Canadian Film will be a new course in the Communications Studies department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City particularly designed for non-Canadian Midwestern US students. It will not only introduce students to the richness and significance of Canadian film as both art and entertainment (which is virtually unrecognized around here),…

This paper reports on the "diversity curriculum infusion" course design process as applied within a Film/Video Directing class at the University of Missouri in Kansas City during the Spring 2006 semester. By custom, film directing has been grounded in aesthetic principles originating in Western European craft and art traditions. While…

The pressure to produce products assures thoughtless imitation and replication in video production. As J. Lynch (1984) observed of the early music video industry, "they borrow the techniques of Dada, Surrealism, and abstract film, and as K. Dieckmann (1985) concurs, the "commercialized industry takes up avant-garde practices to sell…

Classroom and laboratory environments typically can provide actual or simulated activities within which most of the technical and creative elements of the media production process can be enacted, but the financial component of production budgeting is often left aside. A "mini-production community" model has been used for the last three…

Film and television in the western world are highly stylized and culturally specific products. A course on multicultural aesthetics in film and video should introduce the student to perceptual alternatives in film and television use. Some of these alternatives can be derived from three well-established areas of film/television study: the…

While in some respects it has never been easier to teach film and video production, in other respects it has never been more difficult and beset with inconsistencies. For instance, pervasive advertising products of the video networks (i.e., epic scale commercials and music videos) frequently engage in the anarchy of postmodern excess, making it…