COMM 512.001 Social Documentary
This is a class to familiarize you with audio-visual production for social action, including nonprofit, advocacy, institutional, and museum display. You’ll analyze case studies of successful work, map the economic and social environment for media, meet professional media producers, and develop proposals for your own documentaries.
Our goal is threefold:

• to learn about the range of production possibilities;

• to learn about the particular challenges of instrumental media produced with institutions;

• to understand the social and political context and implications of such work.
This kind of audiovisual production is distinctive. It is produced for instrumental purposes—teaching, triggering debate, motivating political actions, fostering group identity. Such work to be compelling must be artful, engaging, and within the expectations of your viewers for an audiovisual experience.

But it also is special because such work participates in a relationship with viewers as members of the public, as citizens, as people who can and will make choices about not just their own lives but about their government, school system, environment, immigration policy, and so on. In that sense, especially, this work is critical to shaping our public lives, public actions, and our public selves.