In SOS Media, students will work with faculty to design collaborative or individual projects by researching and writing treatments, abstracts, and/or other supplementary documents.
In addition to this student-centered curriculum, we will investigate how to build media communities and what forms they might take. The obvious place to start is with the SOS group itself and to approach it as a community. Students and faculty will collaborate to develop activities that will support pre-production and production work. These may include readings, screenings, discussions, presentations and workshops to strengthen conceptual and production skills. But we will also consider other formations of community such as the ephemeral ones created during screenings, ones arising from the connections people make with each other as they pursue their interests in a particular subject or approach to media, or the community formed as people work together on a production. We will explore interactive uses of media technology to develop sound and image alternatives to single channel presentations, as a potential way to further develop the idea of audience as a community.
Participants in the SOS Media community will be asked to follow these guidelines:
- Attend all meetings on time and prepared to participate. Notify faculty in advance if you cannot come to class.
- Attend individual conferences as required or needed.
- Develop research and production plans as required.
- Complete the goals outlined in your plans with integrity and to your satisfaction.
- Collaborate on planning activities that support and help build the SOS Media community.
- Present work-in-progress at least twice during the quarter.
- Participate productively in critiques.
- Serve on at least one production crew other than your own.
As media producers, we learn early on that our work cannot live in a vacuum. It grows out of and is dependent on on complex webs of relationships, interactions, collaborations and transactions. To cultivate our own media communities, each of us needs to define what it means to us, what our own media communities look like, who we are connected to, and how our work both reflects and is reflected by those communities. To facilitate this work, we've created a Drupal site for SOS Media participants in hopes that this virtual community will serve as a resource and record of the growth of our own community and our thinking about what media communities can be. Students enrolled in SOS Media may log in to this site to upload work, write statements and responses. Visitors are welcome to view and respond to our work as well.
