JOUR 499: “LA Casa”: a multidisciplinary
portrait of family life in Los Angeles
Units: 4
Spring 2017 – Tuesday and Thursday – 10-11:50 a.m.
Section: 21465R
Location: ANN L115
Instructor: Prof. León Krauze
Office: ANN 204D
Office Hours: Tues., Thurs. 12:00 to 2:00 p.m., by appointment.
Contact Info: ,
310-614-0081
I. Course Description
Pause for a moment.
Go back to your childhood or those lively first years of adolescence. Think of your hometown, your parents’ dinner table, your living room or your bedroom, where you played guitar and yawned your way through homework. What was life like for you? What was it like to grow up where you did? What made yours an American family? Think of your neighbors. What dreams, ideals and concerns did you have in common?
Now come back to 2016 and ask yourself again: How different are you –are we– now?
What makes an American family now?
In a time of political discord and social strain, a time when America seems to be growing apart, the proverbial “house divided against itself” that Lincoln warned us about, what bonds do American families still share?
Around that same dinner table, at school, during times of happiness or adversity, what unites us?
This course draws inspiration from the Univision segment called “La Mesa” (The table) in which more than three hundred people have been interviewed about their lives on a simple but revealing production premise: a plastic, folding table and couple of chairs, a set of microphones and a couple of cameras, set at a tasteful distance to avoid any disruptions. What has emerged from these intimate interactions is a rich portrait of Hispanic life in Southern California: stories of hardship, struggle but also of joy and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds.
This course will aim for a larger canvas.
If La Mesa began as a conversation between a journalist and an interviewee, let us now look not at the lives of individuals but of families. Open the lens to capture an even larger portrait of life in Southern California: the sight and sounds of family life in America: detailed, humane and journalistically honest.
· Find a Southern California family.
· Gain their trust.
· Join them in everyday life.
· Empathize, understand and discover.
· Tell their story.
· Bring an American family to life on the screen.
Such is the challenge students – and instructor – will face in this course.
II. Overall Learning Objectives and Assessment
Students who take this course should emerge with a clear understanding of the craft of the personal and emotional interview, further developing as aspiring journalists or documentarians. They will learn to establish a productive relationship with their source/subject, including appropriate research and observation of both social milieu and family dynamics. They will be exposed to situations that will require technical proficiency, journalistic confidence and carefully honed social skills. Students will learn how to approach interviewees without disrupting their social environment (“fly-on-the-wall”, observational journalism) and how to build trust and validate a subject through very specific interview and engagement techniques. Students will gain the skills needed to embed within a subject’s environment to obtain a particular journalistic narrative.
III. Description of Assignments
Course: Students will be required to watch and analyze appropriate viewing material for the course, including interviews, news stories and documentaries. They will be required to complete reading materials for the class. Students will carry out a number of interviews that will serve both as practice and as pre-production/casting aimed at selecting suitable subjects for the final project. These interviews should be conducted in different settings, presenting distinct interaction challenges. Students will then become part of a team that will embed with one of the families chosen for the final documentary project. He/she will be assigned a role, about which the student will have to file a weekly report. Students will be expected to offer detailed progress information and share rushes with the rest of the class.
Social media: Students will be expected to contribute to the project’s Facebook profile and use Twitter, Instagram stories and Instagram to document progress. Through the multi-platform curation of @LACasaUSC , students will offer an interactive behind-the-scenes look at the production process, allowing social media audiences to become acquainted with the project’s families.
Presentations: Students will be required to produce three presentations for the class. The first one will introduce the subject/family to the class, with research and insight into possible story lines. Second presentation will happen after 3-4 weeks of work and should reflect clear narrative, protagonists and antagonists and the profile outline. The last presentation will happen post-edit and should reflect the final product.
Class project “LA Casa: a house united”:
· Four teams of four students will produce an equal number of “LA Casa” mini-documentaries, each focusing on the experience of one Los Angeles based family. Each mini-doc will be between 12 and 14 minute long, ready to be distributed as half hour of television for possible broadcast outlets
· Each team will have a lead journalist/documentarian, with the other three members playing equally important roles.
· Each unit will focus on a Southern California family. The will embed with the family for eight weeks and carry on a series of activities geared towards uncovering the inner workings of said family, their social interactions, their relationship with their cultural and ethnic background, their connection to their community and their city, their dreams, aspirations and hardship.
· By the end of each semester, a deep and thorough portrait of the four families should emerge. Each segment will be between 12 and 14 minutes long. A series of multi-platform documents will retell the experience: mini-docs, still photography, audio interviews, etc.
V. Grading
Assignment / Points / % of GradeClass Participation / 10 / 10%
Social Media (active role in curating accounts) / 10 / 10%
Pre-production (finding the families, research…) / 20 / 20%
Production (establishing a narrative, three shoots in field, script development…) / 30 / 30%
Final Project / 30 / 30%
Total / 100 / 100%
b. Grading Scale
Sample grading scale provided below:
95 to 100: A / 70 to less than 75: C+ / 45 to less than 50: D-90 to less than 95: A- / 65 to less than 70: C / 0 to less than 45: F
85 to less than 90: B+ / 60 to less than 65: C-
80 to less than 85: B / 55 to less than 60: D+
75 to less than 80: B- / 50 to less than 55: D
c. Grading Standards
Students will be graded on three criteria:
Social media and class participation are INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES
Pre-production, production and final project are GROUP ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES
Research: Did students find enough potential characters for the story? Did they research each prospective family and successfully explain to the class the pros and cons of each one? Did they conceive a journalistically relevant and revealing set of questions and activities for the family? Did they carry out pre-production and pre-interviews in a thorough manner, thus offering a clear hypothesis of the profile that would emerge in the final product?
Production: Did students come up with a constructive shooting schedule? Were they able to gain access to every member of the family? Were they imaginative enough to capture moments that were both relevant and revealing? Did they manage to adapt to the challenges, both technical and social/cultural, involved in the shooting of a fly-on-the-wall documentary? Did they demonstrate journalistic intuition? Did they shoot on time and were they respectful of the subjects while being journalistically savvy?
Presentation: Did students successfully gain the trust of each of their families? Were they able to assimilate to each family’s dynamic, blending into the background and letting the narrative play out? Were they empathetic, receptive, generous…but also journalistically thorough? Did they capture key and illuminating moments? Did the final product faithfully capture the profile laid out in the hypothesis suggested at the beginning of the semester?
A project deserving an “A” will include a well-cast family that fits with the mission of the project. The casting process is a team effort: all team members will have a say on which family to choose and they will get a group grade when professor evaluates the end result of sais casting. A project deserving an “A” will include a thorough and well-thought out story development plan, an efficient and revealing production process and an effectively edited final product that informs the viewer, paints a journalistically enlightening picture of the profiled family, and results in a strong half hour of broadcast-ready television.
V. Assignment Submission Policy
All written assignments will be submitted via the class blog.
VI. Required Readings and Supplementary Materials
Assigned texts:
A selection from
o Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets(Random House, 2016) ISBN-10:0399588809
Assigned Films:
· Weiner. IFC Films, 2016.
· The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter. Criterion Collection, 2000
· High School. Frederick Wiseman, 1968
· American Family. Craig Gilbert. 1973
VII. Laptop Policy
All undergraduate and graduate Annenberg majors and minors are required to have a PC or Apple laptop that can be used in Annenberg classes. Please refer to the Annenberg Virtual Commons for more information. To connect to USC’s Secure Wireless network, please visit USC’s Information Technology Services website.
VIII. Course Schedule: A Weekly Breakdown
Important note to students: Be advised that this syllabus is subject to change - and probably will change - based on the progress of the class, news events, and/or guest speaker availability.
CLASS WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Topics/Daily Activities / Readings and Viewing / Deliverable/Due DatesWeek 1
1/10 & 1/12 / Class Introduction // Team Building // First assignment: Shoot iphone interviews (Show us what you got) // Social Media suggestions for semester (let’s share our process)
Critique iPhone interviews // Establish interview parameters // Interview examples // technical expectations // Learn the tool called the camera / Svetlana Alexievich, excerpts. / Iphone Interviews
Week 2
1/17 & 1/19 / Let’s tell a story // Field interviews at USC
Critique field interviews // Discuss interview techniques // Introduce documentary families // Families assignments // Schedule first outreach to families // Meet families & pre interview them before next class // One page family synopsis with supporting photos / Field interviews
Week 3
1/24 & 1/26 / Pre interview family findings to be discussed // What’s the families story? //
Choose 5 questions you hope to answer within this documentary
Understanding the production process // Schedule interviews with families //
Week 4
1/31 & 2/2 / Documentary viewing // Discussion to follow / Pre-production stills
Review interviews w/family members // Discuss findings // Revisiting the “Big Story” // Plan & schedule next shoot
Week 5
2/7 & 2/9 / Documentary viewing “The short NEW format” // The internet’s role in the removal of the distribution barrier
Review interviews w/family members // Discuss findings // Revisiting the “Big Story” // Plan & schedule next shoot
Week 6
2/14 & 2/16 / Documentary viewing // Discussion to follow
Week 7
2/21 & 2/23 / Review interviews w/ family members in groups // Discuss findings // Revisiting the “Big Story” // Plan & schedule next shoot
Documentary viewing “??” // Discussion to follow / Draft script
Week 8
2/28 & 3/2 / Review interviews w/family members in groups // Discuss findings // Revisiting the “Big Story”
Review interviews // Team meetings about “the big story”
Week 9
3/7 & 3/9 / Script discussions // Team progress
First draft of script due // Post Production discussed
3/13-17 / Spring Break: Take a break you’ve earned it
Week 10
3/21 & 3/23 / Team meetings // Script notes & discussion // Plan additional shooting for story sequences
Continued script revision // Final approval of script // Approve shooting schedule for story sequences
Week 11
3/28 & 3/30 / I Pick up interviews & Additional sequence shooting // Post production starts
Pick up interviews & Additional sequence shooting
Week 12
4/4 & 4/6 / Video editing & Story revisions
Video editing & Story revisions
Week 13
4/11 & 4/13 / Video editing & Story revisions
STORY LOCK / STORY LOCK
Week 14
4/18 & 4/20 / Additional post editing // music choices? Photos? Graphics? etc
Week 15
4/25 & 4/27 / Teams present final films in a private viewings to professors, discussions to follow // Final Notes for class viewing
Final Exam Period
5/9, 8-10 a.m. / Final PROJECT due
IX. Policies and Procedures
Additional Policies
Instructor: Add any additional policies specific to your class that students should be aware of: missed classes, attendance expectations, checking USC email, use of technology in the classroom, dress code, etc.
Internships
The value of professional internships as part of the overall educational experience of our students has long been recognized by the School of Journalism. Accordingly, while internships are not required for successful completion of this course, any student enrolled in this course that undertakes and completes an approved, non-paid internship during this semester shall earn academic extra credit herein of an amount equal to 1 percent of the total available semester points for this course. To receive instructor approval, a student must request an internship letter from the Annenberg Career Development Office and bring it to the instructor to sign by the end of the third week of classes. The student must submit the signed letter to the media organization, along with the evaluation form provided by the Career Development Office. The form should be filled out by the intern supervisor and returned to the instructor at the end of the semester. No credit will be given if an evaluation form is not turned into the instructor by the last day of class. Note: The internship must by unpaid and can only be applied to one journalism class.
Statement on Academic Conduct and Support Systems
a. Academic Conduct
Plagiarism
Presenting someone else’s ideas as your own, either verbatim or recast in your own words - is a serious academic offense with serious consequences. Please familiarize yourself with the discussion of plagiarism in SCampus in Section 11, Behavior Violating University Standards https://scampus.usc.edu/b/11-00-behavior-violating-university-standards-and-appropriate-sanctions/. Other forms of academic dishonesty are equally unacceptable. See additional information in SCampus and university policies on scientific misconduct, http://policy.usc.edu/scientific-misconduct/.