Film & Media Studies

This course explores the relationship between cinema and literature based on a comparative analysis between the two systems of meaning. It discusses strategies for adapting literature to film. Additionally, it focuses on the basics of cinematographic language in relation to the films studied in this course.
 

This course examines digital humanities. It will introduce the resources available at CUHK for digital humanities (DS Lab, VR Studio, 3-Printing space, etc.). It will also involve the study of some exciting applications of tools, like VR, text analysis, 3-D modelling and printing, historical mapping, etc. 

This course offers students an opportunity to put theory into practice, cultivating a sense of the history and theory of documentary film alongside the chance to make their own short non-fiction film. The theory part of the course charts the historical development of documentary through the examination of films ranging from the early 20th century to the present day, with the focus on issues of truth, ethics, technique, and creativity. The practical part of the course supports them to create and complete their own short documentary film. Four key issues are central to the course: 1) locating the truth one wants to convey; 2) adherence to an ethical code during film production; 3) engaging with storytelling, exposition, visual, and structuring techniques, including considering how meaning is made in post-production, and 4) exploring creative formal approaches appropriate to the film.

In this course students develop writing skills through a series of focused writing exercises that are critiqued in class. Students are introduced to some of the major theories of story design, and are taught how to develop their work draft by draft. Weekly classes cover (among other issues) the classic three act structure, beginnings and endings, the importance of genre, universal themes and their audience relevance, and dialogue. 

This course focuses on the afterlife of a selection of controversial tragedies, which shocked their original audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean London as much as they continue to challenge and entertain us today, both on the contemporary stage and on screen. The course focuses equally on the original context within which these tragedies were first written and performed, and on the history of their reception, with special emphasis on cinematic adaptations spanning over the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. 

This course provides a study of the major movements, schools, genres, styles, writers and works in the history of cinema. It takes an in-depth look at the meaning of the language of cinema and how it relates to the humanities.

This course examines the intersection of music, AI, and creativity, drawing from the rapidly expanding critical scholarship on AI. While the class prioritizes musicological, sociocultural, and philosophical approaches to critiquing AI, it will also engage with other genres of writings from media studies, music information retrieval (MIR), computational creativity, and from within the music industry. 

From sparkly vampires to blockbuster monsters, gothic tropes appear to be all-pervasive in contemporary culture. As Catherine Spooner claims in CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC (2006), like "a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion and advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture." This course introduces students to Gothic’s literary expression in the British 19th century, before exploring the many ways in which this dark heritage continues to affect contemporary cultural production. Focusing on three key texts from the 19th century, FRANKENSTEIN (1818), THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1886), and DRACULA (1897), this course discusses their adaptation, appropriation, and influence on popular narratives such as those found in fiction, film, tv, fashion, and music video. 

This course introduces long-format non-fiction storytelling and delves into the theoretical and practical realms of documentary filmmaking. It looks into the main elements of documentaries and explores the whole process of documentary filmmaking. The course focuses on the different genres and different techniques of documentary films as an important information base for students to produce their own films. It examines the wide array of documentaries covering political, cultural, historical, social, environmental topics, and more. The variety of genres and various techniques provide a wide base of documentary film experiences; this along with the encouragement of individual creativity is the backbone of the student's project throughout the semester.

This course offers a study of video art design and creation and the field of experimental cinema. It explores techniques and technologies of digital video and audio, as well as methods of audiovisual production. Students work in a group to develop an audiovisual project that incorporates video art techniques and formats.