Film & Television

• COM FT 576: Global New Wave
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT250) - Explores the interconnected production and reception of selected European, African, and Asian New Wave cinemas of the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. These films experimented with form and style to challenge classical Hollywood norms.
• COM FT 577: Multi-Camera Studio Directing
  This course introduces students to the creative and technical principles of directing multicamera studio productions across genres, including sitcoms, talk shows, and live entertainment. Emphasizing real-time decision-making, students learn to translate script, performance, and production design into cohesive visual storytelling within a control room environment. Through hands-on exercises and collaborative studio work, students develop skills in directing actors, camera blocking, shot selection, live switching, and team leadership. The course culminates in a fully realized live or live-to-tape production, preparing students for the demands of contemporary studio and broadcast directing. As part of the course, students will engage directly with professional multi-camera production environments through at least one organized field experience during the semester, which may include visits to local television stations to observe directors in real time during live newscasts or recorded interview segments, as well as university or professional sports production facilities such as control rooms during live athletic events; whenever possible, these visits will include pre- and post-observation context and conversations with working directors and production staff, providing students with practical insight into real-world decision-making, workflow, and communication in high-pressure, multi-camera directing environments.
• COM FT 581: From Idea to Audience: Making Content People Actually Watch
  From Idea to Audience: Making Content People Actually Watch is a hands-on, industry-aligned course focused on the creation, production, and distribution of platform-native content for today’s creator-driven ecosystem. Emphasizing vertical video and mobile-first formats, students develop the creative and technical skills to conceive, script, shoot, and edit compelling shortform work tailored to platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, with particular attention to pacing, composition, performance, sound, and motion graphics within the constraints of the vertical frame. The course centers on storytelling under constraint, where format and platform dynamics shape narrative and audience engagement, and includes a major project in which students develop original content—either through a collaborative microdrama series produced with the Screenwriting Department or through alternative formats such as short-form documentary, creator-led content, branded/spec advertising, podcast-driven video, or experimental and AI-assisted media. Through iterative production cycles, students publish and test their work in real time, using analytics, A/B testing, and engagement metrics to refine their creative and strategic approach, while also gaining foundational knowledge in branding, audience development, and content positioning. By the end of the course, students will have built a portfolio of original platform-native content and developed the skills to operate as both storytellers and strategic creators in a rapidly evolving digital media landscape.
• COM FT 582: Writing the Narrative Short
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT310) - 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 Directing
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT526) - 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
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT 201). - From Hollywood movies to TV shows, the web, and more, 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. Through progressive lessons you'll learn basic drawing, character design, visual storytelling, how to use Adobe Animate, and make characters walk, talk, and come to life. We also cover acting, timing, facial expressions, color, keying, tweening, and discuss animation history and industry trends. Many valuable skills learned in this class can also be applied to 3D and experimental animation, filmmaking, art, and broadcast design. Your final project is a show reel quality animated short film that will be shown in the FTV End of Term Screening.
• COM FT 591: Media Business Entrepreneurship
  We are living in the golden age of entrepreneurship. With the never-ending march of new technology and a global media marketplace constantly at our fingertips, there has never been a better time for media business entrepreneurship. Media Business Entrepreneurship (FT591) provides students with an inside look at how the world's leading media innovators are changing the way the world connects, shares information, and conducts business. Students will learn the skills and strategies needed to heed the call of entrepreneurship and take an idea from seed to fruition. Please join us if you are interested in learning about emerging distribution platforms, want to create new ways to inform and entertain, and maybe even have an idea you are interested in validating and bringing to market. Come create media's - and your own - future!
• COM FT 592: Production Design
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: COM FT353 - Graduate Prerequisite: COM FT707 or COM CO722. 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
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT707) - 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
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT593) - 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
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT595) - 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. COMFT597 will be conducted in four phases in accordance with the standard film industry practice: Training, Pre-production, Production, and Post-Production.
• COM FT 700: Fundamentals of Interactive Media
  This course examines the history, evolution, and present scope of interactive media and related technologies from the perspective of design, theory, business, technology, and impact. Global trends, patterns, and themes are identified and discussed within the context in which they are created, experienced, and transformed.
• 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 711: Screenwriting 1
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT711) - 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.