Film & Media Studies

This course provides a hands-on study of directors' pre-visualization and mise-en-scene, the art of adaptation, experimental filmmaking, animation, writing the documentary and working with actors. 

This course builds on the formal analysis skills introduced in FS10010 Introduction to Film and Media. Students are introduced to key theoretical ideas about film and media and a variety of approaches to interpreting and understanding film, television, and digital media in context. Topics may include gender, race, sexuality, industry, and audiences, among others. The course includes case studies in film, television, and other media forms.

This course examines the ways in which contemporary practices of visual communication are being reshaped by digital media. It provides an overview of the digitization of key visual media such as photography, cinema and video, and addresses the social and political implications of the growing use of digital networks as primary forms for the distribution and consumption of images. Students will engage with key issues for 21st century media industries including: how professional organizations such as news media and institutions such as courts deal with the changing ground for claims to truth and realism by media such as photography, film and video; the implications of photo-sharing and social networking websites as new cultural forms for the circulation of images; the blurring of lines between amateur and professional media production, and the growing use of visual communication by activists and NGOs.

Students learn to express knowledge, understanding and critical appreciation of the practice of film writing. Students describe the different approaches to writing about film and the respective purpose, audiences, and outlets for them shows the development of original thought. They demonstrate independence of thought and creative expression in the synthesis of research and ideas in seminar debates and through assessments. The course teaches students how to use critical thinking to produce a piece of film writing that investigates or reflects contemporary culture. 

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.