Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular term. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• COM FT 514: Writing the Television Pilot
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT512 OR COMFT522) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT512 OR COMFT522) - Prereq FT 512 or FT 522. "Writing the TV Drama (or dramedy) Pilot," explores the creation and development of your very own "one-hour" Television Series Pilot. Each student will pitch a concept, write a treatment, outline and pilot script. Also, you'll create a "leave behind" document, which will consist of an overview of your series, complete with character descriptions, future episode ideas and much more. We will closely examine the ingredients of a pilot script through lectures, script analyses of successful pilots, written assignments and group workshops.
• COM FT 516: Writing The Sitcom Pilot
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT522) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT522) - Got a funny idea for a show? Let's see if it has legs. In "Writing the Comedy Pilot," students will develop an original concept for their own half-hour, TV comedy series. This includes pitching their idea, writing a beat sheet, an outline and the pilot script. We will also create a "leave behind" pitching document that will include an overview of your series, character bios, loglines for future episodes and much more. We'll screen pilot episodes, read produced pilot scripts and see why some worked and some didn't. Then we'll do some other things.
• COM FT 518: Media Money Trail
  This course examines the critical financial and strategic challenges that businesses face whether they are in start-up, expansion, or exit mode. Students will use case studies to delve into the lives of the founders and CEOs of some of the world's most innovative and enduring brands and industry game-changers. We'll delve into each company's business model(s) and learn why some evolve to become industry gold standards while others fail.
• COM FT 519: Storyboarding
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Storyboards are essentially ʻdirecting on paper.ʼ They are the blueprint for live action or animation projects. This fun yet in-depth course teaches the fundamental skills needed to create dynamic storyboards and animatics (moving storyboards), skills that are crucial for filmmakers 2D & 3D animators and motion graphic designers. Storyboard Artists must think like a director, cinematographer storyteller and artist, yet you donʼt need to be any of those to take this course. Through progressive lessons youʼll learn visual storytelling, scene composition, timing, and transitions, camera angles, and cinema-graphic language. We cover basic drawing with Adobe Animate CC, color, perspective, character design, acting, and action poses. Youʼll complete numerous projects for your portfolio and demo reel.
• COM FT 520: Television Studies
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - As an omnipresent site of entertainment and information, "reality" and fantasy, "quality" and "trash," and commerce and the public interest, television requires an active, critical analysis of its texts, uses, and production of meaning. Students in this class will engage in such analysis, confronting television as a rich and contradictory site of entertainment, culture, politics, ideology, and signs. This discussion driven seminar sets aside evaluative considerations of TV in favor of theoretical and critical approaches that challenge widespread assumptions about the medium and expand our understanding of its role in our lives. These approaches, which constitute some of the dominant frameworks in Television Studies, include analyses of culture, industry, narrative, genre, images and sounds, liveness, and the television schedule. This course fulfills the additional TV Studies course requirement. Pre-req: FT303.
• COM FT 521: Promoting Your Content Online
  The course teaches students how to market their creative content online. Students will learn how to identify targeted marketing and distribution platforms for new websites, pilots, video channels and series, blogs, etc. and how to use social media to find an audience, generate buzz and identify potential funding sources. Students will also learn practical entrepreneurial tools needed to organize their creative work as a business venture.
• COM FT 522: Writing Television Situation Comedy Scripts
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT310) - Intense writing workshop learning how to write professional sitcom scripts. Elements of character, dramatic story structure, how comedy is created, how scenes build and progress a story, formal story outlines, dialogue, the business of sitcom writing, pitching, arc, comedic premise are analyzed. The class becomes a sitcom writing team for a current hit series and writes an original class spec script to understand the process of group writing employed on most sitcoms. Also, students write their own personal spec scripts with individual conferences with the professor.
• COM FT 523: American Cinema to 1960
  This course offers a survey of American film history from the beginnings to 1960. The course is intended to help students familiarize themselves with key works of American film history from the beginnings to 1960. As it is impossible to cover this period comprehensively, the course represents a selection of major topics and artists that is supposed to provide students with a basic framework for future studies in American film. *Undergrad pre-req: FT250
• COM FT 524: International Cinema
  This course exposes students to a wide range of narrative, stylistic, and representational approaches in the film medium across the globe. Its broad, transnational, and transhistorical scope invites explorations of films and filmmakers seldom studied in traditional film history and offers students an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the many levels on which film creation and film reception operate. This course is designed to help emerging filmmakers locate their own craft and creative impulses among historical and stylistic cinematic traditions and to guide emerging film scholars to challenge gaps and silences produced in traditional film history. As such, it encourages students to contemplate their own responsibilities as storytellers, directors, producers, critics, and scholars of cinema. The course material aims to raise the question of what can be gained and learned from appreciating, analyzing, and discussing a diverse group of films from distinct cultures and time periods and to destabilize traditional canons of World Cinema. *Undergrad pre-req: FT250
• COM FT 526: Directing
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Students learn all aspects of directing, with particular emphasis given to script analysis and working with actors. The director's involvement in blocking action, composing shots, managing the production process and editing are also covered. Acting experience is helpful but not required.
• COM FT 527: Crowdfunding and Distribution
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: FT201 - Whether you're producing web series, long or short format fiction, documentaries or video games, media makers are expected to build and develop their own audience, as well as raise the funds necessary to produce and get their work out in the world. In other words, a media maker must be more than just a creator. To be truly successful, you must also become a creative entrepreneur. Effective Fall 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Oral and/or Signed Communication.
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  • Oral and/or Signed Communication
• COM FT 532: NBC: Anatomy of a Network
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - Undergraduate Pre-req FT 303 NBC has the distinction of being the first national network on the air, and at various points in its history it has stood for corporate stodginess, quality programming, enviable target audiences, and abject failure. In this course students will analyze the different stages of TV's development by using NBC as a case study, approaching the network's history from various vantage points, including those of the larger industry, network executives, and early audiences. Driven by primary sources (NBC's back-office documents, industry trade articles, and NBC's radio and television programs) and scholarly literature, this course will explore the ways "America's network" has navigated the transition from radio to TV, monopolistic trends, inter-network competition, programming decisions, conglomeration, and competition with cable and the Internet.
• COM FT 534: Critical TV Industry Studies
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - Whether you want to work in the television industry or focus your research on it, your connection to it will be incomplete without a critical interrogation of its history and processes. Tv industry studies is a scholarly reading and discussion-driven seminar that conceptualizes the u.s. television industry as a complex site of negotiation between producers and audiences, labor and management, creativity and commerce, and government and corporations. Whereas other television studies courses might privilege the intricacies at work within specific programs or genres, this class asks students to locate those programs within the broader context of a capitalist media system.
• COM FT 536: Film Theory and Criticism
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: Undergraduate pre-req: FT250 - An introduction to classical and contemporary film and media theory. Topics include montage theory, realism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and cultural studies. The course includes screenings of films that have contributed to critical debate and those that challenge theoretical presuppositions.
• COM FT 538: City in Film
  This course explores the relationship between the moving image and urban spaces in the 20th and early 21st century. We initially focus on a subgenre of avant-garde film and experimental media, the city film, which includes the European “City Symphonies” of the 1920s and numerous examples of experimental shorts made about the city in the big metropolises of the West. We continue into the post-World War II era with films rendering the impact of the war on European cities through the stylistic paradigms of realism and expressionism. The second half of the course focuses on narrative features and experimental (often digital) documentaries portraying life in cities around the globe.
• COM FT 541: TV Genres
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT303) - This class uses fan studies and genre studies approaches to critically analyze the ways that fan practices have shaped and been shaped by the television industry as well as how fans have used their position to influence the norms of television. We will focus on genres with extremely active and integral fandoms and how they are similar or distinct: science fiction/fantasy, melodrama/soap operas, and sports.
• COM FT 542: Advanced Screenwriting
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT412) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT713) - The student will write a first-draft screenplay and two sets of revisions. In addition to participating in weekly discussions on aspects of screenwriting that are tailored to student needs, each student will complete and revise a full length motion-picture screenplay. 4cr.
• COM FT 544: Documentary Production
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT353) - Graduate Prerequisites: (COMFT707) - This course is designed to develop skills necessary for producing long-form documentaries. There is an emphasis on exploring new, more engaging forms of storytelling and a broad range of stylistic approaches. It covers the entire process: finding a topic, developing a story structure, conceiving a style, shooting, editing, and post-production. Students develop their own ideas and form small groups to produce them.
• COM FT 545: Television and Childhood
  Children represent an important target for mediated messages. However, there are important rules, ethics and differences we should keep in mind when creating content for this audience. In this class, we will consider the effects messages have on behavior and development in younger populations. We will also consider design and programming decisions that influence these effects.
• COM FT 547: Avant Garde Cinema
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (COMFT250) - A survey of global avant-garde film and experimental media from the 1920s to the present. We will explore film, video, and digital video as mediums of unadulterated artistic expression resulting in daring, experimental forms and controversial contents. The course covers 1920s and early 30s high modernist cinema of "isms" (Dadaism, Surrealism, Impressionism), Transatlantic and international currents after World War Two including trance film, underground film, structuralism, and "psychedelic expanded cinema of split and multiscreen films (Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, Rudy Burckhardt), 1970s video art including feminist and gay/lesbian filmmakers, X-rated Europeans (Kren and the Vienna Secessionists) and international "trash" cinema auteurs, the digital video avant-garde, masters of found footage cinema, queer digital media, recent transnational trends. Disclaimer: Some of the films shown in this course contain sexually explicit and graphic bodily acts.