Course: Advanced Cinema Production – Nonfiction CNPH 32200
Professor: Idrissou Mora-Kpai, Assistant Professor, Cinema and Photography
Attributes and Designations: Non-liberal arts (NLA)
When do students enroll:
This course is offered in Fall and Spring. The prerequisites are CNPH 22400 or TVR29900. Registration is restricted to students in the BS Cinema and Photography, the BFA in Film, Photography, and Visual Arts, or the BA in Documentary Studies and Production degrees.
What it covers:
This course provides an intensive, advanced, project-based experiences that examines the relationship between the theory and practice of creative documentary.
The course covers all stages of documentary production from the idea through development, pre-production, production, and post-production. It examines the fundamentals of documentary art across both traditional and new forms. It also provides production skills and strategies
How it is taught:
Students research, define, and schedule their own documentary projects related to broadly predetermined topic areas that can be developed in the city of Ithaca or elsewhere such as displacement, social inequality, climate change, intimate portraits, experimental, and musical environments. Each student develops and produces an original documentary short film related to one of these topics within a collaborative learning environment.
Why I teach this course:
Although I enjoy teaching all my classes, I particularly love this advanced class because the students who enroll are motivated by a tangible interest in the documentary genre.
They are eager to expand their knowledge of the field of nonfiction storytelling. Students arrive to the course possessing basic knowledge of craft such as camera operation, sound recording, editing, etc., honed in their previous classes. As a result, I do not have to dedicate all my focus on developing these aspects at this level.
We dive straight into what is fundamental to the production of documentary cinema.