Aesthetics: Advanced Storytelling

Storytelling and Art II – Narrative and Reality-Based Content Creation is a more advanced step, for which AS 101 is a prerequisite, to understanding how story and art combine in creating visual content, whether film, television, or web-based. Using the concepts gained from the prior course, students will explore how various genres and mediums of visual content use story and art to satisfy the human hunger for story. 

This class will deepen the student’s clarity on issues such as the psychological underpinnings of story, the way the elements of story and art intermesh to create the finished “film”, how technology expands visual storytelling even as it constrains, and how content keeps pace with technology and vice versa. The class will use numerous examples and class discussion to help the student form an understanding of past, current and future art, and create an incisive definition of camera-based work as a storytelling medium.

Audience:

This course is designed for: Producers – Editors – Assistant Editors – Multimedia Producers

Objectives:

The student will explore the basic divisions of content – narrative (fictional) and reality-based (traditional documentary and various “non-scripted” reality formats) – and discuss the production of a film (the term “film” used as a shortcut) from the viewpoint of creating a compelling and artistic story. 

The student will come to understand the practical considerations in which the creator of content must operate, the collaborative nature of film, why and why not stories “work”, and – through watching both superb examples of the film art and some that are considered to be failures – learn the principles of analyzing film content for how closely or distantly the film aligns with the human need for story and the elements of story. A further objective of this course is to become aware that, as William Goldman once famously said, “nobody knows anything” and thus why one film that seems to click off all the boxes of will fail, while another will succeed, as art and as story. By the end of the class, the student will have a firm understanding of story and of art as both the elements of a finished film, but as the outcome of a finished film.

Prerequisites:

Completion of the course Media Composer Fundamentals I (MC101) or equivalent experience. A working knowledge of Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Experience in video production or post-production is recommended.