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Introduces students to basic image making technology, aesthetics and methods. Students will investigate the qualities of the medium of cinema: light, time, motion, sound, and structure. Through these explorations, they will develop a personal relationship to artistic filmmaking through individual projects and in-class workshops.

The Cinema Notebook: A production-led class that takes the etymology of cinematography, "writing with light," to equate the camera with a pen, noting the world, responding through filmmaking, and prioritizing equipment access over complexity.

Examines the evolution of film festivals through curatorial, artistic, industrial, and audience perspectives. Blending historical analysis with experiential learning, the course features conversations with filmmakers, programmers, and producers. Special attention is given to the Sundance Film Festival’s relocation to Boulder and the role of Colorado-based festivals in shaping regional film culture. Students explore how festivals shape cinematic culture and history, with a focus on moments when programming influenced the trajectory of film.

Provides students with artistic foundational hands-on experience in integrated use of media software in both the PC and Mac creative imaging making digital working environments. Includes fundamentals in general computer maintenance, creative and practical audio editing, image management and manipulation, and creative moving image practice.

Surveys representations of American Indians in American (especially Hollywood) film with an emphasis on "revisionist," or “breakthrough” films. It follows the creation of "the Hollywood Indian" from early literature to contemporary motion pictures. Films are analyzed within historical, social, and artistic contexts, and examined in terms of the impact their images have exerted upon American society at large, as well as Native communities. Near the end of the course we will look at what happens when Native Americans write, direct, and act in independent films or streaming television series.

Instructs students in developing a technical and aesthetic understanding of complex camera, lighting, sound, and editing moving image production.�� Students will explore interpretive cinematography, sound design and mixing, preproduction workflows, and move deeper into the mechanics of editing through individual projects and in-class workshops.

Includes analysis of independent and experimental animation and an introduction to various animation techniques (object, line, collage, sand or paint on glass, Xerox, cameraless, pixellation, etc.). Students produce exercise films and a final film exploring these techniques.

This course examines the relationship between American films of the 1960s and their cultural and historical context. Major fears, dreams, issues and events that shaped the decade will be explored, as will directors and stars who rose to prominence during the period. From the promise of the New Frontier, to the anxiety surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the escalation of conflict in Vietnam; from the rise of civil rights to the birth of feminism and gay liberation; from the shattering of the dream of radical social change to the political disillusionment that would culminate in the next decade in Watergate, the ten years between 1960 and 1970 left an enduring imprint on American film. Special attention will be given to examining the nature of that imprint, that is, to exploring how films express ideology--how they manifest, consciously and unconsciously, the values, beliefs, and ideas specific to their moment in history. Emphasis will be placed on learning how to succinctly synthesize historical readings and write incisive critical essays that combine historical information and textual analysis.

David Lynch and the Cinema of Enchantment & Disturbance Since the mid-1970s, visionary filmmaker and artist David Lynch has fused the psychological poetry of European surrealism with his own particular flavor of distinctly American subject. The result is an astonishing array of films, from the early cult-classic Eraserhead, to the controversial Blue Velvet and brutal Fire Walk with Me, to his landmark masterpiece Mulholland Drive. His mind-boggling and boundary-obliterating serial Twin Peaks (1990-2017) remains the most significant television series in the history of the medium. While luxuriating in the sweetness of everyday surfaces, his films explore the painful, unnerving, and often terrifying realities of what it means to be human—all while twisting stories into mysterious Möbius strips and delighting cinematic senses of all sorts. In this course Lynch is set in relation to films, music, sound art, and paintings by a host of fellow-travelers, themselves exploring the beautiful but often upsetting dreams and nightmares we sometimes wish we could escape—but often hope will never end. Recommended for: the Strong of Spirit and Wild at Heart. Not recommended for: everyone else.

This class is conceived to expand our notion of the power and possibilities of nonfiction film, a mix of making, looking, listening, and discussion in more or less equal parts. We will begin with the notion that documentary need not be dull or dutiful; from there, we’ll branch out to explore a range of exciting nonfiction approaches, delving into their history and examining contemporary intellectual and stylistic currents. Your first projects will put image, sound, and language to the test within an expanded field of nonfiction strategies; the new insights gathered from these investigations of you and your classmates will be applied to production of your final short documentary project.

Surveys the most exemplary and significant films in the Horror film genre from the 1920s to the present. With a historical emphasis, the course explores the ways in which the Horror genre has evolved in response to shifting social anxieties and cultural developments, and its reflections on society in various national or international contexts. Expect disturbing content and images.

This course will track the increasingly fractured, panoptical state of image culture, which has been explosively fueled by the internet. We will track how the hybridization of cinema—beginning with the post-war introduction of television to the multi-platform present day—has impacted the aesthetic form and political content of film viewing, pivoting on the work of director Jane Schoenbrun, as well as that of Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Penny Lane, and more.

Starts in 1959 and follows the historical growth and evolution of film aesthetics to the present. Studies Italian neorealist, French new wave, and recent experimental films, as well as the films of major auteur figures such as Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Antonioni, and Coppola.

This course is designed as an introduction to the major positions and concepts in film theory. As one of the key phenomena of the twentieth century (and part of the mutating media landscape of the twenty-first century), film has attracted a large number of philosophically-minded observers who have sought to understand its power and potential. We tend to take cinema in its present form for granted, and thus it can be an exciting process of defamiliarization to ask ourselves deceptively childlike questions such as, “What is cinema?” or “Why do people go to the movies?” The tradition of film theory allows us to think in new ways about many aspects of the medium—its raw materials, its technical means, its stylistic choices, its social implications, and its meaning for audiences.

In this practical and technical lecture course, students will gain an understanding of a variety of models for creative use of camera, lighting, and sound equipment. A broad survey of production topics, including mise-en-scene, single-camera cinematography, multi-camera cinematography, cinematic lighting design, and sync-sound capture will be introduced/outlined in support of CINE 3400.

Explores boundaries of traditional animation construction and delve into contemporary animation history. Small projects will involve experimentation with animation techniques that integrate with analog animation, frame-by-frame digital processes and live-action footage.

The world of video changes with blinding speed. This class lays the groundwork to keep up with the changing technology and all the technical details of working in commercial post. We will look at distributed rendering, color grading, film scanning, multi-editor collaboration, live production virtual reality and distribution. Every week students will have a technological challenge and work as a team to solve it. Strong familiarity with Adobe, Avid and DaVinci is recommended.

Many of our ideas about who scientists are and what they do have been formed through media consumption - especially from the movies. This course examines how our ideas about science have been constructed at the movies and on television, and how science and cinema, their histories, philosophies, and visual cultures, are interconnected. “Science on Screen” combines film viewings, critical thinking, discussion, and creative project opportunities. Each week considers a particular feature film in depth, supplemented by a range of short films and related media forms. Units address these questions through focus on topical and thematic case studies. They do so through analysis of a combination of documentary, fiction, docudrama, sci-fi, popular television, and experimental film.

A writing intensive course that focuses on the art of the short form screenplay. Students will complete regular writing exercises, presentations, and several short scripts. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours.

Introduction to small gauge analog moving image formats and technologies with a focus on process and experimentation through hands-on exploration and demonstrations. This process-oriented class will utilize DIY methods and Alternative Process Photography approaches to work creatively with silver based holographic mediums. Students will create moving image works with Super 8mm and 16mm film while exploring the implications and possibilities of working with these mediums within our current digital paradigm.

Stories serve as compasses and architecture: we navigate by them, and build sanctuaries and prisons out of them; they sustain our imaginations, but sometimes we must let them go. The stories we tell ourselves in dreams can likewise shape our days and take over our nights, driven as they are by our deepest desires. But what, as Gaston Bachelard puts it, is the “cogito” of the dreamer? What are the poetics of reverie? What distinguishes dreams from daydreams? What of lucid dreams, nightmares, fantasies and vision quests? What functions have dreams served in different cultures at different times? And how may we use dreams as a source of creativity? In this course, historical and theoretical readings and writings by artists illuminate an eclectic mix of American and international narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental films (Waking Life, Frank, The Missing Picture, The Congress, The Rancher) as well as short stories, dream diaries, graphic novels, paintings, photographs, and performances, each of which investigates the complex relationship between dream and reality, the unconscious and creativity, our stake in given stories, and the virtue of letting them go. Filmmakers, writers, and artists whose works will be examined include Maya Deren, Olive Schreiner, Delmore Schwarz, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Winsor McKay, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Tanning, Jerry Uelsmann, Marina Abromovic, and The Bridge Club, among others. Students will keep dream journals and write critically and creatively about the intricate interrelationships between stories, dreams and the creative process, and graduate students will have the opportunity to produce new work inspired by dreams and to write about that work in their final projects.

Through projects, discussions, and screenings, this class explores the practices and aesthetics of computer-based moving-image art editing.

Seminar for the serious round table discussion and critique of film as an art form, emphasizing development of appropriate verbal and written language skills for description of film.

This class is restricted for students in the BFA track.