Social Documentation

Overview

Social Documentation from University of California, Santa Cruz goes beyond the story. That's our motto and our practice: to go beyond story-telling into the intimacy of people's lives, the causes underlying social injustice, the issues too pressing to ignore. There's a story, too, but we think that should be the beginning, not the end, of the matter.

Graduates with Social Documentation from University of California, Santa Cruz will be able to:

• Critically analyze social issues pertaining their documentary subject matter by applying social science methodologies and will implement ethically sound community negotiation and professional and interpersonal interaction in documentary fieldwork.

• Acquire analytical writing skills, produce advanced project proposals and develop creative treatments.

• Demonstrate an understanding of historical models of documentary practices and demonstrate by using those idea in their own practice uses those ideas.

• Demonstarate expertise in documentary project planning.

• Shoot documentary video and photography with various cameras and in a variety of contexts.

• Implement professional lighting and sound recordings in a variety of settings and with diverse equipment.

• Understand and implement video and sound editing, logging and transcribing.

• Implement post-production video, audio and photographic output.

• Demonstrate an ability to analyze their field recordings according to story structure and character development in order to develop their own work.

• Implement distribution, social media and transmedia applications to their documentary projects.