CMDP 3620: Images and Stories
This course is about the process and rigor of developing ideas through writing and image making. Throughout the semester, students will be challenged to experiment with innovative and non-traditional approaches to storytelling while expanding their current notions of form and content. Students will learn and apply innovative non-traditional approaches to scripting and storytelling, including automatic thinking, idea sketches, visual notes, outlines and storyboards, serials, aleatoric methods, diagrams, locations, photographs and short stories. This course focuses on exploring scripting methods outside of the fixed and rule-bound traditional model of storytelling as a means of introducing students to discover their own scripting techniques.
Learning Objectives
- Identify diverse strategies in storytelling through immersion in other contemporary artists' creative practices via assigned readings, videos, slide lectures, podcasts and other creative content;
- Develop a sense of self as a writer and artist;
- Experiment with implementing a range of different scripting, dialogue and storyboarding approaches to 'tell' your own personal stories, and those of others;
- Recognize the importance of revision and incorporate it into your work;
- Relate the course content to your own creative practice through short writing assignments and group discussions;
- Evaluate your own work and that of your peers through consistent, constructive feedback.
In this course, you will
Experiment with diverse modalities of storytelling through active observation, dialogue, creative constraints and storyboarding;
Engage with the work of multi-disciplinary artists who tell stories in images and words;
Produce an experimental script, also known as an autonomous production object exploring a theme or topic of your choice.
Britland Tracy
Britland Tracy is an artist, writer and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text and ephemera to observe infrastructures of interpersonal connection and discord. She has published two photo-books and exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), Davis Orton Gallery (Hudson, NY), Rule Gallery (Marfa, TX and Denver, CO), Redline Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO), Kleinert/James Center for the Arts (Woodstock, NY), Lucie Foundation (Los Angeles, CA), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), CU Art Museum (Boulder, CO), and Understudy Art Incubator (Denver, CO), among other experimental and collaborative spaces. Her recent work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Ragdale Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Denver Theatre District. She holds a BA in French Literature and Art History from the University of Washington, a Certificate of Fine Art Photography from the Photographic Center Northwest and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts from the University of Colorado. Her current and past projects can be found at www.britlandtracy.com.