RTV Course Outline

AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL AUDIO-VISUAL PRODUCTION
AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION BASICS

I propose to divide my course this year into two (which will run concurrently):

1. Digital Audio-Visual Production:
This is an essentially practical module, designed to help students acquire specific basic skills in digital audio-visual production. This will include lens and microphone-based acquisition of audio-visual material; capturing images and sound to digital formats; non-linear digital editing of moving images and sound. It will help you understand the audio-visual production process and how the technical constraints of framing and editing moving images and sounds affects the translation of events described on the page into sequences on the screen.

We will learn to use various sound and image-gathering devices we may have access to – digital handy cameras, mobile phone cameras, portable recorders, etc. But not as mere ends in themselves, but as new tools of expressing oneself in this increasingly digital world we inhabit. And above all, to continue telling our stories lucidly in this new medium.

2. Visual Communication Basics
“A picture is worth a thousand words," says an old adage. But, “In the beginning was the word”. At the beginning of human culture, people sought to communicate with each other across time and space, using technologies like cave paintings. As technologies developed – from wood block prints to computer screens – master communicators continued to develop the techniques that shape our ways of seeing.
This course will expose you to the masterpieces of communications arts, put them in historic context, and explain the basic principles and "rules" that each new technology developed. Here, we learn to communicate without an over-reliance on words. Studying the all-time great photographs, paintings, film clips and contemporary images will go a long way toward explaining how to communicate with pictures. In short, we’ll learn/discover new ways of seeing!

Course Instructor: Ajay Noronha