Spring 2023

Prerequisite: Requires sophomore and above standing

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  tent pole film franchises, and explore concepts, processes and different strategic approaches used by today’s distributors.

Movie Marketing - Sample syllabus (PDF)

Prerequisite: Requires sophomore and above standing

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.

Entertainment Law - Sample Syllabus

Prerequisite: Requires sophomore and above standing

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.

Digital Business Strategy - Sample syllabus (PDF)

This class will look at the west coast tradition of Latinx theater and its particular connections with the broader Los Angeles performance community. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on questions of regional development, history, aesthetic specificity, and political impact, Latinx Theater and Performance may look at the development of this particular cultural form as a distinct genre with roots to oral ritual, performance art, studio art and other interdisciplinary influences. The class may trace roots back to the Latin American performance traditions such as Mexican vaudeville, the rise of the political theater in the 1960s, and the complexity of the genre in more contemporary times. Students will read play texts as well as scholarly articles to frame a more in-depth critical analysis of the Latinx performance.

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.  

Writing the Comedy Pilot in Los Angeles - Sample Syllabus 

Prerequisite: 1) Completion of FMTV-UT 32: Intro Drama and Visual Writing or FMTV-UT 56: Scriptwriting II or FMTV-UT 33:  Fundamentals of Dramatic and Visual Writing or FMTV-UT 20: Storytelling Strategies And 2) sophomore and above standing.

The aim of this class is to explore, analyze and understand the elements and approaches to screenplay writing.  In order to accomplish this goal we will examine how a screenwriter utilizes structure, character, plot, theme, and symbolism to create a screen story well told.

Script Analysis - Sample Syllabus (PDF)

Prerequisite: Must be Tisch Film and TV majors or Stern/Tisch Dual Degree BS/BFA Film and TV students 

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.

Producing for Film and Television - Sample Syllabus (PDF)

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.

Film, Race and Representation - Sample Syllabus

How does music reflect a place, a time and a people? This course will be an investigation into today's music scene(s) in LA and how they evolved historically. From the Chicano legacy built in to Richie 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.

Films may include The Decline of Western Civilization, A Star Is Born,Straight Outta Compton, Wattstax, Laurel Canyon, Los Punks, The Wrecking Crew, Amazing Grace

Today was a Good Day - Sample Syllabus

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.

Interactive Narrative - Sample Syllabus

No prerequisites. This course fulfills the Interactive Media Business Elective; Interactive Media Arts Elective. This course requires enrollment in the Workshop and Recitation sections.

This course explores the disruptions and creative possibilities that realtime emerging media provides through the lens of learning how to design, create, produce and perform in realtime. Students will be learning how to design and produce for realtime interactive audiences, understand the modern streaming media pipeline, the fundamentals of virtual production, digital content creation and the basics of game engines and other software - all in the service of delivering a more engaging and intimate connection between audience and performer. Students will design and perform 2 distinct realtime performances as well as work together with peers to conceptualize, design and produce a short realtime ‘pilot’ using the tools and techniques you’ve learned in the first two projects. 

Real Time Media: Concepts and Production - Sample Syllabus

Experiential Learning Seminar - Sample Syllabus (PDF)

Note. 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.

Fame- Sample Syllabus

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.

Copyright, Commerce, and Culture - Sample syllabus (PDF)

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.

Music Superision - Sample Syllabus Updated Syllabus coming soon.