On the Film History workshop strand we will look to build your critical thinking and argumentative skills and give you the chance to practice writing up your ideas on a weekly basis. This will help you learn to formalise your in-class debates and ideas and teach you how best to communicate your arguments – in both words and images. Our focus is primarily discursive: the workshops have been designed as a place for you to debate, reflect, and bring your own ideas and examples.

There are 5 basic strands to workshop activities. These involve:

• debates about what film history is and how we do it
• discussions about how we relate film texts to their contexts
• ideas about the relationship between film as history and the way film representshistory
• how we use primary historical sources to support our analysis of film texts
• how we write up our historical analysis of film aesthetics

Unlike the Film Analysis workshops, students are required to complete some work in advance of the workshop sessions. In your Study Groups you will be asked to complete short writing tasks in advance of each workshop, which you will post to a module blog. We will use these posts as the basis of our workshop activities and discussion. You should thus come to class prepared to discuss your post, and pose and respond to questions from the rest of the group and from the tutor.

As such, you MUST complete your posts no later than 5pm on the day prior to the workshop session (Tuesdays).

Using the blog

• Log in with your IT username and password
• Select “Posts” from the bar along the LHS and click “Add New” (OR select “+ New” from the bar across the top of the page and click “Post”)
• Format for blog post title: Week X, Group Y: Title of Task
• Write your post in the text box below the title . Click PUBLISH

• You are encouraged to include film stills and clips in order to illustrate your post.
• You can use VLC (http://www.videolan.org/ ) to make stills from DVDs and video clips [Video >> Take Snapshot]
• You can use Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/ ) to make video clips from DVDs
• See this guide on how to properly configure Handbrake to rip DVDs: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-rip-a-dvd-to-your-computer-580976. Drag and drop file into your post to upload
• You can also embed Youtube clips into your post simply by pasting the URL for the video into the text box
• See this guide: https://en.support.wordpress.com/videos/youtube/

You can also choose a “featured image” for your post which will appear on the blog main page. Scroll right down to bottom, on RHS: “Set featured image”