Film & Media Studies

One of the first forms of mass media, the power of the periodical was tremendous. It shaped readerships, politics, morality, and some of our best-loved works of fiction. With a focus on literary magazines, this course allows students to engage with literature in its original published form and to work with original artefacts. In the first week, students are given the intellectual and practical tools needed to handle and interpret physical and digitized periodicals through a series of seminars and workshops. Students then have two weeks of seminars, workshops, and excursions based around Victorian and Modernist periodicals, discovering familiar names in new contexts.

Video games have become one of the world's most lucrative media entertainment forms, grossing more as a global industry in the 21st century than film or television. However, the mass acceptance of video games and the industry's growth into an economically powerful business has also affected us socially, culturally, and aesthetically. This course examines the dynamics of video games from a variety of perspectives, including its historical and technological origins; ontological debates about the nature and necessity of games and play; the flexibility of game aesthetics; types of game genres and narratives; the people who play games both casually and actively; transmedial dimensions of games (particularly in Japan); and how games function in and represent society and culture at large. In addition to readings, students play a sample of video games throughout the semester in order to understand a variety of game genres, designs, and intersections with culture and society. 

This course examines the contemporary theoretical and empirical work from the fields of media and social semiotics to explore new media practices across social media platforms. A central focus is understanding the new forms of sociality that are emerging in relation to these new technologies. It looks at how identities are performed and communities are formed through close analysis of the communicative patterns observable in both small and large sets of social media texts. Of particular interest is how opinion and sentiment are construed in these texts.

This course offers a specialization within European or, more narrowly focused, Scandinavian film cultures. Issues that can be studied include genres, industry and expressions of artistic movements – as well as the creative persons involved. During the course, students are invited to explore a topic of their own interest, within the course framework, to be examined with an independent essay.

This course discusses the basics of video editing and the techniques and processes of digital post-production. It examines the different possibilities offered by digital post-production equipment: digital composition, digital effects, 2D graphics, and 3D animation.

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.