Established Curriculum Projects
Established Curriculum Projects
These are curriculum projects which have been delivered in courses at UCT over a number of years.
The FAM201S introductory film narrative course exposes students to conventions of cinematography, concepts of spectatorship and the language of film studies. Director's Cut allows students to sequence clips and make some of these choices explicitly by selecting between shot scales, points of view, camera angles and other aspects of cinematography that position the spectator in the screen space. The environment is built on the NewsBreaks activity that supports clip sequencing, scriptwriting, question answering and feedback generation.
For further information see:
http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/downloads/Aware/DirectorsCut.htm
Read about the Director's Cut story.
News Breaks
We created a simple computer-based learning environment where students are able to practice writing a news script while viewing the accompanying video material. Here students create their own TV news story by first selecting and sequencing video clips and then writing the accompanying script. During this process they receive automated feedback on conventions of news production.
For further information see:
http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/downloads/Aware/newsbreaks.htm
NewsFrames involves creating the newspaper front page and is run in the computer laboratories with tutors to advise students. Additionally they are encouraged to discuss related topics in online discussions outside class time. The tutorial's basic goal is making students aware of conventions in framing the news and how this is impacts gender, representation and audience in the media.
For further information see:
http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/downloads/Aware/newsfram.htm
The NewsScripts TV news scriptwriting activity is a realistic exercise requiring students to write a script to match video pictures using the news writing style. We used an edited news story from news coverage of the September 11th attacks that we prepared for the 2001 running of NewsScripts and the Indian Ocean tsunami that was prepared in 2005. The activity is web-based, allowing student to type in their script along side the clip segments.
For further information see:
http://www.meg.uct.ac.za/media_studies/tvnews.htm
