An examination of the art, craft, and business of screenwriting from theoretical and practical perspectives. Topics include screenplay format and structure, story, plot and character development, dialog and scene description, visual storytelling, pace and rhythm, analysis of professional and student scripts and films.

Why do we put certain films into categories? What constitutes a film genre, how do we recognize it, and what do we do with it? This course examines these questions and more by considering a specific genre over the course of the semester. We will learn to think of genre as a way of comparing and contrasting different films. Genre will also be thought of as a way of creating expectations and measuring experience and meaning. The power of film genre is that it allows us to understand film as a text and film as a social practice at the very same time.

Why do we put certain films into categories? What constitutes a film genre, how do we recognize it, and what do we do with it? This course examines these questions and more by considering a specific genre over the course of the semester. We will learn to think of genre as a way of comparing and contrasting different films. Genre will also be thought of as a way of creating expectations and measuring experience and meaning. The power of film genre is that it allows us to understand film as a text and film as a social practice at the very same time.

A hands-on introduction to single-camera filmmaking using digital video camcorders and non-linear editing. Production assignments will foster student skills in the art of visual storytelling: from pre-production, shot composition and lighting to continuity editing and post production audio.

Intensive workshop course in advanced concepts and techniques of studio-based television production, with a focus on the direction of live programs. Under the supervision of the instructor, each student will produce individual projects in a variety of genres, which will be streamed digitally. Some post-production editing and field camera work will be involved.

This course will provide an overview of the theories, tensions, and debates within the study of critical media literacy as it applies to K-12 classrooms and community organizations. Current practical and analytic research in this area will be examined. This course has a required civic engagement component; students will work with and on behalf of youth in the community on media literacy-related projects. This course is one of the required courses for the Media Literacy Certificate and satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Comm majors.

The concerns, controversies, theoretical perspectives, and body of knowledge on the issue of violence on television, in video games, on the Internet and in social media are examined. All students will work in groups to conceptualize and carry out an original research project on the topic. Social science research studies on the topic of media violence comprise the weekly reading assignments, and students submit brief reflection papers on the main points from the readings each week.

Screen Studies is a site where film, television, media and cultural studies come together to address a digital age. We?ll track the evolving forms of screens alongside the changing nature of our relationships with them. We begin by addressing what is specific to each screen medium, and then expand beyond the screen to look at the cultures that form around screens and their impact on our daily lives, politics, and identities. This course will survey para-social relationships with branded YouTube celebrities, pop-cultures, subcultures, fan-cultures, and cancel-cultures.

This course combines reading and discussion with application of theoretically informed methods in the study of everyday social interaction. We will: 1) Read and discuss representative studies of social interaction and communicative behavior in cultural context. 2) Do graduated classroom and field exercises to assemble methodological tools and accumulate data for your final paper. The final paper will be based on accumulated data - especially recordings and transcripts - from your field site. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Comm majors.

This course will examine the different ways that communication and digital technologies are shaping notions of work and labor. We will engage with ongoing debates on topics such as the sharing economy (e.g., Uber/Lyft driving), microwork (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk), microcelebrity (e.g. YouTube stars and Instagram influencers), tech entrepreneurship both in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world, as well as the work that goes into making popular consumer technologies like the iPhone.