This hybrid media theory and practice course directly engages the interrelationship between discursive and creative production. Classes will include screenings, lectures, discussion, and hands-on experiences in producing and collaborating on digital media projects. Topics courses may be repeated with a different topic for credit.
Experimental Gamemaking
In this hybrid theory/practice course, students will view, play, and make video games that follow the lineage of contemporary experimental and avant-garde game makers. In addition to practicing the fundamentals of game engines, game programming, and introductory 2D/3D asset making, we will trace the history of transmedia storytelling through experimental game making, from Colossal Cave Adventure to Disco Elysium. In the process, students will learn about the pitfalls and bottlenecks of modern game production, while being introduced to alternative aesthetic, sociopolitical, and creative discourses around gaming, and the innovative strategies deployed to challenge and change the video games industry. Throughout the course, students will conduct a series of experiments ranging from short prototypes for visual novels to Machinima, and they will expand one or remix multiple prototypes into a larger game. No previous experience with games or programming necessary.
Media Activism through Participatory Video
This is a combined theory and practice course that will engage students in looking critically at what participation means when working with members of a community. In participatory video, who holds the camera often determines who holds the power. By gaining an understanding of documentary film and ethics, we will question the relationship between filmmaker and subject. Students will learn about working with community, developing relationships and trust, and how to collaborate using participatory methods. Through readings, screenings, and guest lectures, the course will explore the potential of using digital media tools to engage communities in media activism. Students will be introduced to a variety of methodologies that will lead up to a final collaborative project that will engage a local community in participatory video. This final project will result in a series of public workshops, screenings, and exhibition.
Visual Design and Composition for Media
This theory/practice course focuses on better understanding and intentionally designing visual structure within cinematic media. Students will critically reflect on how visual components communicate meaning across narrative and non-narrative forms alongside designing their own image systems through a series of photographic exercises, video sketches, pre-production visualization, and concept design look books and research for larger cinematic projects. It is an opportunity to spend more time exploring cinematography, production design, and overall compositional design elements such as color, value, line, shape, depth, visual rhythm, and more. The course will examine the varied roles that contribute to designing a project’s visual style and story across film and varied cinematic media forms. Students will also consider how these principles and methods are engaged, extended, and challenged through emerging media forms.
The Video Essay
In this theory/practice course, we will explore what it means to “think and write with video” about film, media, and popular culture. Readings, screenings, and class discussions will engage the history of the video essay, including its filmic precursor, “the essay film”; debates about what makes a video essay scholarly; and a variety of formal, aesthetic, and rhetorical strategies for communicating ideas through moving image and sound. Student work will involve a series of hands-on assignments building towards a scholarly video essay that can be submitted to an on-line journal.
Game Design Workshop
This course will introduce students to the foundational concepts of game design through the practice of creating video games. Video games are products of culture, and this course approaches video games as media artifacts worthy of analysis, critical design, and purpose-focused production. In this course, students will learn digital tools for video game creation, such as an introductory-level game engine, basic programming skills, and audiovisual design. Students will also question and critique theories and foundational practices of game design. Readings, lectures, and in-class exercises will explore the expressive and political possibilities of games as cultural productions. No previous programming or game design experience is required.
Reimagining Social Media Practice
This course seeks to dismantle conceptions of the internet and social media as distribution platforms and instead critically and creatively reimagines them as a production medium, one capable of producing unprecedented media content, communities, and cultural interventions. Students will engage with theories of social media and online communities by engaging with projects that explore these issues from a practical hands-on perspective. Students will become social media and online content creators to accomplish three main goals: become literate in the social media content creation process, understand current research and theories on social media and online communities, and transgressively examine the implications of a culture imbued with social media and online content. Topics to be explored in the class include influencer culture, cyberbullying, the Alt Right, strategy, public crises, identity communities, election hacking, fake news, and psychological and social implications of social media use.
Digital Tools for Radical Change
This theory and practice course takes a critical look at the use of media communications and social media in resisting oppression and organizing for social change. Readings, class discussions, and creative assignments will engage a variety of case studies in which digital and social media were used to shape debates, advance causes, build networks, and encourage civic participation, including #BlackLivesMatter, @realdonaldtrump, and the ACLU's Mobile Justice app. Throughout, emphasis will be placed on the art of communication as the single most important aspect of effective community organizing, activism, and advocacy. Students will put theory into practice by conceptualizing, executing, and evaluating a digital advocacy campaign via social media. Their work will be supported by skills-based workshops and class visits with Los Angeles media activists and social media influencers, which will help equip them with practical tools and insight into digital and creative practices for achieving specific goals. This course is being linked to a Cinematheque series and will include a few mandatory screenings on Thursday nights.
Remix Media and Culture Jamming
What is Remix media? Remixing, reusing, and reworking separate media elements from different sources to produce an entirely new work with a different meaning. What is Culture Jamming? Coined by Oxy alum '82 Marc Dery, "culture jamming" is an anti-consumerist tactic used to disrupt or subvert dominant media culture, including (but not limited to) corporate advertising. This theory/practice course takes a critical look at the history of remix culture—from Dada to Machinima—along with the gamut of aesthetic, political, and social concerns addressed by remix artists and musicians and the reception (and even appropriation) of their work by the corporate entertainment industry. Students will put theory into practice by producing their own remix projects including a subvertisement and remix video. We will also explore issues around copyright and fair use in the sampling of both commercial and independently-produced works.
Public Media and Alternative Exhibition Strategies
For over 25 years Anne Bray and her Los Angeles organization FREEWAVES have created public media art events that bring diverse audiences and independent media artists together in dialogue on current issues in nontraditional, community-focused exhibition contexts. This hands-on course will engage students in theoretically and practically exploring past precedents and future possibilities for innovative and people centered media curation and exhibition. Students will work with Bray to conceptualize and realize alternative public media programming interventions on campus, in Los Angeles, and online, examining critical questions of space/venue, audience/community, and outcome/social engagement.
Media & Social Movements in Los Angeles
This theory/practice course focuses on the relationship between media and social justice struggles in the greater Los Angeles region. Readings, class discussions, and creative assignments will address the use of media tools as a form of local and global resistance against various forms of economic, racial, sexual and gender oppression. Students will learn about the theoretical and material tensions between the global political economy and local grassroots media movements, ranging from Asian American video collectives of the 1970s to the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (a.k.a. L.A. Rebellion film movement) of the 1980s. In the latter half of the semester, we will examine contemporary sites of media activism online, including but not limited to #blacklivesmatter, QWOCMAP, and the Asian American Oral History project. Weekly labs will provide opportunities to explore various media forms and strategies in order to critically analyze why certain platforms have emerged within different movements and what political possibilities still resonate. While labs will focus on audiovisual production and social media, there will be room to experiment with other forms of media resistance including ‘zine-making, comic books, and musical performance (e.g. critical karaoke, flash mobs, etc.). We will be joined throughout the semester by media activists and local community organizers, who will share their perspectives on contemporary struggles and, at times, lead skills-based workshops. The course will culminate in a final project in which students conceptualize and begin to execute a media campaign with a Los Angeles-based community organization. Additional Core Requirement Met: United States Diversity.