DIRECTING & PRODUCING THE SHORT FICTION FILM (FM3039)

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The course will help you learn to direct and produce complex, personally expressive short fictions films. We’ll do this through incremental exercises designed to help you explore storytelling structures, staging, expressive frames, working with actors, sound design, crew negotiation and editing. We’ll also learn essentials of producing, press and distribution. Conducted from the director/producer viewpoint, the course challenges students to create a film that matches form with content and develops production skills through all stages of the process. The class is also an immersive creative workshop, incubating everyone’s ideas with support from the group. Some students will direct their own films. Others will produce other students’ short films in lieu of directing their own film. For best results, it is advised that you have already taken Principles of Video Production and at least one Film Studies course.

Code: 
FM3039
Name: 
DIRECTING & PRODUCING THE SHORT FICTION FILM
Discipline: 
FM (Film)
Type: 
Regular
Level: 
Undergraduate
Credits: 
4
Can be taken twice for credit?: 
No
Pre-requisites: 
3 Credits From Range [FM1000 To FM4091] OR CM1019CCI OR CM1019CCDI
Co-requisites: 
None

Learning Outcomes

  1. Audition and direct actors across a range of emotion in your film.
  2. Communicate your vision to your crew, manage your shooting schedule and deliver work on time at each stage of pre- and post-production.
  3. Compile a director’s notebook of idea development, class notes, research and pre-production materials.
  4. Create and write, direct and edit a short, cinematically expressive film.
  5. Master the principles of long single takes and continuity shooting to build performance and articulate space.
  6. Recognize directors by the questions they ask and how they use cinematic tools to ask those questions.
  7. Record clean, expressive sound and create sound ambiance to back up your script’s ideas.
  8. Understand and create film language (including attention to dramatic beats, story development, staging, lighting and duration, and sound) that is expressive of and explores your film’s ideas.
  9. (Pending) Local and Global Perspectives (LO1): Students will enhance their intercultural understanding of languages, cultures, and histories of local societies and the global issues to which these relate. (GLACC LO1)
  10. Aesthetic Inquiry and Creative Expression (LO2): Students will engage with artistic or creative objects (e.g., visual art, theatrical works, film) in different media and from a range of cultural traditions. (GLACC LO2)

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