Was recommended this class because it was supposed to be easy and a light workload, but apparently that's different for the summer sessions. Though the class isn't very hard content-wise, the amount of busy work and content you need to watch every week is unreasonable. Taking this class ruined the last 6 weeks of my summer, but I'm sure the class is much better during a 10-week quarter.

I honestly could not recommend this class to anybody.

The quizzes are basically trivia about the films and lectures. For example, one of the questions was regarding what item a character was implied to have previously bought in one scene, which is an incredibly insignificant and specific plot detail. I quote from the quiz, "In In the Mood for Love, which object does Mr. Chow ask Mr. Chan to purchase abroad?" Other questions include what specific camera angles were used in specific scenes, which I didn't appreciate opening the movie to find with a time limit. The quizzes also repeatedly ask what specific movie that the professor used as an example to make a small point. TIP: when you're taking notes, and she mentions the name of a movie, write down the name of that movie next to whatever point she was making.

She also does Q+As with cinematographers and directors, and the test questions require you to remember what they said. I personally do not care why a cinematographer I have never heard of got interested in filmmaking. One of the questions on a quiz is, and I'm not joking, " George Huang said he grew up in a very traditional Chinese household. What did his parents do for him on his 9th birthday that influenced him toward going into the film business?" The answer is, drum roll please, they took him to see Star Wars. By the way, these Q+As are usually 40+ minutes each.

Many of the quizzes also are worded so poorly that they actually have multiple answers that could hypothetically be correct. It doesn't help that Professor Trice is so bad at explaining things that often, when I pull up the lectures and look through the specific portions where she talks about the question (the quizzes are open note), I still have trouble figuring out what the answer is. For example: one of the questions was asking whether Melodrama borrows from realism or not, and what she said about it in the lecture was, "Melodrama appears borrows from realism, but realism serves the melodramatic passion and action." (The answer is yes by the way). And occasionally, she'll just say a sentence that has absolutely no meaning in context. She words things so pretentiously that I'm pretty sure she often has no clue what she's saying.

The workload is insane. I took 2 other courses this summer, which were GEOG 4 and LS30A, and I would estimate that this course took up 80% of my time, even though I outsourced a LOT of the notetaking to other people. The workload includes watching all of the movies (12 total plus short films), watching all of the lectures and taking notes(~20 total), doing all of the readings (I think 10-15 total) and taking notes, doing all of the quizzes (24 total, 30 mins each), doing all of the discussion forums (11 total plus two responses to classmates), and doing the 2 creative exercises. A lot of people dropped the class within the first 3 weeks.

The discussion board's implementation was offensively terrible. The grading is basically completely random, and the TAs give no feedback, other than being passive-aggressive. They like to center otherwise flawless answers around a 10/12 or 11/12 grading-wise for basically no reason, which according to a poll, a huge portion of the class also believes.
For example, I got marked a 10.5/12 and got marked off for "answer could have been more connected to the prompt". The discussion prompt is this, "Option 1: Briefly explain how the assigned episode of Westworld is an example of a post-classical or “complex” narrative. In your answer, utilize specific examples from the episode and refer to class lecture materials and readings. How does it use narrative satellites and kernels? How does it employ the “operational aesthetic?” Then, describe what you think of this trend in TV storytelling (i.e., the narrative as a complex “puzzle” to be solved/revealed by viewers). Is this a natural step forward in storytelling, given the technologies we have at hand (social media, streaming)? Or, is this technique limiting? Are there types of stories that don’t lend themselves to this kind of approach?" As you can see, there are like 12 questions in here. The word limit is 300-500 words. When I disputed this, the TA told me that even though I answered every question well, my answers could have been more fleshed out, even though my response was over 700 words already. Multiple times, I got marked off in the "evidence" category of the rubric for "lacking in specificity," even though I always provide quotes and even time stamps as evidence.

The professor responded to concerns about grading by students by just brushing them off. She "conducted an audit" of the TA's grading by ensuring that the average score is the same across TAs. But as people in the GroupMe have expressed, this is because the TAs are grading equally random. My TA sent an announcement (because she was clearly getting a lot of complaints) basically saying that if you want to score high, you have to make your responses extremely above average and more than answer the prompt. Disregarding the fact that this is a nuts expectation for a lower division class with an already extremely high workload, this is also a complete lie. My discussion posts have varied in quality largely because of time constraints, and how much time I put into a discussion post, as well as how "insightful" it was, has had literally zero correlation with the grade I have received. Literally nobody in the class actually knows how to consistently get an A in the discussion section.

Also, one of the movies, called "Never Forever" by Gina Kim, is easily the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life. Finally, the professor is blatantly neomarxist and incessantly infuses that ideology into the course material. This is very hard to put up with if you don't also follow her personal ideology.

Here are some tips if for some reason you want to or need to take this class:
-For her lectures, and especially the Q&As, click on "show transcript." Then, you can use ctrl+f to search for specific phrases to get to a part of the lecture that the quiz is asking about. Only use this as a last resort and don't abuse it though, because you have a time limit and it won't always work. Also because you need some of the knowledge from the lectures to be able to write your discussion posts. But it is very helpful as a last resort - for example, when a quiz question is "when making her point which movie did professor Trice reference" or something, you can individually ctrl+f the name of each movie until one comes up.
-Divide up the notetaking among several people, at least four but ideally 8 or 10. One person doing all of the notetaking and learning all of the material just isn't realistic, especially not in a six-week-long course.
-If you're wise with what you choose to answer in the discussions, you don't actually technically need to watch all of the movies.
-The TAs and the discussion prompts ask for you to give your opinion based on the knowledge that you have gathered from learning the course material. Don't think that doing all of that will get you an A. Meaning, spend a maximum of 2 hours on each discussion post.
-Make sure that you get 100s on the quizzes. They will balance out the 10-11s out of 12 that you will constantly be getting on your discussion forums, and will give you a good shot at actually getting an A.
-Set the speed of the lectures to 2x and pause when you need to take notes so you don't waste your time. For the Q&As, if you're skimming them, set it to 3x using a browser extension such as Video Speed Controller.
-The workload each week actually somewhat varies. Don't think that the workload at weeks 1 and 2 are the standard for the course - on the week of Fourth of July, she gave us 4/3 the amount of work as usual (later 5/3), which screwed me up because I made the foolish mistake of thinking that I was allowed to actually have a life outside of this class on Independence Day. So during the weekend, check the workload for the upcoming week before you make plans.

1. The class does have a high workload (being a 5 unit class). You will have to watch 2-3 films for a week adding up to 5 hours and watch the recorded lectures for another 2 hours, then read the textbook, complete quiz + discussion forum post and for two weeks, write creative exercise responses. However, note that the class will not be as intense during regular quarters with 10 instead of 6 weeks. Having taken two other film classes (French 41, German 59), I think the workload is not out-of-line. You do have to consider what other classes you are taking though because this course does require a good amount of time.
2. As others have mentioned, the textbook reading can be long. However, you should be smart about doing that. You should skim any sections that dive deep into the history, and read more carefully about the film techniques. Both types will show up on the quiz, the first type you can pinpoint by using the search function, but the second type you will need to understand well and utilize in your reading responses (discussion forum and creative exercises)
3. The discussion forum posts require 300-500 words. I often found that introducing two pieces of evidence (from reading or film), elaborating their significance and relevance to the prompt will almost surely get me to the middle to high-end of this range. I advise that you go beyond the bare word minimum, and incorporate the terminologies introduced in that week. As for grading harshness, there may be some small variance between TAs. Prof. Trice said that the range between discussion forum grades is 0.6 in one of her emails.
4. Choose your creative exercise prompts and timing wisely. For summer, we had to complete two from five total prompts, each due at the end of the week (Wk 2-6). I obviously do not advise choosing week 6 if you are taking other summer classes as you will have to write an essay during exam week. As for content, choose the ones that you know you can excel at (both quality and time consumption wise). If you are already familiar with composition in drawing, choosing the prompt of storyboarding may be a lot more easy/fun + short explanations than writing a long essay. Also for some week's topic you are given different angles to approach it and some take shorter time than others. For example on sound, you could either listen to some provided clips and write about how sound enhances the visual aspects OR you could find a clip of your own, resound it and explain your reasons.
5. Do the course eval. It gives you 1 point bonus in the *final grade*

If there's one thing I could say, it is that I REGRET TAKING THIS CLASS. I took it because it looked like an easy A elective with a bunch of A+/A's, however, this is the most time-consuming, horribly laid out class ever. The TAs give out random grades on the discussion posts without absolute reasoning... You could write the most perfect post ever, but if that TA is having a bad day they will probably give you a 10 or 11 out of 12, which is a B- or A-, just because they felt like it. When confronting the professor about the TAs, she let the class know that the distribution is correct and that it is fair... it really isn't! This is a beginner class and it should be engaging and exciting, not super overwhelming. Just do yourself a favor and choose another elective.

TLDR: this class is EASY to get an A in. As long as you watch all the videos and do the work, you can get an A. You just have to be okay with doing a LOT of work each week. And the professor is super lazy, which makes the large workload extra annoying.

The concepts in the course aren't hard to grasp, and the quizzes aren't terribly difficult. Kyle Borowski is an amazing TA and grades pretty easy. BUT. For a beginner-level GE... compared to a lot of other classes I've taken (including film classes and even compared to STEM courses)... this courseload was VERY heavy and took up most of my week's work. I spent more time on this class than my 2 STEM upper-division classes combined. Also, I took it asynch so we watched lecture videos, but Professor Trice just used pre-recorded lecture videos from years past that were outdated and provided incorrect information about the course. The lectures and quizzes referenced films that students may have watched for the course in past years but were omitted from the course this year. The course videos were sometimes out of order as well. This felt very lazy on the instructor's part and made me as a student feel like she did not give a **** about her current students at all because she had done the work prior and just reuses them sloppily. It's not like she's had to record any new ones, so at least put them in order or edit out parts where you talk about a movie we didn't watch?? Dumb. Plus her TAs are doing all the grading and she makes it so that people can't email her so I have no clue what she is actually doing for the course.

Note: I took this class asynchronously, with David Maquiling listed as the actual professor.

However all the lectures were recorded by Prof. Trice, with David and TAs handling administrative tasks. Plus Bruinwalk is having trouble adding new profs so...

I loved this class! It is a little time-consuming due to the movies you have to watch in addition to the ~1.5 hours of lecture per week, but if you enjoy film I think the class is very fun and educational.

It was structured as follows: 2 online quizzes each week (one following each lecture), and 1-2 discussion posts per week, including 2 replies to classmate's posts. There were also 2 creative exercises and 1 final project, but as someone who genuinely is interested in the creation of film I found they were not too time consuming and very fun/encouraged creativity.

I loved Prof. Trice as a lecturer, the high-quality recording paired with visuals were very engaging and it was the easiest time I ever had paying attention to online lectures. She is a little disorganized, but it was easy enough for me to follow along. Her style might not be for everyone though.

It's evident she put a lot of time in preparing the lectures, and she often summarizes the readings so you're not completely lost if you didn't do them.

Highly recommend if you enjoy film/filmmaking!

I would recommend taking this class! It's very interesting and the workload is manageable.

TAKE THIS CLASS! It is so good! So easy and so fun

This class is pretty easy but workload is heavy

So I took this course during the summer and online, so your experience may vary. For summer folks, I must say: this class really wasn't that hard. I had Alexx Apicella for a TA, a fantastic person who actually pointed me in the way of some internships. The best way to structure this (again, if you're doing this asynch over the summer) is to copy + paste the syllabus into your own doc and structure out how many of the lessons and quizzes you'll do in a day. That way, you'll find a way you can space out the class without feeling like you need to do three days of work in one day. To be fair, I didn't watch one or two of the movies and there were a few were I was definitely scrolling on my phone the entire time. Regardless, there's always the Internet if you need to BS a quiz.
FYI: Don't watch Never Forever by Gina Kim in public. You'll thank me later.