Calendar & Classes

As the academic component of the students’ internships, an integral part of the Los Angeles Study Away experience, this seminar helps students reflect critically on their internships as a way to further their individual academic and professional goals. This includes evaluating various aspects of the internship sponsor, such as its mission, approach, and policies, and the local, regional, and national contexts in which it operates. Students will be challenged to think analytically about their internships and host organizations and to connect their internship experiences to past and present academic work. In the case of Los Angeles, students will expand their knowledge of the entertainment and media industries and learn about career opportunities they may not have been aware of previously. The course will also provide students with specific strategies on how to network and interact with industry firms and players, including how and when to seek an agent, how to get a script read, how to get an entry-level job at a studio, network, record company, communications firm, Page 2 technology start-up, etc. Students will be graded on the academic work produced in this course (i.e., students will not be graded for their work performance at their internship site).

Instructor: Shivani Honwad

Movie marketing is a fast-paced, highly interactive course designed to give students a basic overview and understanding of all aspects of a domestic movie marketing campaign, focusing on business decisions with the goal of developing a competitive advantage for a film’s theatrical life and beyond. The course will examine a range of movies, from low-budget independent to tentpole film franchises, and explore concepts, processes and different strategic approaches used by today’s distributors.

Instructors: Michelle Marks

In the world of digital and networked media, the technology industries that provide the infrastructure for the entertainment and media industries have become important. In particular, platform- mediated networks have become very important. This course will cover platforms from a strategy and marketing perspective. The objectives will be to understand how platforms function, the unique challenges they face, and how platform oriented companies can leverage their strengths and achieve success in the marketplace. These objectives will be achieved through a combination of readings, class discussions, case analysis and a group project.

Instructor: Rikke Alderson

Law inevitably touches all fields in some way, and mass media and entertainment is no exception. This course examines the inner workings of the entertainment business from a legal perspective. Major topics include contracts, torts (defamation and privacy), and intellectual property. It also focuses on the relationships between various parties in the entertainment field (e.g., the artist, manager, agent, and so on), the protection of intellectual property interests, and various aspects of the recording industry (e.g., contracts and royalties). Ultimately, this course prepares students for general analysis of a wide variety of entertainment law issues. Dealing with more narrow topics, such as constitutional concerns or union representation, requires additional, specialized independent study. This class also helps students further develop their reasoning and communication skills.

Instructors: Alysia Anderson

This class is an examination of the creative, organizational, and managerial roles of the producer in narrative motion pictures and television. Topics include how a production company is formed, functions, creates and obtains properties, financing and distribution. The course gives specific attention to the issues that will be faced by students as future producers and/or production and studio executives.

This class is primarily a creative producing class—and it will focus on the Los Angeles entertainment industry. And it will examine both feature film development and production and the television industry.

This class will provide students a roadmap of how the Los Angeles film and television industry works. It will also help students decide what kinds of projects to develop and acquire, how to assemble the necessary elements, such as director, writer, cast, etc., and to construct a realistic overall producing plan. Today’s producer must be an entrepreneur, navigating and setting his/her own course in a dynamically changing world, as well as someone who can find and create content.

Instructor: Adam Fratto

NOTE. Tisch students this course can count towards Tisch general education requirements.

Communication and media scholars have long concerned themselves with the relationship between various media/technologies and ‘the audience.’  Different intentions and perspectives inform the discourse and research on how media and communication technologies and their audiences/users interact. This course will examine the history, theories, and methodologies of audience research, always questioning the construction of audiences and media users -- constructions that are shaped by commercial, academic, political and cultural interests. Students will examine different approaches to audience research that inform the concerns, questions, methods, findings, and implications of audience/user research.

Instructor: Dr. Marina Litvinsky

Tandon-Only Prerequisite: Completion of first year writing requirements (EXPOS-UA 1, EXPOS-UA 4, CCSF-SHU 102, WRI-UF 101 or equivalent writing class).

This course introduces students to the complex relationship between interactivity and storytelling. Students analyze how an interactive structure creates narrative. Works explored in this course range from nonlinear novels, experimental literature, audio narratives, theater/performance to film as narrative databases and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, and characteristics of interactive media.

Instructor: Mia Farmer