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# AFVS Media & Design Fellow - Wesley Simon

### Projects

**Film Essay Workshop Series**
Wesley conceptualized and ran a series of essay film workshops during the fall term. These workshops intended to help Wesley create scaffolding exercises toward an essay film project. This project supported the essay film project in **AFVS 70: Art of Film**, which was offered in the spring 2022 term. Working with a group of Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs) as user-testers, Wesley's essay film workshops introduced students to the basics of video essay composition and editing. Each week, Wesley gave the LLUFs a specific task to complete, and once the group gathered, they discussed each student's film-essay-in-progress. This approach encouraged the students to draft the film essay in a manner analogous to drafting any academic essay. Wesley's workshops also foregrounded the importance of feedback and revision to the film essay composition process. Through these workshops, Wesley was able to design and test activities that the course could use in the spring term.

**Video Editing Workshop**

In support of **AFVS 70**, Wesley hosted students in the Learning Lab for a video editing workshop. Because students were completing a montage assignment--in which they edited together clips from films they watched in the course--the video editing workshop drew on principles of Soviet montage as a way of familiarizing students with the basic features of video editing software. By the end of this workshop, students had created rough cuts of montages using footage provided by the Learning Lab, helping them to complete a low-stakes version of the assignment using the video editing tool.

**Weekly Office Hours at the Learning Lab**
Wesley hosted weekly office hours for AFVS 70 students in the Learning Lab studio, providing one-on-one support for their video essay projects.

**Film Dubbing Project**
Working with one of the Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows, Wesley supported AFVS by creating dubs for several films that students enrolled in AFVS 70: Art of Film study. These dubs specifically intended to make foreign language films more accessible for sight-impaired audiences--a need that arose in the midst of the course.

Some of the other projects Wesley focused on during the year included:

* **Editing interviews** with AFVS faculty member Alfred Guzzetti, who teaches the AFVS 152X: The Essay Film.
* Redesigning the Art of Film website: This is the **course website** for AFVS 70: The Art of Film.