COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

How is it that the moving image has assumed such a central place in our experience of contemporary art? This writing- and viewing-intensive course will seek to answer this question through a critical introduction to the uses and functions of video within the art world since the 1960s. With a particular focus on the 1970s, we will explore the pioneering work of individual artists (such as Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, William Wegman, and Dara Birnbaum, among many others) as well as the work of experimental video and television collectives (such as TVTV and Videofreex). Although this class does not require prior knowledge of video art, it does require an interest in strange and challenging media.

Students will learn to rhetorically critique how popular culture represents and creatively engages September 11 and how implicit arguments made therein contribute to the public's understanding and memory of that event. Emphasis on writing and oral presentations.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

At home and abroad, freedom of expression remains one of the most fundamental and fragile of all human rights. Surveying conflicts and resolutions, challenges and triumphs, this course engages the ongoing struggles over freedom of speech and access to information in countries around the world. Throughout the course, we will examine different legal frameworks used to regulate public expression, including landmark cases in the United States, and the rhetorical power of language in both majority and dissenting court decisions. Much of discussion will be explicitly comparative, exploring the ways different countries approach rights and responsibilities surrounding public speech in democracies, dictatorships, and nations that lie somewhere in between. Weekly discussions will compare, for example, repression and resistance within countries such as Burma (Myanmar) and North Korea vs. Indonesia under Suharto and Singapore--states that lie at opposite poles of economic and technological development yet share, or have shared, an extraordinary, almost Orwellian, control over information flows within their borders. Simultaneously, the course will examine the assumed relationships between political liberalization and democratic reform, comparing challenges to democracy and civic engagement in countries with broad and well-established speech freedoms, such as the Philippines and the U.S., with those in countries whose governments reject or distrust Western models of political and social liberalism, such as China, Malaysia and Thailand. Of equal import, the course will examine the rhetoric emerging in current debates over the War on Terror, with its pervasive “information warfare” and its anticipated “clash of civilizations,” and the role of such rhetoric in shifting the boundaries of individual freedoms and journalistic rights, at home and abroad. Finally, the course will survey an emerging world information order, examining the ways that global integration of communication networks and media ownership both advance and impede freedom of speech and access to information.

This class will investigate the idea of the author in television by looking at contributors to the creative televisual process, both in abstract and in terms of actual careers.  From radio writer to the live TV director, from the writer/producer of the 1980s to the show runner of today, we’ll examine the work of such significant figures as Irna Phillips, Norman Corwin, Agnes Nixon, Norman Lear, Stephen Bochco, Dick Wolf, Joss Whedon, and many others.

Although film critics and theorists tend to think of cinema as a “visual art,” this shorthand description of the medium overlooks the importance of film sound in cinematic storytelling.  This course is intended to provide a general overview of the way in which film theorists have treated the issue of sound in the cinema.  Among the issues addressed in the course are:  the contribution sound technology and practice makes to film form; the various possible formal relationships between sound and image; the effects of sound technologies on notions of realism and verisimilitude; the importance of sound to particular genres, like horror film; and lastly, the role of sound in film spectatorship.  The course will also showcase the work of the most important sound stylists in film history, such as Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, and David Lynch.

This course will survey scholarship on the evolving valence of mixed race in Hollywood film and entertainment television. Since the days of early film, characters of mixed racial heritage have served as powerful symbols within media story worlds, highlighting fault lines in the nation’s construction of race. Such characters and mixed-race romantic relationships were often portrayed as tragic or pathological before and during the studio era. But since that time images of “mixed” characters, romances, and families have evolved dramatically, taking on a more positive valence, while actors of mixed heritage are now likely to foreground this in publicity. We’ll explore this evolution through scholarship that examines mixed-race and bicultural characters and racially mixed couples and families in film and television, the casting and promotion of mixed-race stars, and the implications with respect to the increasingly diverse U.S. audience and past and contemporary notions of race.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

Theory and practice of editing and post-production for both video and film. Aesthetics of narrative and documentary editing stressed. Students edit a substantial project.
APPLICATION

This course provides a basic introduction to the elements that make for a successful dramatic screenplay. Particular emphasis will be placed on the story concept, dramatic structure, character development, dialogue, and visual storytelling. Recent feature films will be analyzed and discussed from the perspective of their scripts. Students are expected to create a 30-page screenplay by the end of the course, with the possibility of scenes from them or the entire script being produced by the CA 659: Advanced Film Workshop class in a future semester.
APPLICATION

For students who, after completing Comm Arts 355, are interested in continuing their film production education, this course provides advanced instruction in cinematography, lighting, and sound. Students work together as filmmaking crews to create several short scenes during the semester. There is an emphasis on directing skills, effective grip and lighting techniques, the aesthetics of camera work, and sync-sound recording, using Arriflex cameras and Fostex digital audio recorders. Students work with existing scripts and will find their own cast, locations, and props -- the class is designed to improve a student's knowledge of how to light and shoot a dramatic scene.
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This class explores several techniques of digital imaging and 2D animation including: storyboarding and conceptualizing, pencil testing and timing animation, animating simple sequences with Quicktime, experimenting with coloring and materials, and finally compositing in After Effects. Emphasis will be placed on experimental or hybrid practices, combining traditional film animation techniques with digital processes while developing conceptually challenging ideas.
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By introducing historical, philosophical and theoretical issues involved in the development of interactive art and technology, this course traces the origins of these discourses and practices and follows their evolution into the contemporary idiom. This course also investigates the emergence of computer and related interactive technologies as artistic tools through readings, in-class discussions, and web-based projects, with particular emphasis placed on their interdisciplinary natures.

In class students will learn to create their own interactive multimedia projects using Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver. The course will cover: principles of web-based programming and design via HTML, Javascript, and Actionscript. Emphasis will be placed on the creative application of these authoring languages as well as the application of programming concepts particularly useful to students engaging in time-based media.
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Making the Early Silent Film is a production class run as though it were a small film studio from before the First World War called the Wisconsin Bioscope Company. Our goal is to produce short, silent, black & white 35mm films in the style and with the technology of that era and to show these films to the public.

In preparation, we’ll read accounts from early filmmakers and view their films, along with previous Wisconsin Bioscope productions. Then we will collaboratively make three or more films. The 15 students must be willing to do everything required for the productions.

For more information about the Wisconsin Bioscope Company’s previous films, equipment, philosophy, please look at this website: mywebspace.wisc.edu/dhfuller/web

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