Understanding Carey Meyer

This assignment should help you to look at Production Designer Carey Meyer’s contributions to the series. One of the temptations when running a seminar on this series is to get stuck talking about theme, character, foreshadowing... all the writerly aspects that makes the series great.

For this assignment, students write a 3-5 page paper precisely describing a single setting used anywhere in the series and the effects created by décor, props, space, color and shape. In Reading the Vampire Slayer, Karen Sayer offers a productive notion that places are not just location or territory, but are inseparable from the consciousnesses of the people in it, writing, “Places are fusions of human and natural orders and are significant centers of our immediate experiences of the world. They are defined less by unique locations, landscapes and communities than by the focusing of experiences and intentions onto particular settings…. Place, whether fictional or real, is always imagined.” Places are products of discourse: multiple, contingent, and in flux. The student's job is to talk about this intersection of experience and design, the imagined and the physical. The students should not feel the need to do research for this assignment, although they may, of course.

Questions to consider for this assignment: What does this space look like? What colors dominate? What props are to be found here? How are they used? How does the space impact blocking? What does the set design say about the characters found there? How does the camera work and the lighting design typically affect how the set is rendered? What are the typical associations an audience has about this type of space and how does the series play with those understandings? How is this space similar to or different from other related spaces in the series?

Papers will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

· Title: Does the title prepare the reader for the argument to come? Does it describe the paper? Is it catchy? Or is it a simple statement of the topic question answered?

· Quality of Introduction: Does it have an introduction that directly declares the thesis, briefly states 2-4 premises that the paper will use to support its point, and indicates the impact of the argument (i.e. why the topic matters)? Does the reader know what to look for in the body of the paper or are they uncertain what the author is trying to prove?

· Writing and Rhetoric: Does the paper undermine the author’s authority by having basic writing errors in spelling, word choice, paragraph transitions and grammar? Does the author craft an argument that demonstrates their insight into the question posed or do they simply provide a summary? Does the author anticipate reasonable counter-arguments, summarize them fairly, and refute them?

· Evidence: Does the paper use concrete examples or does it simply refer to the episodes in question? Does the paper precisely describe the sets and props or does it use empty adjectives like “beautiful” or “striking”? Does the paper link its observations to events on screen or use quotations from the readings to advance its argument?

· Impact: Does the author impact their analysis or are they trapped on the screen? Media is one of the more social human endeavors, made and consumed by a great number of people. The media arts are social and thus political. What is the social result of encouraging these ways of seeing, listening, feeling and thinking?

· Variety: Does the paper understand the entire work or do they understand only a part of it? Each media product works on several levels at once:

o text (narrative, character, form)

o viewer (individual perception, audience, social use of the product, author’s construction of preferred readings and viewers)

o author(s) (intention, previous works, influences)

o genre (patterns of pleasure, narrative and formal expectations)

o art history (genre across media)

o economic (placement within industrial, national, and global economic structures of production, distribution and exhibition)

o medium (means of communication)

o culture (ideology, myth)

One goal of this course is to foster your ability to discern the entire meaning of a media product.

· Mastery of Course Content: Does it demonstrate fluent understanding of the theories, evidence and arguments raised in class and the readings, or does it ignore them?

· Citations: Do the citations follow the MLA format such that readers can verify claims made by the paper?

· Quality of Conclusion: Does the paper have a conclusion that briefly restates the main points and best evidence to leave the reader with the best understanding of the argument? Or does the paper just end when it reaches the page minimum?