FMSA 311: Core Studio: Drama Lab

This Film + Screen Arts media core studio allows for varying degrees of concentration and hybridity in a range of media practices, themes, and genres. This is a dramatic practice course in which individual and collaborative projects enable students to identify appropriate and preferred media practices, and synthesize these approaches using film, digital cinema, audio, online, web-based, interactive stories, and/or immersive, performative modalities. Foundational media skills from previous semesters are the basis for innovative and creative risk-taking that embraces specific cine-making processes and expands and cross-pollinates terrain between genres, industry genres, and the author's approach. Project work is led by the director/author, albeit it is collaborative by nature, developing students' multidisciplinary, team-working, and project management skills. Author-driven scripts and films will be analyzed and broken down, their components examined for purpose and intent. Students implement directing and producing concepts in their own films and class exercises and complete a significant workshop working with their actor(s), from casting and audition through rehearsal and principal photography. Students continue to refine their critical vocabulary and analytical and technical skills. They will have regular critiques and a tight timeline in which the projects must evolve from concept to completion. Students are expected to work on each other's films covering key positions in either pre-production, production, and post-production and ensure that their third-year core studio experiences involve a solo project.