Wednesday, June 25, 2014

TMA 680: Goals for the Course

Very generally, my goals in this class align with what everyone else wants to learn about, based on what we discussed yesterday: technical aspects of filming, including editing, sound, lenses, design language, etc.  Becoming proficient (to the degree possible during a 6-week term) in Adobe Premiere will be the means by which I accomplish some of these technical goals.  The Doc Mode activities we did last term in TMA 668 were very helpful in shaping my approach to filming and editing; with that said, my videos were pretty obviously made by an amateur.  My biggest struggle with filming last semester was in not knowing how to carry out some of the ideas I had.  Part of that might have been due to grandiose, un-film-able ideas that just didn’t work in the time frame we had, but I think a lot of it was due to my lack of technical expertise. 

To what end do I want to acquire/use these skills?  Personally, I find a lot of value in using these tools to document my own life and that of my family.  With regard to teaching, this class is just what I need to develop certain curriculum for my English and film classes.  Creating filming assignments with students in mind (and then performing those assignments myself) will essentially take care of my lesson planning for my Film Studies class, which I’ll be teaching for the first time this fall.  The class is going to revolve around film language and its relation to literature (since it counts as an English elective).  My plan is for students to do three projects—draft a storyboard, write a screenplay, and create a film—and at the end of the semester they’ll choose whichever of those three best fits their learning styles/preferences and delve deeper into it for a final project.  I want my students to be able to see the relationship between those three aspects of making a film (along with others), but first, I need to better see how all of these pieces fit together.  If I can finish this term with these projects planned—after finding out what works and what doesn’t work—I’ll consider my goals met. 

1 comment:

  1. I really like the idea of aligning the goals of the class with the things that you need to do for the Fall semester. In fact, I think that we are going to work on developing some rough outlines for our pre-production projects as well as our production projects.

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