by CalArts Community Arts Partnership
Visual Art
This summer we will be exploring a patchwork of different artforms and thinking about how art and community can be overlapping and interwoven webs that connect us together. Students will explore different ways to express their creativity through individual and collaborative projects. Each week will feature a new theme where students will participate in projects, workshops, and critiques that sharpen conceptual, technical, and communicational skills surrounding art. Students will experiment with a wide range of mediums such as drawing, fiber, installation, cyanotype, block printing, and more, expanding their artistic skills and horizons along the way. This lab is all about having fun and learning about art, no former art knowledge is required!
Animation
In this Summer Animation Lab, students will learn the foundational animation skills needed to create unique & engaging animated films. In addition, students will also have opportunities to experiment with a wide variety of mediums to help formulate their own artistic voice. All in all, this course will provide students with the knowledge and guidance necessary to become confident and independent animators. No former drawing or animation skills needed!!
Film
PERSONAL — COLLECTIVE — COMMUNAL FILMS
In this lab, we will attempt to redefine our understanding of filmmaking, and its process to develop a more community oriented film practice. We will explore how the personal falls into the collective and the communal forms of making. We will move from community making into collective making to eventually culminate in a personal project - showing along the way how all three of these worlds of storytelling are not so different from one another.
Over the course of four weeks, we will play games from our communities, tell stories that have been passed down familial generations, watch a wide array of films, build our own archives, learn to work with cinematic tools and create more of our own using DIY techniques. Our aim is to break away from the western structures of filmmaking and bring cinema closer to home.
Each participant will work towards creating an introspective personal project that is reflective of themselves and their community. In doing so, all these projects will together become an anthology that represents the new space that we aim to build.
Music
With a special interest in the students’ personal experiences with sound in the world, this music lab will give students the opportunity to create and find sounds in order to express themselves through music, as well as the technical understanding to compose, record, and arrange work in a Digital Audio Workstations (or DAW). The first week will focus on the impulse to create and a rudimentary foundation in technique. Students will learn how to count and subdivide as well as implement basic harmonies and chord progressions. Week two will focus on a crash course in music production through a DAW and fundamentals of musicianship. This week will culminate in a short composition to accompany a film from our fellow students in the film lab. This will offer a more nuanced understanding of composition, pacing and dynamics. Week three will be focused on instrumentation and sound design for film, as well as more advanced music theory and techniques. With these new tools at their disposal, students will collaborate on their final project: a group-based composition (cover or original) that will tie together all of the lessons learned over the month. The class will culminate with a live performance and finalized recording of each groups’ composition.