film set. Here, the concentration will be on training students to be proficient in working with the Steadicam, Gimbal,Dolly, Jib, Wireless Follow Focus, Wireless HD Transmitters and the various Lighting Fixtures. There will also be a class trip to local equipment rental houses to familiarize them with the industry equipment rental protocol as well as an introduction to the professional crew who work there. While it might come across as overly technical, the aim of the course is, in fact, to help students overcome all the technical handling and use them to heighten their visual storytelling capabilities. The course is designed to address the practical challenges when trying to achieve the best possible cinematic images through the design of advanced camera movement, camera techniques and lighting techniques.
• COM FT 597: Advanced Cinematography
  Advanced Cinematography is an intensive hands-on and creative course that challenges students to draw from the knowledge they have gained in Basic and Intermediate Cinematography and their previous production experiences, and apply them in a structural yet artistic approach in creating a true cinematic image. The main objective of this course is to inspire students to create quality cinematographic images, not merely by just the creation of frame and light, but rather, by digging deeply into the subtext of the narrative and the subliminal elements of the music. FT597 will be conducted in four phases in accordance with the standard film industry practice:Training, Pre-production, Production and Post-Production.
• COM FT 701: Media in Evolution
  This course examines how media businesses adapt or perish in the face of disruptive technologies. Students trace the history of the television industry and the emergence of new platforms to explore how technology has influenced consolidation, emerging revenue models, distribution options and audience consumption.
• COM FT 702: Script To Film
  Exclusive to Graduate Screenwriting students (required in 1st year). An introduction to the relationship between the written script and the image on screen. Through in-depth analysis, we will study screenplays, films and the mind of the screenwriter in order to decipher the process of developing story from character, plot and theme. Students will be required to write expository papers and present their own analysis of a chosen film.
• COM FT 703: Media Business Entrepreneurship
  This course will provide students with the practical knowledge and skills needed to heed the call of entrepreneurship. Classes will include guest speakers from various business sectors including venture capital professionals, angel investors, accountants, attorneys, marketing experts who are skilled in launch phases of PR, as well as media entrepreneurs who succeeded against all odds. Students will also participate in the development of a core business idea, from concept through the creation of a sound business plan as a final project/presentation. 4 cr. Fall
• COM FT 704: Genre for Screenwriters
  This course starts with the basics of genre theory, then identifies American genre conventions using the course's "study" films. Study films will be discussed in terms of the genre's conventions: theme, structure, characters, setting, subject matter, visual motifs or recurring icons, and tone/mood. Each student is then required to write a treatment and 10-15 pages of a feature script in a genre unfamiliar to him/her. Students' creative work will be workshopped.
• COM FT 705: Comedies and Melodramas for Graduate Students
  This class will view and discuss romantic comedies and domestic melodramas made in Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's.
• COM FT 707: Introduction to Video Production
  An introduction to the techniques of producing and directing video projects, including videography, lighting, editing, sound, and special effects. Emphasis is on execution and design of both "live" on tape and postproduced works using both field and studio equipment.
• COM FT 708: ASIAN CINEMA FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
  Surveys important and influential films from India, Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere in East Asia from the 1950s to the present, taking in the work of such directors as Satyajit Ray, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Zhang Yimou, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai. The course is designed to make students familiar with foundational styles of realism and fantasy in Asian film and with ways Asian films address changes and evolution in Asian culture and society. The course should help students understand certain traditions in Asian film, and prepare them to engage critically with the ever burgeoning, new, and compelling filmmaking that comes from this part of the world.
• COM FT 711: Screenwriting I
  Exclusively for screenwriting graduate students, an introduction to principles of drama, screenplay structure, characterization, screenplay description and dialogue through lecture and discussion of produced screenplays. Students begin with exercises and then write outlines/treatments in preparation for completing a first act (approximately 30 pages) and full treatment of an original feature screenplay. Student work will be discussed in workshop format.
• COM FT 713: Screenwriting II
  Students compose a feature-length film and a set of revisions based upon the film outline created in COM FT 711. Further examples of dramatic structure are analyzed from the library of world cinema.
• COM FT 721: International Masterworks
  An eclectic and unsystematic survey of a small number of the supreme masterworks of international film created by some of the greatest artists of the past eighty years. The focus in on cinematic style. What does style do? Why are certain cinematic presentations highly stylized? What is the difference from realistic, representational work? We will consider the special ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling that highly stylized works of art create and devote all of our attention to the function of artistic style and form to create new experiences and ways of thinking and feeling.
• COM FT 722: American Masterworks
  Long: First course in a two-semester survey on American Cinema (each course stands on its own; no requirement to take both or take these in sequence). We study American cinema from its beginnings, rooted in fairground exbibition and nickelodeons, and track the establishment of the great studios in the 1910s and 20s, the height of the studio system in the 30s and through World War II, and the decline of this mode of filmmaking in the late 50s/early 60s. Focus is on Hollywood cinema, with some documentaries, independent films, and experimental shorts covered. Topics stardom and glamour, the Production Code/censorship, Cinema during the Depression, Realism and Expressionism, Hollywood and World War II, the anti-Communist witch hunt, the advent of color and widescreen film, TV as early competitor, and the B-movie, the teen market, and drive-ins. We pay special attention to the intersection of economics and the representation of race, gender, and sexuality. Genres include slapstick comedy, the gangster film, the musical, screwball comedy, film noir, the melodrama, westerns and historical epics. We study the impact of important individuals, including directors Alice Guy Blach?, D.W. Griffith, Oscar Micheaux, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Dorothy Arzner, Orson Welles, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Ida Lupino, Shirley Clarke, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and Elia Kazan, cinematographers James Wong Howe and Gregg Toland, choreographers Busby Berkeley and Arthur Freed, and producers Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, Sam Spiegel, and Lou Wasserman.

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