Humanities and Fine Arts 191HFA37 - FYS- New Media Storytelling

"New Media Storytelling" is devoted to visually mapping the campus. Incoming students will reflect on their first university experience combining portraiture and photographs/recordings of place into seamless visual stories. Participants will learn to use tools already at their disposal - photography, video and audio on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Digital Media Lab equipment. Additionally, they will learn to use inexpensively built analog instruments such as pinhole cameras and contact microphones. Through weekly assignments and field trips in the arts and media facilities at the university students will gain an appreciation of the campus, its people, its strengths, and its challenges. Students will have the opportunity to photograph and video spaces and people at University of Massachusetts - Amherst, and create new media works which will interface with the larger world through the use of social media. Two papers will be required: a response paper about a local exhibition and a reflection on the work of a historical figure affiliated with the University, for example W.E.B. Dubois.

Open to first-year Humanities and Fine Arts Exploratory Track students and first-year HFA Majors.