Syllabus: GEN 230 Creative Expression: Performing Arts: Spring 2012

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Schedule at a Glance

	class days	topic / activity	deliverable	due date - before class on ...	format
	January 18, 20	W: introduction to the course Matteo Ricci's YouTube Channel F: introduction to your video project first reading of Odd Couple scene	list of ideas	Jan 20	your email response to my email to your school address
Pre-Production	January 23, 25, 27	M: overview of the process review of your ideas cast OC scene for auditions analysis of video structure W: rehearse and run OC scene F: pitch your concept to your classmates LIVE ON-STAGE!	concept for your video (<25 words) pitch	Jan 27 Jan 27	written email (not an attachment, just type or paste it directly into the email) oral presentation	Pre-Production
	January 30, February 1, 3	M, W: rehearse and run OC scene on Lecture Hall stage F: production values demo - light and sound, taping OC scene
	February 6, 8, 10	M, W, F: casting your scripts read scripts with possible casts	final script treatment production lists shot list	Feb 6 Feb 8 Feb 10 Feb 10	written emails (not as attachments; just type or paste directly into the email)
	Production dates - pick one for yourself or I'll assign you one	Gateway 1 appointment with me to look at your script and production lists, discuss casting, and foresee production challenges		Feb 6 - 10	personal appointment or email
Production	February 13, 15, 17, 20	scene rehearsed with cast on set	scene rehearsed		personal attendance	Production
Production	February 22, 24, 27, 29, Mar 2, 12, 14, 16, 19	filming in studio and on stage we have 22 students divided into 2 locations (stage and TV studio) over 9 class days with Spring Break in the middle	scene performed shot list directed, taped with attention to production values	Feb 13 - Mar 16	personal attendance	Production
		Gateway 2 appointment with me to view the media assets for your project	collected media assets	March 19 - 23	laptop, USB, or external or network drive .fcp, .wlmp, .prel file personal appointment or email
Post-Production	March 21, 23	M and W: filming re-takes in studio and on stage; editing in lab F: capturing and editing in lab video editing resources and techniques	video editing soundtrack			Post-Production
	March 26, 28, 30, April 2, 4, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20	editing in lab	titles, credits	Apr 20	.aup file .fcp, .wlmp, or .prel file
	April 23, 25, 27	Showtime! in Lecture Hall	director's final cut, project file youtube description, tags	Apr 23	uploaded .mov or .wmv file
		Gateway 3 Showtime! director's cut	uploaded to You Tube	April 23 - 27
	April 30, May 2, 4, 7	editing in lab	deadline for Genny (like the Oscars) considerations to be posted to YouTube	May 7	.aup file .fcp or .wlmp file
	Final exam period	Gateway 4 producer's cut location TBA	Genny ballots due producer's final cut Genny ceremonies	TBA (May 9 or 10)	.mov or .wmv video file .flv file (made by YT from your upload)

Topics and Activities

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
-- Winston Churchill

Introduction to the Course

Last May, the last time I taught GEN 230 Creative Expression, we spent the final few class days in the Lecture Hall watching the students' final projects on the big screen. "Begins with a single step"

The students had a good hoot watching them, but for me it was like a final exam. The problems I saw, as a teacher, were not all solvable. But some were, and this course for Spring 2012 is my attempt to raise the overall quality of the final videos by improving the process. It's not a complicated process, but it structures a complicated activity, which is making a short video in just a few months when you have a lot of other things demanding your attention. If you are engaged in the process and you meet all the deadlines, you will accomplish more by the end of the semester than you think you can now.

This course, in a sentence: By early May, you will have, on YouTube, a video that you made. Guiding you through the process step-by-step, I will do my best to help you make it a video that you are proud of.

There is no ink-on-paper textbook for this course. All the course materials and almost all of your work will be available online. You may, however, need to spend some money on theater tickets and a couple of mini-DV tapes, maybe $20 total, especially if you buy the tapes in three- or -four-packs and sell the ones you don't need.

People are watching 3 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

48 hours per minute!! The two dozen students in this course each uploading a 5-minute video will be contributing a little over two hours of video, about 5 seconds in YouTube-time.

The journey is more interesting, and more important, than arriving at a destination. A video on YouTube is a snapshot of the process, a station on the journey to be left behind.

overview of the course web

Every page whose URL begins with http://toLearn.net/gen230/... .htm is part of this course web. This course web has nine pages:

welcome, the lecture I would have given on the first day of class BW (before the Web)

course, the official page of course info that every student must receive at the beginning of every course

reports, the page with a class roster, oral presentation schedules, and a chart where we can make sure we agree on your deliverables

and this page, the syllabus, which has the schedule at a glance listing the day-by-day topics and the due dates for your deliverables (aka homework).

After we look at the director's cuts at the end of November, I will nominate videos for the Genny awards. You will vote after watching the producer's cuts during the final exam period.

We also have a page (or "channel") at YouTube for the course: Matteo Ricci's Channel. Some of the videos from recent sections of this course are available on that channel. Yours will be there soon.

ideas for your video

By the end of September, you need to have a script for your video for this course. I highly recommend that you take the easy way and tell a story that has a beginning, middle and ending. Here are some ideas to get you started.

ShortsBay - Watch Short Films. Love Short Films. Growing Showcase of the Best Shorts Around the Planet. 5-minute videos.

Indie Short Films - 2010 Competition Winners - End of the Tour and Gillespie. Note the production values, camera work, and lighting. And acting. Note that both films are done with very few actors and sets. With a good shot list, they could have been taped in a weekend; they're only 15 and 8 minutes, remember.

make a video response to someone else's video, for example a video on YouTube or one done for NFFTY - National Film Festival for Talented Youth (that's you!)

send a message -- advocate a cause or point of view, your own or that of a not-for-profit organization that could use the publicity. For example, "The Faces of Hunger in Buffalo" or "Wind Turbines Rock"

social issue or topic film - Extensive use of research, interview, and narration are the building blocks for this project. Provide a fresh perspective a political issue or document a local story that has larger implications.

recreate a scene from a movie, either straight or satirically. For example, reverse the genders of the characters but keep the plot line and dialogue -- the results can be pretty funny. (Think of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts delivering each other's lines in Pretty Woman. Call it Pretty Boy.)

character Film - reveal an extraordinary or extremely ordinary person using image and sound to build a portrait. Record life as it happens rather than staging scenes or interviewing the subject.

document a newsworthy event, either a real event or one you stage. For example, some nut wanders in from off-campus (or a teacher or other student cracks) and holds your roommate hostage in the downstairs classroom in 85 Humboldt. What happens next?

make a video version of a research essay you (or someone else) wrote for a course in the past, or one this semester, or your senior thesis for GEN 411.

illustrate a poem, that is, make the video to show while the poem is read as a voice-over or appears as text on the screen. Music, too, of course.

make an info-mercial for a ridiculous product or a commercial for a real product.

enter a contest from the very long list at StudentFilmmakers.com -- or if the deadline has passed, do a video that could have been entered in the contest or is inspired by one of the contests

even though the Outrageous Interactions contest is over, you can still make a video in the same way. "Lights, camera, call center?! That’s right, you read correctly. Interactive Intelligence, a leading call/contact center software provider, is looking for videos of your most hysterical, bizarre, unbelievable, outrageous customer service interactions -- talking to a live person on the phone or interacting with an automated system, real or imagined. Got a doozie for us? Well get off your duff, grab a camera, a friend or seven, and show us what happened."

try a case - set up a courtroom and put someone on trial, either seriously or satirically: the Nigerian for trying to blow up the plane at Christmas, your landlord or an NFL coach for being stupid.

satirize daily life - ex: the worst first date; the perfect way to break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend; stupid teacher tricks; disasters in public speaking class; what really happens in ... the cafeteria kitchen / the women's locker room / the library stacks / the President's office / the room where Vet Tech keeps the rodents.

fantasy sports - tape a Medaille men's soccer game with three or four different cameras. Then re-arrange and mix-and-match the parts to create a different ending for the game, adding play-by-play, commentary, commercials, scoreboard shots, and sounds appropriate to how you rearranged reality.

observational film - a visual portrait of a person, place, or activity. Observe the subject closely and find the most effective shots to reveal it.

These are general areas. Just before class, I sent an email to all of you at your official school address. In in, I give more detailed instructions and ask you to respond to it ASAP with half a dozen specific concrete ideas. If fifty students each send me that many ASAP, by Friday, I'll copy and paste them all into one big list and we'll have hundreds to look at on the big screen. Somewhere in there will be something to inspire you.

machinima - anything that appears on your Playstation or Xbox screen can be captured as a video file, which can be edited just like video you took with your camera. You can then add voices, music, and effects. The technique is officially called machinima, aka poor person's animation.

stop-motion - claymation videos use this technique, but you can use dolls, toys, Legos, or even real people. Set it up, take a still picture. Move the dolls slightly. Take another picture. Line up hundreds if not thousands of still pictures in a video editor, add voice, music, and effects. Again, poor person's animation.

acting troupes

There are twenty-two students in this class, so we are going to break into five groups of four, more or less, and rehearse the beginning of the first scene of the female version of The Odd Couple, Neil Simon's Broadway, movie, then TV production from the 1980's. We are doing this to give you some practical acting experience and so that your classmates can better cast you in their videos.

In addition, the scene will take about four minutes to act out, about the length of the video you will make for this course, so you will get some idea of how much script material can fit into four minutes.

assignments

respond to my email with your half-dozen concrete specific ideas for videos for this course.

Most of the course assignments will be explained at length lower down on this page as part of the process, but a couple of them don't fit the process neatly and are explained here.

watch video, stage plays, and other performances as a maker rather than as a consumer.

True West is about the sibling rivalry between two estranged brothers who have reconnected. Austin, the younger brother, is a Hollywood screenwriter writing a screenplay while house sitting for his mother, who is vacationing in Alaska. His older brother, Lee, appears at the house after the two have not seen each other for years. Lee is a drifter and thief and has been living in the desert. The two are not on good terms, but Austin attempts to appease his older brother, who is more dominant.

Three times during this process, between pre-production and production at the end of February, between production and post-production at the end of March, and finally in mid-April, you and I will sit together to discuss your progress. This appointment might take three emails and two minutes in person and we can do it after class one day. Or it might take an hour and we need to sit together at a computer in the computer lab working out your problems.

These gateways are designed to give you feedback on your progress through the process. Given the short time constraint of the semester, these gateways will also keep you on track to complete the process with sufficient opportunity for experimentation, feedback, and reflection.

This course is all about the process, not the product. To repeat from the course page, if you do not pass a gateway, that is, if you do not have a script and shot list to show me by the end of February and taped scenes by the end of March and a completed video by the middle of April, I will send an official Academic Warning report to your advisor because I will be having serious doubts about whether you will be able to successfully complete the course at an A or B level. Depending on how far behind you are, I may recommend that you drop the course at that point.

Introduction to Your Video Project

In this course, you will go through the process of making a video with opening and closing credits and a music mix as well as a point/purpose, transitions and effects. The process is more important than the product. Or, more accurately, an orderly, thoughtful process is more likely to produce an attractive, engaging product. Conversely, unsuccessful products are often the results of a hasty, unplanned process.

making the transition

One goal of this course is to help you through the transition from passively consuming media to also actively making it. Between them is a transition -- a mindset, a way of looking at media, a critical stance -- that may be new and uncomfortable to you.

This is a creative expression course, an art course, one of the very few you take in your formal education. As such, it can be a little scary. Instead of analyzing plays and films, you're going to write them. Then perform and record them. Your learning will diverge, not converge.

It's the transition from reading to writing, from consumer to maker. It requires you to learn a new toolset.

For most people, the first transition is relatively easy. The second is harder. Not only am I asking you to make something, it has two problems: it's the arts, and it's school.

The audience for your work in this course is those people who have stumbled on it linked to your resume near "Skills" or via a search at Google.com or YouTube.com. They may be in a position to hire you or admire you, and your online projects will let you strut your stuff for them. Go for it! I expect you to see how this creative stuff can relate to a job you may have. It is also designed to move you further into the new and fascinating world of user-generated content.

If you look at the list of deliverables, you'll see that I'm asking you to go through the process of making a video. The product, the video, is much less important than the process. I am going to continually throughout the semester stress the process, not the product.

However, you still have to make a product. What will you make? If you want to, you may make a version of the first scene of The Odd Couple, the Broadway play, comedy film, and TV series by Neil Simon. To do that well and to make it interesting and attractive and funny will be a very challenging task. However, the final video needs to be only 4 or 5 minutes long, so a "straight" dramatic version is also a very doable task.

I want to encourage you to depart from the straight dramatic scene and do something to it or with it, to transform it in an interesting way. You can move so far from the original that no one would recognize it. You can come up with something entirely different. Like what? For starters, realize that you have a terrific opportunity to use your classmates as actors. You also have professional-caliber special effects software available to you. And finally, you have thousands upon thousands, almost two decades of models -- all the video/TV/movies/presentations you've ever seen.

Where will you get your ideas? Visualize. Close your eyes and run the movie across the screen of your closed eyelids. Observe closely.

you'll get it from other people or from online resources -- Don't be afraid to steal, uh, that is, to emulate the models, to mix and match parts you take from here and there.

constraints for your video

To get this project to fit into a three-month semester, I have developed several constraints that you need to follow. "Constraints" in this sense are choices I have made for you in several areas where the trade-offs may not be so clear.

On the far end, YouTube won't let you upload a file larger than 2 GB or a video longer than fifteen minutes. On the near end, holding someone's attention for four or five minutes is not easy. More than that is even harder. In addition, you have only three months to write, produce, and edit this beast, and it's probably your first attempt at such an organized creative project, so .... Do yourself a favor and think short!

Yes, YouTube is full of random, spontaneous video clips. Yours won't be one of them. Holding up your cell phone's video camera for five minutes during a concert at HSBC Arena or during a Friday night drink-fest at a buddy's off-campus apartment and then slapping a title at the beginning before you upload it to YouTube is worth doing on a number of levels, but it isn't appropriate for this course. If at the last minute you decide to "change everything" and do the taping without a script and shot list because there's no time, then you have what I call an "undocumented final video" on the Course page section about final grades. Your grade will be lower. Don't do that to yourself. Do the process; do it right.

At the beginning of the semester, all your friends in the dorm and back home will say, "Sure, I'll be happy to be in your video." But when it comes time to scheduling production days during October, it's just impossible to schedule around everyone's part-time job. It will be easier to trade with a classmate - "I'll act in yours if you run one of the cameras in mine."

Note that the syllabus leaves a month of class time for production, at least one hour of which will be devoted to taping your project. Thus, we have several hours of taping time right there. If you have a good shot list, we can do a lot of taping in one hour when we have the stage or TV studio and two dozen students available for cast and crew.

If you look at some of the videos from previous semesters on the Matteo Ricci YouTube channel, you'll see that the video is blocked in certain countries. Or it is still viewable but the audio has been removed because the copyright holder complained. In several cases, lack of music really hurts the video. Don't let that happen to yours. There is way too much wonderful, interesting music that you can use where that won't be a problem.

Similarly, your visual content in terms of nudity and violence should stay within the bounds of what could be shown on network TV during evening prime time.

However, your verbal content, that is, the ideas and views expressed, do not need to stay within those bounds. For verbal content, think in terms of the First Amendment. Avoid libel and slander, of course, unless it's clearly satirical. You have freedom of speech in this course, so feel free to exercise it!

Avoid any risks that could cause personal injury or destruction of property.

Toolkit -- hardware and software for this course

In this course, you will use cameras, lights, and microphones. You may use your own or borrow them from the College according to the sign-up sheet in the Huber lab -- see Jim or Steve. They or I will be happy to show you more about using them. I am also willing to work with you on location during your production.

You will also use, in addition to the usual email and browsers, video and audio editing software. I recommend using Final Cut Pro or other Apple software. In our lab, we have Premiere Elements. However, it is also quite acceptable, though more limiting, to use MovieMaker, which comes installed on most PCs, and Audacity for sound editing. If you have other software you would like to use, please let me know. Note that there is no reason for you to open Word or any other word processing software for any reason whatsoever in this course.

If you have never used video and audio editing software before, please let me know. Unfortunately, our classroom (the Lecture Hall) does not come with computers for everyone. I will do several class days of demonstrating hardware and software, but that's no substitute for your hands on a keyboard. I will be happy to sit with you individually to help you with the software.

Overview of the Process

The creative process is as old as humanity. It's often a messy process and the tools and materials have changed, but the process is the same. It is a process that you have been through before, personally, many times, although you probably didn't use these terms to describe it.

Here is a chart and brief description of the phases of the creative process as we will follow it in this course:

The cream color is for parts of the process that are mostly words: concept, property, treatment and pre-distribution pitch.

The blue color is for parts that are mostly oral: the concept and property pitches.

The brown color is for parts that are mostly digital and hands-on: producing the vehicles for distribution.

Where do ideas for videos come from? Where will you get yours? (see above under Intro to Course)

analysis of video structure

Two strangers meet in a coffee shop and realize their whole lives have been leading up to this moment.

Who did what to whom, with whom, where and when? Two appealing characters, two other characters, here and now

The Syllabus

GEN 230 Creative Expression: Performing Arts - Spring 2012