This is an intensive, hands-on workshop addressing the complex challenges of game design. The premise of the class is that all games, digital and non-digital, share common fundamental principles, and that understanding these principles is an essential part of designing successful games. Learning how to create successful non-digital games provides a solid foundation for the development of digital games. Students will analyze existing digital and non-digital games, taking them apart to understand how they work as interactive systems. A number of non-digital games will be created in order to master the basic design principles that apply to all games regardless of format. This course is subject to a non-refundable department fee, please see the Notes section for more detail.
Hollywood in your palm. That is what this combination of lectures, screenings, demonstrations and practical production workshop will offer to the students in this course. There will be several professional guests making presentations and Q&A sessions from the mobile phone filmmaking industry. In addition to the historical and critical overview of the emergence and exponential growth of global cell phone cinema, students will shoot all footage on cell phones and download them for computerized editing. The final project will be under three minute shorts. Projects will include all genres of film and television: news, mini-documentaries, animation, music videos and narrative shorts. Completed student projects will be suitable to be posted on the Internet and entered into domestic and international mobile phone film festivals. For example, two minute long improvisations of Bollywood Style Music Videos shot on Cell Phones by the students have been projected at the Tribeca Cinemas as part of the New York Indian Film Festival. It is suggested but not compulsory that students bring to the class a cell phone capable of recording video.
The introduction of the video camera into the artist’s studio pushed the boundaries of time-based media beyond its traditional use in cinema and television production to embody technology and narrative as an intimate material process. This video course will explore the various dimensions of video art, including its physical sculptural qualities, its use as a tool for poetic and conceptual gestures, performative approaches, and its role as a spatial dimension in video objects and installations. Video’s ability to collapse an art object through its process, utilizing experimental documentary approaches and research-based methods, enables unique collaborations between artists and disciplines to invent formats such as dance-on-film, poetic essay records, personal and collective social experiments, remote documentary performances, and hybrid forms of audience interaction. Through thematic case studies and assignments, students will develop and produce several video works in the semester, providing them with the art historical context, technical skills, and conceptual framework necessary for creating and installing time-based video art. The course will culminate in a gallery special video installation, emphasizing the audience’s interaction with time-based media within the visual art context of galleries, museums, and site-specific presentations.