Where the action is: DIGITAL NARRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICE

I will try not to neglect this blog, but I am pretty excited about my new course, Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, and will be posting on the blog for that a lot this semester. For the past 4 years, I have been teaching a course in the Film Scoring Department at Berklee that I designed for the film composing students, to help them better understand the movies that they will be scoring and be better able to communicate with the directors with whom they will be working. Now, with the explosion in audio for video games, reported on by the Boston Globe (with a great picture of my student Nazer who is President of the Video Game Music Club!) and picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I've created a new class, Digital Narrative, to explore gaming and other forms of new media in their wider contexts, to provide the students who are working in this new field with a stronger background in storytelling and to start to think about what the people who make the games, DVDs, and immersive environments they will write music for are thinking about. In the Fall, we'll start having minors in the Liberal Arts, and Visual Culture and New Media Studies will be one of them, and I am completely thrilled to be developing this area at Berklee.

The Second Life component of Digital Narrative is something we are going to evolve together as a class. It is an easy platform for us to use as a group, to try out some gaming, computer-mediated communication, ideas about immersion and interactivity, synthetic camera, virtual subjectivity, etc. We can of course also use it to make machinima or for screen shots for comics for the the projects. We want to do some gaming together as a class, so I am trying to figure out the best ways of doing that, without only doing what I already know. Should all be very interesting, and I invite you to see what we are up to on the class blog, and later, if all goes well, to check out the wiki we are going to make. I'll be using the blog to post things for students, and also projecting it in class as lecture/discussion resource.