Cinematic Landscapes: The Making of

3 units

Watch movies. Talk about movies. Analyze the making of movies. Make a movie. Climate-themed movies. Post-apocalyptic movies. Meet in technology. Learn to scientifically use drones. Learn to scientifically use LIDAR. Use these tools in your climate-themed movie. Sculpt stories in time, supported by sound. This course will focus on the analysis of landscapes and cities as portrayed by popular cinema. How eidetic portrayals of nature and cities are circulated by popular cinema. Stories through which the values, common referents, public concepts, and memes of a culture materialize through the construction of movies. Interior to the semester there is an interdisciplinary workshop. Four-day fieldwork with Geology Assistant Professor Alex Bradley. Map and produce digital representations at 2-cm resolution of a mountainside scoured by a burst reservoir. This class is divided into three parts: watch, learn, and make. Watch: Each week, students will be asked to watch one movie and one director's commentary, often referred to in the bonus features as the making of. Learn: Students will study the methods and techniques used to create settings, props, and storyboards in the service of a sound vision. Make: Students will synthesize digital and analogue time-based media tools (sound and video) to make a movie thematically based on climate change.