UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

This course focuses on the art of telling stories for Virtual Reality. Students will immerse themselves in understanding the media through the technology available so they can learn about the challenges of telling a story using its specific attributes. In this hands-on class, students will create and produce a short film using 360 video, which will purposefully blur reality and fiction, and narrate a story. This course will include analyses of experiences and texts with an emphasis on immersive narrative and the nature of interactivity. The purpose of this class also includes intensive learning through collaboration and reflection on future challenges and our responsibilities of storytelling through new technologies.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

This class addresses light as an art form through analytical observations, practical applications, and thoughtful critique. This class builds a foundation of understanding how light exists in our lives by breaking down properties of light into color, quality, intensity, shadow, contrast, and environment. Writing and basic drawing techniques are incorporated as a means of communication.

Course Description

In this course, students will be introduced to the creative process of “devising." Devising is a term used to loosely describe productions created by a wide range of theatre collaborators, actor-collectives, director-designers, and performance artists. Sometimes, a governing playwright is brought in to facilitate the literary values of the group’s explorations. Often, groups who devise are governed by a visionary director/performer or co-directors. The term “devising” itself is used in England to distinguish productions that are not based on plays. In short, devising is the creation of a new performance piece wherein the collaborative artists who create the work also perform the work. In this course, students will be immersed in the different models of devising through readings, hands-on workshops, and much dialogue. They will collaborate throughout the quarter, ultimately creating an original performance piece.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components. This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

Put your headphones on and delve deeply into the power of sound in and as art! Experience installations and performances on the cutting edge of music and aural creativity. Learn the basic skills and techniques of generating and manipulating sound to touch the senses and impart emotion, ideas, and meaning. Then integrate what you've learned and experienced by expressing your own ideas through a unique piece of multi-media, sound-focused art.

Course Description

Digital Imaging is a course that explores working with photography outside the parameters of traditional darkroom photography. The focus is on post-processing images for ends, including compositing multiple images, combining text & images, and working to conceptually to develop a complex visual book of digital images. Artist presentations and readings serve as launching off points for class discussions regarding the nature of digital images in our media saturated culture and the ways we can work with them. With each new project introduced throughout the quarter there will be corresponding technical demonstrations dedicated to specific technical aspects of Photoshop, from basic to intermediate. No previous Photoshop experience is required for the class.

Course Description

As a Core course, Digital Photography will involve equal parts making images, reading, writing, and analyzing/discussing. Assignments progress on a formal level from B&W to color and then to working with images in time, whether stop-motion or sequenced as short experimental films. The ideas students bring to the projects will be emphasized and the readings, films, image presentations, and discussions will provide direction to explore themes such as consumerism, the environment, gender, social diversity, imagination and dreams. The photographic medium has undergone changes in the last decade at a rate unparalleled since photography's invention during the latter part of the 19th Century. What does digital photography hold for the 21st Century? How is it different from working with film -or is it? What are artists doing within the medium today and what are their influences? These and other questions will be addressed over the course of the quarter as the technical, conceptual and formal properties of the medium are introduced.

Course Description

This class addresses light as an art form through analytical observations, practical applications, and thoughtful critique. This class builds a foundation of understanding how light exists in our lives by breaking down properties of light into color, quality, intensity, shadow, contrast, and environment. Writing and basic drawing techniques are incorporated as a means of communication.

Course Description

This hands-on studio course offers an exploration of costume design and construction techniques used in costume design for the stage, film, print and photography. Students will experience the world of the costume designer from the designer’s point-of-view through a quarter-long exploration in which they will conceive of designs for a unique historical garments and build each garment themselves. Steps to this project will include design analysis, historical and conceptual research, an introduction to flat patterning and draping techniques, and instruction in hand and machine sewing techniques. Throughout the course, students will move from gathering visual research through collage, to rendering their designs on paper, to learning to put together a three-dimensional sewing pattern, to finally, building finished sewn garment samples they have designed in their entirety.