Media Core Courses // Cinema Studies // Media Electives
Media Core Courses
Media 1
(Semester 1 // coordinator Dr Brian Morris)
In this course you are introduced to the practices and values that inform the academic studio-based learning model used throughout the Media degree. You will learn to create media, individually and collaboratively, and to situate and evaluate your work in relation to contemporary industry and academic contexts.
Story & Place in Media
(Semester 2 // coordinator Dr Liam Ward)
Media 2/3/4/5 — Media Studios
(Semesters 1, 2, and flex Nov/Dec // coordinators Dr Brian Morris & Mr Paul Ritchard)
In these courses you will work individually and collaboratively to investigate, design and produce media within a studio-based model. You will further develop your creative, critical, technical and evaluative skills. As part of studio practice you will learn to situate your work within broader industry and academic contexts. You will also regularly present your work in class and, at times, to a broader audience.
Media 6
(Semester 2 // coordinator Dr Brian Morris)
This course is designed as a capstone experience to enable you to synthesize and integrate knowledge, connect theory and practice as well as demonstrate holistic achievement of program learning outcomes.
In this capstone course you will gain insight into specific national and global media and cultural industries. You will draw upon the skills and experience you have gained throughout the degree in order to begin your transition to a professional career and/or postgraduate study. At the end of the course your portfolio will demonstrate your abilities to operate and innovate within a rapidly changing media environment.
This is the designated Work Integrated Learning (WIL) course for BP221/BP221ACC Bachelor of Communication (Media). This course includes a work integrated learning experience in which your knowledge and skills will be applied and assessed in a real or simulated workplace context and where feedback from industry and/ or community is integral to your experience.
A WIL agreement including schedule and relevant insurance documentation is required to be completed before commencing each placement (local and international). International placements must be registered and processed through RMIT Global Mobility. In the case where a placement ends early, please refer to Changes or cancellation of WIL activities in the WIL Guideline.
Cinema Studies (Contextual Strand)
Note: These courses and their structure will be changing from 2022. Stay tuned to emails/Canvas for how this may affect you. You will be supported through this transition.
Introduction to Cinema Studies
(Semester 1 coordinator Dr Djoymi Baker // Semester 2 coordinator Dr Alexia Kannas)
This course provides you with the basic knowledge and skills needed to read the cinema as a specific practice and medium.This will include an introduction to terminology, theoretical language and various tools for enabling you to analyse and contextualise specific films, critical writing and thinking about cinema. You will view a broad range of films, from the very earliest cinema to the contemporary, from Classical Hollywood to international cinema, as well as fiction, documentary and experimental films.
Popular Cinema
(Semester 2 // coordinator Dr Djoymi Baker)
In this course you will study cinema through an examination of its links with popular culture. You will view a range of forms and genres of popular cinema, which may come from historical, international and contemporary contexts. These will be explored from perspectives such as the economic structures of the classical Hollywood studio system; the influence of globalization and global popular culture on the cinema; or the study of stars, auteurs and their films as cultural, industrial and aesthetic formations.
Australian Cinema
(Semester 2 and flex Jan/Feb // coordinator Assoc Prof Adrian Danks)
In this course you will examine Australian cinema through the close reading of films in relation to issues of ‘national cinema’ and Australian identities. You will explore key historical periods of Australian film, and the re-configuring of identity in recent Australian cinema (Indigenous, feminist, multicultural and queer). A number of concerns are explored, in particular concepts of ’national cinema’, Australian film history, Australian space and environment, and the relationship of the Australian film Industry to government policy. There is also a focus on broader questions of film culture, and under-analysed aspects of Australian cinema.
Asian Cinemas
(Semester 2 // coordinator Dr Shweta Kishore)
This course will introduce you to a broad spectrum of Asian cinemas reflecting various aspects of film culture. The focus of the course is on film history, genre, national cinema and authorship studies, to contrast styles and themes found within and between different Asian cinemas.
The course will address the following questions, amongst others: What, if anything, constitutes a national or regional cinema? Is there something distinctive that defines Asian cinema? How do Asian cinemas respond to the aesthetics and economics of ‘Hollywood’ cinema?
True Lies: Documentary Studies
(Semester 1 // coordinator Dr Shweta Kishore)
This course offers a critical overview of the historical development of the documentary form and its varieties, and the critical and theoretical discourse surrounding them. This course will survey a variety of documentary forms across a range of historical periods and national cinemas.
You will explore the relationship between ideas of truth and representation, political agency and the ethics of documentary film practice, and how these concepts and practices can be related to historical changes in documentary filmmaking.
Histories of Film Theory
(Semester 1 // coordinator Dr Alexia Kannas)
In this course you will explore the changing role and nature of film theory throughout the twentieth and into the twenty first century, examining its implications for how we understand particular films, filmmakers, theoretical paradigms, and artistic/cinematic trends, schools and movements in global and international cinema.
In the process, a variety of texts, both on screen and page, will be studied to help address and inform our overview of this expansive area. In so doing, we will often return to the fundamental question that drives much of this analysis “What is Cinema?”
Media Electives
Networked Media
(Semester 1 // coordinator Dr Seth Keen)
Networked Media concentrates on authoring, publishing and distributing online media. It situates current developments in an historical context, to assist you to understand how online networks function.
Broadcast Media
(Semester 2 // coordinator Dr Liam Ward)
In this course you develop broadcast media knowledge and skills through the mixing of theory and practice. Equal time will be devoted to the forms of radio and television. You will explore ideas of audience; program formatting; production research and development and industry practice. You will develop your skills in the creation of content through all the production phases.
Making Media
(Semesters 1 and 2 // coordinator Dr Alan Nguyen)
In this course you will learn to create media, individually and collaboratively, and to situate and evaluate your work in relation to contemporary industry and academic contexts. You will also be introduced to the practices and values that inform a studio-based learning model.