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.
This class is an overview of the field of video games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion. The course will prepare the student to: – Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective – what are the components of a game? – Apply new theories and evaluate them critically. – Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts. – Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods.
This course will explore the three main Adobe imaging products – Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Structured as a dynamic exploration of design ideas and the adobe landscape, we’ll look at and explore the traditional design tools and methods along with many of the changes and enhancements AI is bringing to the digital design toolkit. Through a series of short exercises we will look at graphic design and layout using Illustrator and InDesign adding the image enhancement techniques in Photoshop. In the short exercises we’ll look at basic design concepts using typography, shapes and images to create layouts that are clear, simple and intuitive. More complex exercises will challenge your abilities to use images and typography to best express your goals in a variety of formats. You’ll also complete a small project of your own for the end of the class. Class time will be divided between work in class sessions, lectures, and feedback/critique sessions. This course is not intended to completely cover the software but will give you an understanding of which digital tool will best deliver your fresh ideas to the page. The majority of the class focuses on creating images, logos, books and magazines, but we cover the options of converting for screen output. We’ll incorporate some Adobe apps to augment the desktop and tablet applications. Depending on schedules, we will visit a gallery or museum during the semester. Students should have access to the Adobe Creative Suite through the NYU license.
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.
From interacting with the latest device to cogently communicating complex data, user experience design (UX) is a discipline given increased prominence by the inescapable human relationship with technology. We will cover the UX design process as it relates to interactive interfaces found in websites, mobile apps, hardware, and events.
In this course, students complete a coordinated sequence of short projects that add up to a finished, live-motion video project. The course strongly emphasizes the relevance of particular tools and techniques to the specific project Concepts are introduced through the screening of historical examples, from 1895 to the present. The course format is modeled on professional standards and workflow for preproduction, production and postproduction. | Prerequisites: DM-UY 2263
This course will investigate the dominant critical perspectives that have contributed to the development of Environmental Communication as a field of study. This course explores the premise that the way we communicate powerfully impacts our perceptions of the “natural” world, and that these perceptions shape the way we define our relationships to and within nature. The goal of this course is to access various conceptual frameworks for addressing questions about the relationship between the environment, culture and communication. Students will explore topics such as nature/ wildlife tourism, consumerism, representations of the environment in popular culture and environmental activism.
This course introduces students to key concepts in the history of media and communication, and to the stakes of historical inquiry. Rather than tracing a necessarily selective historical arc from alphabet to Internet or from cave painting to coding, the course is organized around an exploration of case studies in context. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent for Societies and the Social Sciences.
The meanings of health & disease are shaped not only by scientific & Medical discourses, but by media, communication, & the cultures of health. This course examines the impact of media & health cultures on what counts as normal & pathological, how medical environments are understood & experienced, popular tactics for communicating & contesting biomedical information, public understandings of biotechnology, & how media representation & popular culture help to shape understandings of disease & health. readings, films (& other sources) will be drawn from a variety of genres, including epidemiology, public health, anthropology, history, communication studies, & medical memoir.
This course provides an overview of critical thinking on contemporary media production, media outcomes and media systems. Introduce theoretical approaches and practice used to analyze the content, structure, and context of media in society. We will explore factors shaping media texts, including: politics, economics, technology, and cultural traditions. The dominant critical perspectives that contribute to our understanding of media will be read, discussed, and employed. The course has three broad objectives: 1. Develop a critical awareness of media environments, 2. develop a familiarity with concepts, themes and theoretical approaches of media criticism, and the terms associated with these approaches and 3. develop an ability to adopt and adapt these frameworks in your own analyses of mediated communication.
A veritable buzzword globalization refers to several newly emerged trends. To name the three most visible ones these are the economy, culture and politics. Media do not only describe and interpret globalization but also are its important part. A study of globalization is inherently diverse and eclectic. So is this course. Students will read, watch, analyze and discuss. In class discussions and writings they are expected to engage questions connected to globalization, culture and the media. Through a series of lectures and discussions the course explores how the process of globalization transforms the media and examines the impact of new technologies on global communications. Emphasizing the transnational context of media and culture the course approaches global media and cultural production from a wide range of theoretical frameworks relevant to contemporary condition.
This course introduces students to key concepts in history of media and communication, and to the stakes of historical inquiry. Rather than tracing a necessarily selective historical arc from alphabet to Internet or from cave painting to coding, the course is organized around an exploration of case studies in context.
Few values have been as unalterably disturbed as privacy by developments in new media and other information technologies. This course presents an inquiry into the impact of information and digital communications technologies upon privacy and its meanings. In order to examine at a deep level technology’s place in society and the complex ways that technology and privacy each shape the other in interactive cycles of cause and effect. Philosophical analysis is balanced with significant contributions by legal scholars, computer scientists, social scientists, and popular social critics.
The application of various systems of communication analysis to specific behavioral situations. Through the case-study method, students apply communication theories and models to practical, everyday situations.
Analysis of factors inherent in the persuasive process, examination and application of these factors in presentations. Hours are arranged for student evaluation and practice.
An examination of the art of debate using current issues of public policy & social justice. Students will learn the skills of critical thinking, evidence evaluation & persuasion. Hours are arranged for fieldwork & student evaluation.
This course presents a critical analysis of the development, principles, strategies, media, techniques, and effects of propaganda campaigns from ancient civilizations to modern technological society. The course focuses on propaganda in the context of government, religion, revolution, war, politics, and advertising, and explores implications for the future of propaganda in the cybernetic age.
In this course students will build form the skills they learned in 3D Modeling and 3D Animation to produce 3D for Interactive Applications. Projects may be geared to scientific, engineering or entertainment applications according to individual skills and professional aspirations. | Prerequisites: DM-UY 2133
How do games tell stories? How can we move beyond the traditional narrative in games? Is there a more holistic approach that embeds the story deeply into the interaction? In this class, students will begin to answer these questions by analyzing games and developing their own experimental narrative games. | Prerequisite: DM-UY 2153
In many political movements, the festive emerges as a major force shaping alternative social practices, forms of gathering, being together, and moving together. These alternative modes of being in collectivity are actively redefining the political. This sense of collectivity becomes particularly evident in the aesthetics of the Global South and its Diasporas. Consequently, this course explores the festive’s role in forming political movements beyond the traditional scope that reduces it to a simple byproduct of social life. It also explores how the pandemic has forced us to reimagine what coming together means. Taking Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics as an initial case, this seminar engages in a detailed interpretation of performances that challenge traditional definitions of both the festive and the political. A wide range of performance practices, such as carnival parties, sound systems, cabaret shows, popular dance styles, artworks, organized slave riots, and indigenous uprisings, shape the modes students will engage in theory and practice. For this course iteration, we will focus on questions around Black and Indigenous relations to carnival performance, structures of mutual aid as festive practice, and how they enact utopian modes of communal life, and how these modes of communal life redefine current understandings of art and politics. The class involves field trips, visits to several performance events, and conversations with artists and organizers who use the festive as a political tool to engage in political action in NYC. Questions regarding race, gender, and class will be directed to the philosophical, anthropological, and historical texts paying close attention to their involvement in the formation of colonial oppression. Performance studies’ methodologies will serve as the guiding mode to articulate these questions.