Moving Images (IAT344) 2011 - Ongoing
Moving Images reviews and consolidates the fundamentals of digital video production, including camera and composition skills, the role of sound, lighting, and continuity and montage editing. Students will review and analyze works from traditional cinema and from contemporary digital video. The course reinforces fundamental skills and extend the student's abilities to use a range of digital production, post-production, and presentation techniques.
Since I was hired at SIAT as a professor specializing in Media in 2010, I have been continually working to develop this course toward concrete community engagement and applied collaborative filmmaking. This has been in long-term partnership with local cultural institutions such as the Museum of Vancouver, the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, and and Vancouver’s Poet Laureate. Over the years we have also worked with the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, City Studio, The City of Vancouver, The Reach Community Health Centre, SFU faculty members, and many members of the wider community. This portfolio does not fully document all of this work but highlights major projects and examples of student work.
Covid 19: I successfully redesigned the course to be taught completely online during the covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in a unique archive of over 90 films documenting student and community experience in that challenging time. Student work has been viewed by tens of thousands of visitors to museums, galleries, and online, and has been screened in film and media festivals around the world.
This portfolio consists of examples the course syllabus, lectures, reflections on challenges in teaching and course design and our collaborative production model. I prominenently feature examples of student work and documentation of exhibitions featuring student video productions as evidence of my teaching effectiveness and commitment to community engagement through teaching.
Collaborations and Student Work
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Museum of Vancouver Collaborations
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Bill Reid Gallery Collaborations
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Vancouver Poet Laureate Video Poetry Collaborations
In 2021, I co-authored a paper for the virtual Museums and the Web conference, with collaborators from the Museum of Vancouver (Dr. Viviane Gosselin, Dr. Sharon Fortney, and Kwiaahwah Jones) and Bill Reid Gallery (Dr. Beth Carter), along with former teaching assistant Dr. Aynur Kadir, to reflect on our video making collaborations and what that could mean for engaging with discourses of decolonization between universities, museums, and communities.
Visualizing Collaboration: Video Production and Decolonial Curation between the Museum and the University.
Abstract:
Since 2015, curators at the Museum of Vancouver and the Bill Reid Gallery for Northwest Coast Art in Vancouver, B.C. have worked in collaboration with undergraduate students and faculty from Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology to produce short documentary videos that support curatorial engagement with artists, augment access to artworks and collections, and provide new opportunities for public programming. The videos provide windows into the collaborative work taking place between these museum and gallery institutions, Indigenous curators and artists, and university instructors and students. In this paper, we came together to discuss our collaborations with artists and students over the last five years, and the role of collaborative video production processes as a part of decolonial curatorial work and pedagogy across our institutions. The dialogic form of our paper situates our collaborations in relation to institutional discourse of indigenization and reconciliation, raising the question of whether or not institutions like universities, museums, and galleries can claim to advance reconciliation while continuing to function as colonial institutions, and how applied collaborations between our institutions might contribute to the understanding of these dynamics in meaningful ways.
Highlighted Student Films
Some of my favourite films produced by students over the years