Film & Media Studies

This course introduces a broad spectrum of performance practices that may be identified as local cultural expressions found in Singapore. Such practices occur in varied spaces and mediums, and include street opera, getai [song-stage], animal performances, theatre, film, religious festivals, national day parades, YouTube video performances and mobile gaming. The course explores the rich performative histories of these practices and studies concepts of performativity, liveness, and mediation. It also covers the ways in which technology and media play a crucial part in cultural expression and identity formation. 

Contemporary Middle Eastern cinema reflects the social, political and cultural challenges in the region, while revealing the revolutionary spirit of its filmmakers and their filmic language. This course defines dominant themes such as: territory, cultural identity, memory, modernism, religion, feminism, internal conflict and socio-political violence, within both historical and present political contexts. Filmmakers include: Chahine, Saab, Kiarostami, Farhadi, Gitai, Maoz, Folman, Doueiri, Khleifi, Assad, Güney, and Ceylan, dealing with the challenges of Egypt, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey. Basic film analysis terms and cultural theories are covered in order to study and articulate the form as well as content of these films. While addressing the larger question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this course encourages students to consider the analysis of film as a participant in social and political change.

This course examines the foundational principles of contemporary media production. It focuses on three areas of media production; graphic design, animation and interaction design. It also studies the applied theories and techniques involved in creating contemporary media productions and current tools and strategies for a range of media contexts.

This course examines the Australian identity through an exploration of Australian film, theater, and television traditional formats and new digital content and delivery platforms. It focuses on young Australian playwrights, performers and filmmakers, and the range of learning that takes place through young people's engagement in, and appreciation of, theater, film, television and digital content. A variety of genre, formats and delivery are critically examined against the backdrop of Australian historical and sociological perspectives. Critical analysis is undertaken, not only through deconstructing Australian films and plays, but also through constructing digital content, using smart phone video application. 

This course addresses how history has been punctuated by civil resistance and disobedience movements whose characteristics, combats, tools, and arms get more sophisticated, shared, and reinvented as time moves forward. It identifies the news as a marker of movements of citizen protest, social opposition, demonstrations (such as Climate), and other acts of disobedience. From Thoreau to Gandhi, from Martin Luther King to the Extinction Rebellion movement, from Radio London (1940-1944) to the fight for the Larzac or the ZAD of Notre-Dames-des-Landes, this course explores how specific movements are born and fed and how media plays a role in the development or the resonance of these actions, from yesterday's press to modern platforms. The course includes analysis, readings, and deconstruction of what is called “civil disobedience and resistance,” in both democracies and authoritarian countries, from yesterday to today.

Japan is one of the world's leading film production powerhouses with countless films produced from the silent era to the present, from artistic to entertainment pieces. This course looks at the history of Japanese films and discusses the unique appeal and problems of Japanese films. 

This is an introductory course to studying screen cultures in their medium specificity by looking at adaptations that make narrative borrowings explicit. Students learn how to diagnostically write about and think with films, which rework popular and literary tales.

In this course, students work with an industry client to develop a project to realization, identifying an area of specialization and consolidating the skills needed to work in the media industries. The main emphasis in this course is practical production, augmented by critical and creative thinking within a range of specializations including Animation, Video Production, Interaction Design or Sound.