Artistic Directors: IGOR SUNARA, REEVES LEHMAN / School of Visual Arts                           

This course will explore the collaboration between director and cinematographer through a hands-on approach to film-making. Students learn the technique of pre-visualization, prepare for their practical work, and shoot 5-7minutes shorts.

As the director; you must know what the point of a scene is, and the essential moment this scene describes in the emotional lives of your characters. The goal is to tell a story dramatically rather than didactically, which means characters do things rather than explain things. To elicit the best performances, director must make the connection between the actor's movement and behavior and the images that are to be created by the cinematographer - in collaboration with director. 

Shot design, blocking, break-down a scene into shots, angles, different viewpoints, composition, rhythm, continuity, lensing, perspective, color, and how light shapes perception are all creative options available to interpret the director’s vision. 

One of our most important tools as filmmakers (other than elicit the best performance), is visual metaphor, which is the ability of images to convey a meaning, too. Learning how to translate a text visually is more than learning the differences between subjective and objective camera angles. We will take ideas, words, actions, emotional subtext, tone, and other forms of nonverbal communication, and render them in visual terms. A story may be the flesh and blood of a film, but the camera is the guiding spirit.