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This course is designed to give students additional skills in writing short form screenplays for their second-year production courses, as well as to gain further grounding in writing structures for future work. Through various exercises students will be exposed to multiple strategies for the development of scripts that are both highly visual and character-driven. Students will explore the elements of visual language to convey key elements of theme and story, and workshop in class with actors to deepen their understanding of characters. Scripts are read and discussed by class members with respect to style, structural elements and visualization.
Open to film majors only.

How to transform an original idea into a strong story treatment and then a final script is the focus of this course. Each student will take his or her concept and develop it into the 12 steps of a hero's journey by learning how to create strong characters (hero, villain, mentors and sidekicks), compile a mythology of rules for their special worlds, and then incorporate those ingredients into a strong story. We will discuss how to keep the project both specific and broad, unique yet familiar (a mind-boggling reality in Hollywood), in order to achieve the ultimate goal: franchise status. Throughout the development process, students will strengthen their stories and explore how to monitor the marketability of their characters, with an emphasis on honing dialogue, so that it appeals to both children and adults. Students will complete this course with a polished animation script, a command of the development process, and a much fuller understanding of the animation film industry.

This course will prepare you to proficiently use Autodesk AutoCAD. It is designed to take beginner AutoCAD users and prepare them for working in a design office. We will create floor plans, sections, and elevations while developing line weights and graphic standards.

Note: Upon registration students will be able to download a free version of AutoCAD to use during the course. This course is fully online and offered through a combination of regularly scheduled sessions during the listed course hours, as well as asynchronous material that may include prerecorded lectures and media, and interactive discussions.

Students work with their mentor to complete their final body of work. Individual and group critiques as well as outside evaluators (artists/critics) provide a wide variety of viewpoints for students to address in their work. Reading materials, group discussions, and presentations supplement the sessions. Emphasis is placed on the presentation and installation of a cohesive body of work for Open Studios, during which students present their final projects to the public.
Open to senior fine arts majors only.

This course is designed as a series of projects to encourage students to solve problems and discover working processes. Each project will begin with a discus- sion of contemporary artists, as well as current museum and gallery exhibitions. Various materials will be explored, from woodworking to mold-making, welding to video. We will meet for group critiques. This course may be repeated once for credit.Open to students from all departments.

This course will explore methods and materials in relationship to individual goals as an examination of painting mediums. Inclusive of formats from representation through abstraction, artists working today utilize both historical and current practices. We will look at these applications through individual discussion, assignments and field trips. Focus will be on developing a personal vision and exploring the options for expression through the manipulation and understanding of materials. Students will be encouraged to consider how "thinking through their materials" will enable them to strengthen their work. We will consider the many technological innovations in media, leading to changes in the practice of painting that are specific to the 21st century, as well as the many historical practices that have been upgraded to utilize modern alternatives. This course may be repeated once for credit. Open to students from all departments.

Create extraordinary graphics, typography, book pages, posters, collage, and fine-art editions with one of the strongest tools available today for analog and analog/digital image-making: the relief cylinder letterpress. This course introduces the press and a range of printing techniques. Combining image and text, artists' editions and bookworks will be created using wood and metal type in combination with linocut and other relief-printing surfaces. Digital images will be incorporated through the use of the photopolymer printing process, which creates plastic relief plates from digital sources and scans, including drawings. Letterpress printing is user-friendly and highly adaptable to individual projects, and allows for quick editioning through the use of semi-automatic presses. This course gives a thorough understanding of the range of contemporary image/text-making techniques possible in this medium. Weekly demonstrations and planning sessions will help students understand the process and realize successful productions. Previous printmaking experience is not required; individual artistic direction is encouraged.
This course may be repeated once for credit. Open to students from all departments.

In this course we will explore ways to create engaging and memorable two-dimensional design. Students will be encouraged to adopt a disciplined, yet playful, creative process. Using accessible materials and simple techniques, both handmade and digital, we will experiment with the principles of two-dimensional design and color theory, including figure and ground; unity of form; contrasts (geometric and organic forms, shape, size, direction, texture); unit/super-unit/pattern; visual hierarchy, harmony, rhythm and narrative; the seven color contrasts; color illusion and color expression. The goal of the course is to develop a creative tool kit of ideas and techniques, embrace a unique awareness of form and color, strengthen design skills and encourage a way of learning through experimentation and play. This is a basic-level course and is open to all students.
NOTE: All students with an active registration in this course will be given free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. This course is fully online and offered through a combination of regularly scheduled sessions during the listed course hours, as well as asynchronous material that may include prerecorded lectures and media, and interactive discussions.

Want to take your designs to the next level? This course will cover the techniques to elevate your two-dimensional designs with additive processes like embossing, debossing, texturing, layering, etching, relief printing and extruding. Part design, part fabrication, you will work in a digital laboratory, creating physical objects from your designs with specialty tools like laser cutters, UV printers and 3D printers. By the end of the course, you will have several finished objects that we will photograph to add to your portfolio. No fabrication experience necessary, but a moderate understanding of Adobe Illustrator is recommended.
NOTE: All students with an active registration in this course will be given free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud. The materials fee covers a set amount of materials, including but not limited to 3D printing consumables, laser cutting materials, and printing inks and papers. This course is held on campus at SVA in the Wilde Lab, a state-of-the-art rapid prototyping facility and fabrication space.

What is sound and how does it help us construct and deconstruct our relationships to space? What does it mean to compose for listening? This interdisciplinary course addresses the intersection of speech, sound and installation. We will trace a history of visual, acoustic and literary arts that use sound as a medium to think about transcultural language exchange. We will examine notions of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship as inputs that complicate our relationships to speech in the spaces we occupy. Each participant will keep a sound journal in response to prompts that emphasize attunement to found, discarded and ambient sound, including, but not limited to, language-based sound. The journal is an archive that will form the basis for a final project (web, field, studio or score), which incorporates acoustic input accumulated throughout the workshop. This course asks that participants arrive willing to center the politics and practice of listening. In spending time with artists who articulate relationships in and outside colonial dynamics, who engage conceptions of "otherwise" and who conceive of autobiography as multisensory, we will begin to build a sound-centered practice that starts with principled listening: to the surround, to ourselves and to each other.
NOTE: This course is designed to be completed without access to sound equipment; however, a laptop and cell phone available to download free audio software and recording app are suggested. This course is fully online and offered through a combination of regularly scheduled sessions during the listed course hours, as well as asynchronous material that may include prerecorded lectures and media, and interactive discussions.

From its very inception, cinema has been invested in its unique ability within the arts to represent dreaming. And both dreams and cinema share an important yet puzzling position within philosophy, often engaged with, but just as often in a way that seems to make philosophy itself insecure. At the start of this course, we will attend to some of the fundamentals of the philosophical study of dreaming and cinema by looking at some foundational texts considering aesthetics and dreams. The main body of the semester will then explore specific themes that are central to the study of both dreams and cinema. We will read texts by philosophers such as Lessing, Aristotle, Freud, Bergson, Klein, and Deleuze, and watch films by artists such as Bergman, Kubrick, and Jane Campion, among others. Each week we will watch one film and read various philosophical texts to try to think about dreaming and movies together. We will endeavor to use philosophy to examine these important phenomena in our daily life, but also to ask what our dreams-waking or sleeping-do to the discipline of philosophy and how we understand who we are.
Note: This course is held on campus at SVA.

This course explores the intellectual, cultural and literary roots and directions of American literature, from its puritan, gothic and romantic origins through realist, transcendental and premodern tendencies late in the 19th century. We'll read selected works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James and the utopian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We'll investigate questions of style, genre, tradition and critical interpretation in relation to the blooming of American society and culture.

Students who want to develop long-form scripts for film or television not only need advanced instruction, but also a community of writers to give feedback, suggestions and support. Film and television scripts share certain basics in development such as character, dialogue and suspense; though they are structured very differently, writers in either industry can work with each other. Emphasis will be on creating long-form scripts for films, series and episodic television, including elements unique to each form.
Open to film majors only. Limited to 12 students.
Prerequisite: CFD-2140, Writing the Feature-Length Script I.

The Italian literary tradition didn't end abruptly with the Renaissance. Many of the greatest novels of the last century were written by Italian authors, writers who fought for or against Fascism, participated in the desperate struggles between labor and capital, took their stand on the issues of anti-Semitism, racism and sexism. Their names may sound obscure to readers of modern fiction-Berto, Morante, D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Levi, Silone-yet we neglect them to our own detriment-politically, morally and aesthetically. This course will explore their work, together with major films of the Italian neorealist cinema. This course is held online.

Experimenting with platforms such as Midjourney, DALL.E, Runway, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, this course delves into the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and visual art and design. Students will learn to utilize and integrate AI tools and technologies to enhance their creative processes and develop innovative design solutions. The course combines hands-on practice with guest lectures. Emphasis is placed on understanding AI as a tool rather than as a means to an end.
Students may be required to purchase browser-based software subscriptions for the semester.
Open to junior and senior advertising and design majors only.