Film & Media Studies

This course examines how crime is framed and represented in the media. It covers the interconnections between crime, power and its representation within the media and popular culture; and how relations of power pervade and institutionalize the meanings of deviance and crime and how these meanings can be sedimented or challenged in cultural terms.

This course focuses on the analysis of various media texts, historical developments within media, and their social and cultural contexts in the English-speaking world. It provides a foundation for understanding film, television, and digital media, and their relation to representation, culture, technology, and aesthetics. The course introduces media such as photography, feature films, avant-garde cinema, documentary films, television, digital media, print, and social media; and covers the concepts, methods, and various cultural theories within film and media. Formal and stylistics elements of film such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing, as well as approaches to understanding narrative and genre, are also covered. Students examine media products as a part of their social and cultural contexts and work collaboratively on the creation of a multimedia product.

This course explores the generation strategy and development laws of different types of radio and television programs. It covers the characteristics, planning, production process, and operation mode of different program types, as well as the relationship with market mechanism, audience needs, and the social and cultural environment.

This course examines how journalist have occupied a unique place in Western popular culture and looks at questions such as why are journalist so ubiquitous in popular culture; how accurate have those depictions been now and in the past; how has the depiction of journalist changed over time, and how have those changes mirrored the public perceptions of journalists and journalism; how do those depictions of journalist compare to reality; how has popular culture dealt with real life ethical dilemmas that confront journalists; and how effective have real-life journalists been at telling their own narratives — portraying the gritty reality, or embellishing the fictionalized view of the profession.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and students are permitted to take the course with instructor consent. Commerce and art collide in the film marketplace every day. Is there a line between business and art, content and promotion, the bottom line and award accolades? This course explores the reality behind big budget art. The course details the life of two fundamentally different products: the independent and studio film. From concept inception to final net revenue reality, the course investigates basic aspects of development, finance, production, marketing, and distribution by investigating two roles 1) indie producer and 2) studio executive. The course focuses on the history of the U.S. production distribution studio machine as the primary market maker that has recently shifted towards international distribution and streaming. It provides an overview of the history of film from a business perspective, outlines the basic terminology of filmmaking development, finance, and production, and outlines indie to studio structures. The course also focuses on the major tools of the marketing executive, their budget, partnership structures, and the essence of timing media for film campaigns.

This course covers the procedures, formats, and conventions of scriptwriting, and the skills and attitudes necessary to produce acceptable writing according to those conventions. This is partly a “creative writing” course, and regular reading and writing is required. Students learn advanced skills in writing scripts for selected media (e.g. film, television, theater, computer games); become aware of how script-writing skills are shaped by production processes; create plots, narrative structures, characters, and dialogue suitable for different media; and learn how existing stories can be adapted and developed in the writing of scripts for different media.

This course offers a panoramic overview of American cinema from the 1970s to the present including different historical periods, genres, movements, styles, and principal auteurs.