This course provides a gateway to more expansive, experimental and advanced moving image production workflows, focusing on the use of space, light and video to create immersive spaces and installations. Students will consider video as a light based medium, light as sculptural form, basic lighting fundamentals, and projection mapping for spatial storytelling. This course is comprised of hands-on workshops, alongside an introduction to the artists, artworks and techniques of projection as public art and installation. No previous technical experience is required, but the skills will augment (and not overlap) past production experiences in film and video. There will be three workshop based creative assignments and a final class determined collaboration to take place as part of the Tang Party.

In this course we will explore the body as a technology for channeling creativity. Whatever your artform, your body is there while you engage with it. This class is suited to students interested in exploring their creativity through embodied storytelling as we ask the questions: how do we tune the body to make space for our creativity? Can the exercise/pursuit of embodiment help us create compelling and true stories? Students can expect each class to contain some form of movement, meditation, or song; guided creative time; and discussion of activities and materials. Several guest speakers may include sculptors, dancers, singers, and poets. The course will culminate with student creation of a portfolio that may span artistic mediums. The course will be grounded by the instructor’s professional backgrounds in poetry, dance, and somatics, but will be accessible to all interested in cultivating their ability to tell a story.

Students in this course will work directly with the InterGeneration Lab and a community of regional elders to identify and create new methods of collaborative interdisciplinary storytelling. The InterGeneration Lab is a project that initiates relationships between older and younger adults through art, storytelling, and empathetic civic dialogue. It aims to model new ways that we can create multicultural, and multi-age social connection.

In this class, we will study the theory and craft of audio production, documentary storytelling, and sound design, with a strong but non-exclusive focus on narrative, voice-driven storytelling, i.e. what we hear on public radio and in podcasts. In the course of learning the tools and techniques of the audio recording/editor, sound designer/mixer, and radio writer/performer, we will produce a substantial portfolio of creative audio works, which we will extensively critique and revise. Meanwhile, we will engage with the history and breadth of documentary approaches to sound and become fluent with theoretical and practical issues in the business and art of contemporary audio storytelling.

In this course, students will explore performance in motion through public space: processions, parades, protests. We will examine historical and contemporary examples of artistic performance, political protest and demonstration, cultural gatherings, and religious procession. We will look at geographic and temporal contexts as well as the psycho-social and emotional elements (from celebratory to mournful) of processional gatherings. What stories are told through these public gatherings? What does it mean to be a participant and/or a spectator? How have these temporal and experiential gatherings been (effectively) documented? The course will involve both participatory and reflective activities. We will begin this class making props to participate in the campus procession marking the closure of Yvette Molina’s Tang Teaching Museum exhibition, “A Promise to the Leaves” (September 12th). Artistic experience not necessary!

The world is full of stories waiting to be told, but what makes a story worth telling? Who should tell it? How should a story be told to relay intent? These are some of the most crucial questions any documentarian must answer. From initial concept through to the final edit this course will ask students to grapple with this process of documentary development in order to acquire a robust set of practices from which to tell the stories of the world around us. Major topics include: How to develop, nurture and test a story idea: when to know it has ‘legs’, the value of conceptualizing story form and methodology, how to ethically obtain access to a story finding the story in the footage—the importance of the editing room forming narrative arc, becoming proficient in the use of filming equipment and editing software. This course requires no pre-existing knowledge or experience of documentary practice or technique.

In this advanced seminar, we will explore how material practices can expand the meaning of the word “research.” Physical note-taking, publication, object-making and repair, and multimedia installations will be some of the modes of knowledge-creation we’ll explore throughout the semester. Early on, each student will find a topic or theme close to their interests that they have not yet been able to pursue within existing academic frameworks, and develop that project over the course of the semester. These creative research projects will form the focus of the class, which will function as a working group, through collective critique, support, and discussion. Meanwhile, we will learn about existing projects by professional artists, scientists, musicians, writers, researchers, etc, and glean techniques of spatial inquiry, design and fabrication, and idea organization. Experience in production (video, audio, art, design, writings, or otherwise) is preferred, though not required. The semester will culminate in an installation on campus open to the public.

From early cinema’s analog trickery—double exposure, rear projection, and in-camera effects to AI-generated imagery, we will examine how filmmakers construct and manipulate reality. We will explore how digital restoration, synthetic media, and AI-driven tools are transforming visual storytelling, blurring authenticity, and constructing new narratives—both as experimental techniques and as processes that challenge our understanding of reality. Through screenings, readings, and hands-on experimentation, students will be expected to complete two polished works of moving image that question the relationship between what we see and what we believe. Projects will encourage creative manipulation of visual media, blending analog and digital strategies to explore the boundaries of cinematic truth.