Collections

Theater & Film – LibreTexts (Various CC licences)

Courses

Do-It-Yourself Film School Online Course (CC BY-NC)

This course will teach you the basics of how to get the most out of shooting video with your mobile device. It will help you get to grips with the basics of shooting video, such as how to orientate your camera, and how to avoid shaky footage; understand the ‘rule of thirds’, and how to use it; the importance of lighting, including scenarios for filming outdoors and indoors; and how to get the best audio, and why sound is often more important than video.

Film Aesthetics (CC BY)

This open set of course materials for Film Aesthetics is a downloadable version of a course created for a learning management system. Included are learning modules and a quiz bank based on introductory film concepts including the following topics: Narrative structure and motifs, mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound design, music, and visual effects.

Software

Shotcut (GNU GPL)

This is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. Major features include support for a wide range of formats; no import required meaning native timeline editing.

Textbooks

Documentary Making for Digital Humanists (CC BY-NC)

This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest across the humanities in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects.

Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process.

This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts.

Film Appreciation (CC BY)

This open textbook was developed with funding from an Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant. It is dedicated to the remarkable faculty and students of the Communication, Media, and Journalism department at the University of North Georgia.

Interpreting Love Narratives in East Asian Literature and Film (CC BY-NC)

This book explores the role of traditional East Asian worldviews, ethical values, and common practices in the shaping of East Asian narratives in literature and film. It offers a specific method for this analysis. The interpretive goal is to arrive at interpretations that more accurately engage cultural information so that narratives are understood more closely in terms of their native cultural rather than that of the reader/interpreter.

Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema (CC BY-NC-SA)

A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say.