The essence of the project:

„This course explores fiction in the making. By prototyping objects and scenes at 1:1 scale out of everyday materials, the course teaches a hands-on approach to making short films. There is a strong emphasis on production, play and iteration. We will also introduce critical and speculative design methods for communicating complex ideas in visual and narrative terms. You will respond to a given story structure, building a series of props and/or sets to construct and perform their handmade fictions. The course concludes with filmmaking, where you will act out the narratives and characters they have developed through the making process.

The theme of the course explores the portal as a key fictional device. The portal marks a threshold, or a border between spaces or places; between one reality and another. As the frontier and the passage, the portal is the thing that connects two worlds and mediates travel or communication from one to the other. In science, speculative fiction and fantasy, the portal can be a natural discovery (black hole, wormhole) or an artificial construct (national border, time machine, brain scanner, drugs) or can be imagined fantastic (rabbit hole, tunnel to John Malkovich’s head). The ways they work can be logically explained or remain an irrational mystery. The experience of traveling through the portal can be physical or purely mental, and the journey can take you to the past, the future, an alternative present, or another dimension entirely.

This course invites you to imagine and design a journey from one reality to another. Through practicing various physical and filmic prototyping methods, this is a chance to describe and explore alternative worlds in high detail. Fabricating props and developing characters, you begin to build a portal narrative and explore the worlds it belongs to.