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: Dr. Marina Letvinsky

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: Kenneth Christmas

Students conceive, produce, direct, and edit a short film exploring the Los Angeles experience with smartphone technology. A survey of cellphone cinema history leads to the study of visual storytelling principles and techniques, which students apply through practical exercises. Choosing among available short film genres (experimental, documentary, portrait, essay, fiction), students are trained through every stage of the movie making process: pitching the idea, scripting and storyboarding, shooting, and editing. Each student finishes the course with a facility in smartphone video technology as well as a coherent film record of his or her particular vision of Los Angeles.

Instructor: Christopher Cole

This course is an introduction to the basic craft of writing original, comedic pilots. Students will read and analyze produced pilots from recognized series and write their own original pilots, which will be analyzed and discussed in a workshop environment. Lectures will emphasize both pilots and the series that emerge from those pilots. The purpose of this class is for students to take their first venture into writing generative work in the episodic form.  

Instructor: Crystal Boyd

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: Jess Fuerst

This course examines filmic representations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and corresponding political, cultural, and social ideologies. Our aim will be to understand dominant and subversive storytelling techniques in films that focus on racialized subjects, sexual identity and class privilege in the US. The goal is to illuminate how meanings of race are constructed and can be read through filmic aspects. We will focus on contemporary films by diverse filmmakers paying particular attention to matters of film authorship, narrative and rhetorical strategy, and technologies of cinema. Our analysis will illuminate how operations of power function filmically to produce both conventional and transgressive gazes. Screenings include work by and about people of color in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Instructor: Jalen Young

How does music – as product, artifact relationship, emotion, and human experience -- reflect and create a place, a time, and a people? In a digitally connected world, how does proximity, community, and culture intersect with innovation and connecting in music?

This course will be an investigation into today’s music scene(s) and communities in LA -- and how they evolved historically through the early 1900s to today. We’ll be working with secondary AND primary sources, engaging with documents, perspectives, and modern conversations. We’ll also explore possible futures of music in LA and its role in an intertwined and changing local and global music ecosystem.

Historically, Los Angeles is rich and deep. From the Chicano legacy built into Ritchie Valens’ La Bamba to the influential sound of NWA to Kendrick Lamar, and the rich histories of 60s and 70s pop music and later to California punk and beyond, the musical genres and styles will be treated as cultural signifiers and ways to access histories of migration, labor, civil rights and the marketplace.

Currently, Los Angeles is growing from this complexity and is uniquely poised to grow from strength and challenges. We’ll explore why, who, and how these systems interrelate with LA’s challenges and bricolages.

Instructor: Valerie Stern

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

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

Fame—celebrity, notoriety, renown—confers both recognition and immortality. It is the most enduring and desirable form of social power; a uniquely human ambition and a central force in social life. Culture, commerce, politics, and religion all proffer promises of fame, whether for fifteen minutes or fifteen centuries. Drawing on texts from history, anthropology, sociology, literature,  philosophy, and contemporary media, this course will reflect on the ethics, erotics, pragmatics and pathologies of fame. We will compare fame to other forms of recognition (reputation, honor, charisma, infamy, etc.), and look at how fame operates in various social and historical circumstances, from small agricultural communities to enormous, hyper-mediated societies such as our own. How does the fame of the oral epic differ from the fame of the printed book or the fame of the photograph? We’ll consider the enduring question of fame as it transforms across space, time, social boundaries, and technological conditions.

Instructor: Sam Kolodezh

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

This course examines the U.S. system of copyright and intellectual property to explore its impact on the creation, distribution, and consumption of media and related cultural products both domestically and abroad. We will consider the theory, history, goals, and tensions surrounding intellectual property law as it has grown and changed in relation to innovations in media and communication technology. We will explore efforts by the contemporary culture industries to build and protect their intellectual property, including issues of online piracy, trademark protection disputes, domestic and global licensing agreements and industrial synergies. We will consider questions of ownership and appropriation, including parody and remix.

Instructor: Alysia Anderson

Women are making significant contributions as creative and business leaders in all areas of the music industry. In this course, students will learn about entrepreneurship as a process that can be applied to launching and sustaining a successful creative business enterprise in the music industry. Students will first engage in a historical and critical examination of the role that women have played, and the skills that have enables them to succeed, as creative and business leaders in popular music.  Class discussions will focus on helping students identify and develop the skills and strengths they need to become future artistic and business entrepreneurs. Guest speakers will include women entrepreneurs who are leading companies and who have successfully started their own business ventures in the music industry. Students will learn the circumstances and strategies behind their success. By the end of the course, students will put together an individual short term and long term plan to advance their careers as future executives and leaders in the music industry.

Instructor: Brianna Agyemang

Course prerequisite: REMU-UT 1215. Students who have taken REMU-UT 9241 should not enroll in this course.

The course defines the role of the motion picture music supervisor, who draws upon the combined resources of the film and music communities to marry music and moving images. This course is intended to lead students to a better understanding and appreciation of the use of music in the filming process. Lectures, assignments, presentations and present the principles and procedures of music supervision and their role in the filmmaking process.

Instructor: Bonnie Greenberg

Students will take what they have learned in the previous classes, placing special emphasis on how a pilot generates long-form story and long-term character development, and write a pilot that incorporates all of these elements. They will also write a pitch document and/or a series bible, in addition to creating a series pitch. The goal of this class is for the student to incorporate all they have learned about story generation as well as long-form story and character development into an original work that shows mastery of the form.

Instructor: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa