David Carlin david.carlin@rmit.edu.au Paul Ritchard paul.ritchard@rmit.edu.au RMIT University

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Abstract:

In a fluid and rapidly changing media landscape, today’s screen production students more than ever require skills in ‘critical practice’ to enable them to play leading roles in tomorrow’s screen culture and industries. It is extremely difficult to find pedagogical approaches that facilitate student learning of creative and technical production skills and at the same time place these within a critical and theoretical context that encourages the questioning of and experimentation with existing production and aesthetic paradigms. Two second-year undergraduate screen production courses at RMIT Media have introduced ‘digital dossiers’ as part of an attempt to foster a learning culture of ‘critical practice’. These digital dossiers, when embedded within a structure of process-based learning, may play an important role, we argue, in helping students identify and challenge assumptions they bring to their understanding of screen practice.

Bios:

David Carlin is a writer, director and Lecturer in Media at RMIT University. He won the RMIT Teaching Award for Outstanding Contribution to Teaching as an Early Career Academic in 2007, and is a member of the Media teaching team awarded an ALTC Citation in 2008. David has recently published in Overland and Senses of Cinema, and has a book of creative non-fiction to be published by Scribe in 2009. David's PhD, a hybrid creative writing/dissertation thesis, investigated issues in the translation of traumatic memory into narrative. His research interests currently centre on intersections of memory studies with film documentary and drama practice, digital archiving, cross-platform production, autobiography and memoir.

Paul Ritchard lectures in Film and TV production in the Media discipline at RMIT University. He is a filmmaker and musician who has previously made 13 short films. He has also worked in the screen graphics field on features including Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. Currently he is involved in the ‘Motel project’, which is producing a triptych of films investigating parallel storytelling, parallel time in editing and new methods of collaborating.