Duncan Edwards wrote:Sounds like great news on the academic front though. Do you think you learned anything?
More than I expected, actually. Here are the courses:
Summer A
History of Motion Pictures traced the technology and approach from the early Greek camera obscura concept to the latest digital technology for visual, sound, and editing related to cinema as well as the evolution of production and distribution from early studio monopolies to modern streaming and independent systems.
Art of the Cinema examined how the earliest filmmakers rapidly grasped and exploited insights into the relationship between the new filmmaking medium and human psychology, and how these early techniques evolved over time to become the conventions we now accept and take for granted in the modern cinema world.
Summer B
Foundations of Story began with the ancient classic Aristotle's Poetics and worked its way forward through the Hero's Journey and other techniques to show how stories can use different structures to convey meaning and pathos within the audience, and related these to well-known movies.
Introduction to Film Production felt like drinking water from a fire hose with its rapid-fire overview of all the different roles and responsibilities of persons operating within a film production set from pre-production through post-production, including laws and rules and regulations and how they came to become standard in the industry. In short, it taught how to be a functional team member of a film production set without being an idiot.