CUSAS - Workshop on Documentary and Ethnographic Filmmaking

Part 1: 2:30 - 4:30, Babbage Auditorium, Attenborough Building, New Museums Site. In this session, Adam will screen his new short film on America's largest and longest-running black rodeo, the Okmulgee Invitational, as well as an extended trailer for a feature documentary currently in production about a team of black cowboys working their way up the U.S. rodeo circuit. Adam will discuss the power of observational filming, the importance of finding a unique production approach to each film, equipment considerations, and possible ways for ethnographic fieldworkers or other academics to integrate video into their research practices. 

Part 2: 5:00 - 6:30, Titan Room, 2nd floor, Cockcroft Building, New Museums Site. This follow-up session will focus on more technical aspects of basic camerawork, and other practical aspects of filming. (If the RSVP count is small enough, we will move this session to the Leach Seminar Room, Department of Social Anthropology.)

Both sessions will be a mix of structured presentation and open Q & A, adapting to participants’ specific interests and goals. Attending one session without attending the other is fine. Students and researchers from all university departments are welcome. The presentations will not presuppose any prior film experience, but will also seek to be relevant to persons with already-developed film interests or projects.

Please RSVP with your name, degree course, sessions you wish to attend (Part 1 and/or Part 2), and any other relevant information to Tina Bird kdb28@cam.ac.uk. Organizational questions may be directed to Rupert Stasch rs839@cam.ac.uk.

About the filmmaker:  Adam James Smith is Affiliated Filmmaker with the Department of Social Anthropology, holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge and an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford, and is Assistant Professor of Multimedia at Florida Atlantic University. His first feature documentary, The Land of Many Palaces, explored the “ghost city” of Ordos, Inner Mongolia and screened at film festivals and on television around the world. His follow-up feature, Americaville, was shot in a replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the mountains north of Beijing and has been screening at film festivals this year. View the trailer at https://www.americavillefilm.com/about