Documentary Studies Faculty Update

Documentary studies faculty go above and beyond the call of duty each semester to bring the latest in documentary skills to students across campus while still pushing the envelope through their own creative pursuits in the documentary world. Below is just a snapshot of what some of the instructors are up to.

Mellon Fellow Nicky Tavares' "Expanded Cinema" class premieres their 16mm exhibit in Case Gallery this weekend, Möbiustrip, Saturday, February 25 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. This experimental looping installation will be up until Monday, March 6 (M–F, 11–4 p.m.).

Adam Tinkle released "The Hard Problem: An Audio Voyage," an episode of Into the Impossible, the podcast of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. Tinkle worked on the audio montage and mixing, co-producing along with performance artist Marina Abramović, Hugo-award winning novelist Kim Stanley Robinson and the Clarke Center. Click here to listen to the piece along with a video documenting its creation. 

Students in Erika Schielke's 1-credit course "Public Science Communication: Web" are collaborating with the nonprofit Crandall Park Beautification Committee to design content for their webpage. New content will include information about native trees and forest ecology, geared toward the general public.

Paul Hembree will attend the 2017 Game Developer's Conference in San Fransisco, where his collaboration with Loren Schmidt and Kia Labeija will be featured on the Mild Rumpus indie game gallery. Hembree contributed adaptive music and sound design to their sci-fi gardening game Goodnight Traffic City.

Tom Yoshikami, who joined MDOCS last fall to lead the two-part "Festival Programming" course, has officially joined the Skidmore College campus full-time as the museum educator for college and public programs at the Tang Teaching Museum. Yoshikami continues to teach the second part of the "Festival Programming" course, kicking off the semester by bringing two students to the Sundance Film Festival along with members of the MDOCS team. 

The new course with instructor Tom Hart, "Storytelling: Maps," has progressed through a series of differing tools enabling students to prepare public websites that both ingest map content and provide narrative and analytical content. Preliminary websites featured content on the most-attended women's marches and lean-tos in the Adirondacks.

Students in Vickie Riley's "Video Storytelling" class are in pre-production, preparing storyboards and interview questions for their documentary and narrative films. The documentaries cover subjects ranging from homelessness to circus arts to the language barrier international students face and overcome when coming to college. The narrative subjects span from a comedic approach to technology to several stories about different kinds of relationships. 

Nicole Coady, who teaches "Storytelling for the Screen" I and II and "Story to Screen" courses, joins Saratoga Arts Fest as production director of Arts Fest Fridays, a series of free entertainment-filled events that offers innovative arts experiences for people of all ages and previous exposure to the arts held in and around Saratoga Springs. Look for an event at the Tang Teaching Museum next fall! Nicole will also be producing a television series she created for Amazon, The Adventures of Snow White and Rose Red, scheduled to shoot in the Saratoga area this summer.   

Dan Nathan has film reviews of Ken Burns's Jackie Robinson (2016) and Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America (2016) coming in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Sport History, respectively. He is also publishing a chapter titled "Hollywood Stars at Play in L.A." in an upcoming book about Los Angeles and sports. All of this work has informed and enriched his American studies course "Sports Cinema."