OER Subject Guides

Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students' learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. The films found at this link are freely viewable and may include additional materials like essays.

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.

From the site: "Film Appreciation is an open educational resource which 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. Thank you for inspiring us to take on this project."

From the site: "This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers and westerns, and European and Japanese art cinema. It explores the work of Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock, Altman, Renoir, DeSica, and Kurosawa. Through comparative reading of films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship."