Film & Media Studies

This course covers the basic concepts and characteristics of audio-visual media and explains the similarities and differences between traditional audio-visual and new audio-visual media. Based on the trend of media dominated by the computer, Internet, and new media and the new concept of three major fusion, this course focuses on the values, modes, and characteristics of content production, and organization and operation of audio-visual media.

This course presents an essential and eventually advanced mechanism of visual storytelling which significantly shaped the development of the history of mankind and influenced our cultures in many different ways. Students are confronted with various artworks (photography, visual arts, films etc.) and compare several approaches in a multitude of mediums. Through presentations, examples and discussions, students enhance their capabilities in imaginative processes and visual languages applicable on their future art projects. 

This seminar invites participants into a process for deepening their/our understanding of key concepts and practices in the digital mediation of culture, in the interests of a greater shared awareness and agency within the overwhelming, epochal processes referred to generally as digitalization. In lectures, readings, site visits, and group discussion, the course offers useful theoretical bases for approaching digitalization as a/the process at work on culture today. It practices critical skills for exploring and evaluating digital mediations of cultural heritage (both on-site at Berlin museums and online). And it empowers scholars/thinkers/artists/designers as producers of digital culture mediations with practical tools for developing and pitching effective concepts. The course takes Berlin’s cultural landscape as a field and the newly completed Humboldt Forum as a special object of study, drawing on the teacher’s professional experiences from 2015 to 2020 in the development and implementation of the Humboldt Forum digital concept for offer on-site and behind-the-scenes perspectives. The course invites participants to identify the issues, questions, or processes in culture that most concern them and support them in formalizing and refining constructive proposals of their own.

This course introduces students to narrative using the moving image. It encourages students to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to their own work. Students learn key processes and techniques involved in film production: research, scripting, camera, sound, and editing. 

This course provides a study of the elements, systems and construction processes of mise-en-scéne in film and television. Topics covered include: models, styles and movements; art design (lighting, framing, camera movements, artistic direction); dramaturgy and direction of actors; film editing resources; staging and sound space.