MAC 270 Topics in Emerging Media
Theoretical and practical investigations into processes, methods, frameworks, and considerations involved with both creating and distributing emerging cinematic media. These courses examine developing concepts, methods, and works that engage with the wide-ranging creative possibilities of emerging cinematic media practices. Topics courses may be repeated with a different topic for credit.
Speculative Design
A critical design course that explores how cinematic arts practices and theories have been used to imagine alternative futures. The course will provide students with a historical, conceptual, and critical background in cinematic speculative design alongside presenting practical workshops aimed to help develop skills to conceive, develop, and produce speculative designs. The course will place special emphasis on studying how science fiction prototyping has and might be used to critically imagine the impact of emerging media and future technologies on relationships with ourselves, one another, and our rapidly changing environment. Students can expect to engage with both critical and creative writing, digital design, and media production processes that are introductory to intermediate, depending on their prior skill level and interest, and to work both individually and in groups. No prior experience is necessary.
Worldbuilding Design
This course explores emerging methods of narrative design in relationship to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding refers to designing a complex integrated system with many moving parts such as characters, settings, myths, rules, artifacts – often a whole system of a society and culture. These design methods are used throughout media forms ranging from narrative writing, filmmaking, theater, architecture, mobile apps, video games, and virtual reality, to the integrated use of multiple forms using transmedia storytelling. Students will create short projects that investigate relationships between the design of a world and the storytelling possibilities that emerge from and are embedded within it, using both analog and digital methods. Students will experiment with methods and concepts such as non-linear storytelling, interactivity, experience design, transmedia, the poetics of space, and other relevant topics. Readings and short screenings will contextualize hands-on-work within larger historical and cultural contexts.