Students Take on the Art of Film
Professor Matthew Solomon teaches a gateway course for the Screen Arts and Culture students, called SAC 236 or the Art of Film, attracting over 150 students each semester. This past winter term, Professor Solomon and instructor Vincent Longo, a PhD student in SAC, built the course writing requirement exclusively around multimodal assignments. This required students to articulate their critical analyses in audiovisual form, using short clips gleaned from the films under study.
With help from LSA Instructional Support Services and the Sweetland Writing Center, students gained basic proficiency with iMovie or Adobe Premiere in order to create their final audiovisual essays.
At the end of the term, the best audiovisual essays were featured during an in-class festival, with students selecting winners across several categories.
Top videos took on films like 1943's Shadow of a Doubt and 1952's Singin' in the Rain.
This experiment was the first of its size in SAC and is among the first of its kind nationally. It is one more example of the way a liberal arts education in LSA promotes critical thinking and writing, along with skills that are vital to landing a job in the 21st-century economy.
View the top video essays from the class below.
