Digital Filmmaking and Community Media Outreach
This class is an accelerated introduction to digital filmmaking for honors students from all majors. Drawing on your diverse academic backgrounds and research interests, you will gain camera, sound and editing skills, and learn how to represent your observations, experiences and point of view through a series of short creative non-fiction projects. Using DSLR cameras and Zoom sound recorders you will learn how to create and interpret sounds and images, and then to edit your work using Adobe Premiere. Class meetings will consist of brief lectures, discussions, lab tutorials, group exercises, screenings, project work, presentations and critiques. Through class critique, you will learn how to process feedback and use it productively to revise and strengthen your work.
The class also includes a significant community engagement component. After developing technical, aesthetic and rhetorical skills in media storytelling, you will work with a community-based youth enrichment program such as Owl & Panther to mentor K-12 students to tell their own stories through media production. Owl & Panther works with youth from refugee families from Nepal, Iraq and Ethiopia, now settled in Tucson, who have been impacted by torture, trauma and traumatic dislocation. Participating in this project that nurtures creative expression among youth from diverse cultural backgrounds, you will not only sharpen your skills in media production, but also develop teaching/mentoring skills and learn about refugee populations here in Tucson, while contributing to refugee youth’s language learning, acculturation, skill-building in media production, and self-expression.