Film & Media Studies

The aim of this lecture is to familiarize students with the various methods of media research (both quantitative and qualitative) and their theoretical backgrounds. Students may already know (and be using) some of the methods and theories, but this course aims to enlighten them of other approaches as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods.

The course includes engagement with videos about media research methods as well as discussion of recent articles from media and communication journals. Students will be expected to introduce each article in class to facilitate the discussion. Students will gain an understanding of the different kinds of media research methods, as well as when, how and why they were developed. This is not a practical course so students will not be taught how to use particular methods, but this course should help them make a more informed choice of research methods for their own projects.

This course aims to familiarize students with digital video production and editing in a broad context of education. It is designed to help students learn the technology, art, pedagogy, and practices involved in effective visual storytelling. With the advancement of digital technologies, making a video program has become much easier than before. Even so, to produce a highly effective and professional video, we need to learn certain production strategies, skills, and theories. This course offers exciting opportunities to learn basic theories and technical skills through the production of high-quality short video programs, using simple devices such as a smartphone. It helps students produce video content that has high educational value in a rapidly changing media environment.

This course offers a study of concepts related to series scriptwriting including: story line, synopsis, narrative approach, and dialogue writing. It also discusses the importance of a pilot episode. Other topics include: series episode structure; differences between a feature film script and a series episode script; tv genres; pitching a series.

In this course, students use basic video and communication tools to make their own three to five minute film related to the independent research project (BIO 188: Research Practicum). Through lectures and hands-on exercise, this course offers a study of story-telling, story boards, sound-recording, filming, copyrights, and editing. Students work closely with the film instructor and the advisor of their research project to produce their films. Final films are shown publicly during the homestay family lunch or symposium.

This course examines aspects of the historical and contemporary development of film form. In the first half of the term, it looks at crosscutting and continuity editing in films by D.W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, and Christopher Nolan. In the second half it studies discontinuity and montage in various films, including work by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, and Isiah Medina. Students are also introduced to basic editing software and the final assessment is in the form of a video essay.  

This course includes the following topics:

Image Editing Overview

The time and space structure of the video works

Time and Space Structure of Video Works

Where is the "good" of a non fiction video work

Montage

Workshop on Non Fictional Video Works

Meaning of Pictures

Image aesthetics and fashion of the times

Basic Principles of Video Editing

Narrative Editing

The Role of Sound in Video Editing

Media affects how we perceive the world and people. With media becoming so prevalent and powerful in our society, and with student access to computers and the Internet expanding so fast in homes and schools, "media literacy" is becoming the basic form of literacy to provide lifelong empowerment to both the student and the citizen. This course provides students with the opportunity to learn a variety of analytical approaches they can use to understand and interpret media, including traditional media (e.g., TV, radio, print, billboard, etc.) and social media (e.g.,video sharing platforms), in the context of education. Your products may be shared to a certain audience for feedback. Participation in class such as asserting your ideas and presenting in English in front of the class is mandatory.

The labor migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which started in the mid-1950s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on the countries’ societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the difficult lives of ‘guestworkers’ in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second - and third – generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of the so-called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first ‘guestworker ghettos’ to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will explore how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in cinema. The second part of the course then gets more specific and we approach the representation of Berlin in these migration movies.

This is an introductory course for media and communication studies. It provides an overview of major theories concerning media and communication in order to analyze our everyday communications. Theories of interpersonal communication, persuasion, and mediated communication will be included.

Utilizing Irish films, this course looks at the culture, history, and society of Ireland.  Various Irish films, including "The Quiet Man," "The Fight of the Doves," and "Bloody Sunday" will be reviewed and discussed in class.