TOPICS: VIDEO STORYTELLING in Spring 2025 (CM5091C)

In this workshop-style video production course, students will examine contemporary currents in visual storytelling in commercial content for brands, governments and NGOs, in broadcast and online news, and in documentary and fiction filmmaking through a series of screenings and while producing three video assignments. Students with varied levels of skill and experience will learn or improve on existing camera, editing and sound recording and mixing skills, while producing short films to respond to concrete use cases. Both in the screenings and as students develop their projects, we will pay special attention to how aesthetics, format and narrative function together in shifting, hybrid viewing situations to keep audiences’ attention and to elicit action. A final key component of this class will be developing students’ basic working knowledge of the commercial film production process - from brief to treatment, budget to contract, shoot to post-production - to set students up for real-world success whether they go off to become filmmakers or journalists, communication or marketing professionals, or advertising executives or creatives.

Joe Lukawski is a Chicago-native, Paris-based independent creative producer and executive producer with a wide range of production experience from news and television production to ethnographic film and archival documentary, and more recently from TV and digital advertising to fashion films and branded non-fiction. Working over the last five years as a creative producer at LEFT, agency producer at m_nstr and now independently, Joe has produced film and photo content for 50+ brands and organizations like Adidas, Reebok, Heineken, Headspace, VanMoof, the BBC and Revolut to name a few.