Ralph Vituccio

TEACHING STATEMENT

This year, 2024, marks my fourth decade teaching film, visual storytelling, interactive media, and new emerging media practices. Beginning in the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, I taught filmmaking at Pittsburgh Filmmakers where I focused on traditional film production technique and skills. In 2001, the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) started a Masters in Entertainment Technology (MET) program and were looking for someone to teach a class called Visual Story. Upon the recommendation of my colleague Scott Stevens, Randy Pausch invited me to start teaching Visual Story at the ETC. This was a seismic shift for me, forcing a reevaluation of my traditional film teaching approach and how to reconfigure it to a video game program. The challenge was taking the knowledge acquired through years of teaching film production classes, plus me own film work, and adapting core artistic principles to a new generation of game designers. Thus began an intense new learning experience on ways to integrate core visual concepts as practiced in filmmaking for over 100 years into a new art form of game design and interactive storytelling. To be honest it wasn’t easy. It took a couple of years to find those connecting threads that tied the two art forms together giving students that “Aha!” moment. During my first-year teaching Visual Story, Randy Pausch would sit in on my classes. After each class he gave notes on what he felt worked and what didn’t. Randy’s notes were extremely helpful in developing Visual Story those first couple of years into what it’s become today.

The biggest challenge in those early years was the impression students had about Visual Story versus filmmaking. Programmers and game designers did not believe they needed to learn about the role visual storytelling played in media. They come to ETC to learn to make video games, full stop. They expressed little to no interest in becoming filmmakers. In the early years students were hyper focused on the Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) class and for years, the Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) was the main attraction to ETC. However, I started to notice a significant change fifteen years ago with students demonstrating much more interest in the Visual Story class. Videos were becoming more sophisticated and professional. I recall an alumnus who graduated in the early ETC years. He attended a Fall Festival show were we always show a selection of videos from Visual Story class. He was impressed at the quality of the visual storytelling videos and remarked upon the huge improvement of the skill levels since he was a student.

I began developing an approach to get hardcore gamers and programmers interested in Visual Storytelling concepts and I had Randy Pausch to thank for it. Randy would always use the term ‘head-fake’ as a metaphor for a type of indirect learning. Randy would tell incoming classes, “You think you’ve come to the ETC to learn how to make video games. But what you really learn is how to collaborate and work together to make cool stuff. That’s ETC’s secret sauce.”

I began to use a version of Randy’s strategy in Visual Story as well. My ‘head-fake’ was not to get students involved deep into the technique of making short films, although they do make them, but rather focus on understanding how films use the power of visual language to help convey story. In the short term many students think dialogue is what makes movies emotionally strong. Dialogue certainly plays an important role but really the ‘head-fake’ is how basic visual components work at often imperceptible but powerful ways as narrative devices.
Some first years come to ETC with a narrow perspective that video games are a singular art form but soon realize a convergence of film and game industries. Making games more cinematic has become a hot topic and the mashup of these two mediums is a natural one.

Writers, film directors, and producers are getting more involved in game development because of the need to raise production value in certain triple A titles. Also, established game designers are focused on cinematic production techniques. Case in point is an ETC Alum Neil Druckmann. Neil has told me that although he wasn’t aware at the time, but recalls many things learned in Visual Story class have served him well. Neil has created one of the most cinematic video games, “The Last of Us”, as well as adapting the cinematic game to the screen.

CONTENT & METHOD

Paleolithic humans painted animal figures in numerous caves discovered across the globe. These early paintings were visual representations of how they experienced a heard of animals moving across the plains. When these prehistoric hunters enacted the hunt, against the painted animals across the cave walls and ceiling, they would’ve appeared to be moving under the flickering firelight. Some experts believe the first tangible beginning of cinema can be found in these ancient cave painting – the oldest of which are at least 35,000 years old – that seem to imply an early form of ‘persistence of vision’.

The power of the visual story goes for the most part unnoticed. Many aren’t aware why a series of stills or time-based images can create such emotional and compelling experiences. In film we put emphasis on story and dialogue, in video games we look at game mechanics, but much is happening at the sub-conscious levels that aren’t readily noticeable to an average viewer.

There are a group of basic visual components found in every moving or still picture. They are space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. These components are my primary focus in the Visual Story class. Actors, locations, props, game mechanics, game design, scenery are all made of these basic visual components. A visual component communicates moods, emotions, and ideas and gives visual structure and deeper meaning to narratives. I discuss these basic visual components as they appear on television, in computer games, and movies. I strive to show how they’re effectively used in all time-based media regardless of language or cultural barriers.

Within the first two weeks of the Visual Story, students are given a first assignment; to create a personal portrait of themselves in video. This provides an incredible window into each student, as to who they are, how creative they can be and perhaps more importantly allows me to assess their skill levels in storytelling. We post these portraits on the server allowing other faculty to get to know the first years a little better.

Next phase is individual exercises with basic photography principles in composition. They take photos providing examples of the rule of thirds, frame within a frame, filling the frame, balance, etc.

We then dive into at the various aspects of how space can be used to help tell a story. What different meanings do flat space, deep space, ambiguous space, or limited space convey?

We study how line and shape play roles in supporting story worlds or narratives. How leading lines for example can draw our attention to those areas/subjects we want to highlight. How various shapes are used; circle shapes imply an organic message (Hobbit houses in “Lord of the Rings”), squares and rectangles a more industrial feel (sci-fi/dystopian stories), and triangles as dangerous, faster sharper emotion. This is why Disney films always depict bad actors as having sharp triangle-like features.

We look at tone and how it creates mood, whether a game or film is brightly or dimly lit. How using ‘contrast and affinity’ such as playing dark against light scenes, bright colors against desaturated ones, round vs triangle shapes, high vs low shots can create feelings of tension, anxiety, or confusion.

Color is one of the most powerful visual components and perhaps the easiest to understand. The powerful role it plays in supporting narrative in games and films is profound.

Movement is the first visual device to attract the eye. I demonstrate how movement occurs using objects, the camera and what allows a viewer’s attention to track across a screen. In fast paced action games or movies, it’s critical in understanding how to keep a viewers attention centered and not confused as to what’s happening.

Rhythm is sometimes a more difficult one for students to understand. We think of rhythm in terms of what we hear. However, rhythm can be found in stationary (nonmoving), moving objects, and editing.

My teaching philosophy is experiential hands-on learning. The simplest explanation is a three-step process for learning: (1) Lecture on a particular subject. (2) Send students with cameras out into the world to shoot with clear objectives based on a given lecture. (3) Critique the results. (4) Add another concept and repeat every two weeks. Not only do students achieve some technical understanding of the equipment quickly but they get consistent practice and feedback in developing how the visual components can tell a story without dialogue. Building a progression of experiential learning modules, each designed to inform and reiterate upon one another, is the ‘secret sauce’ in my teaching process.
Over years developing, creating, and consistently evaluating and improving upon assignments and through feedback and critiques I’ve made many discoveries. This aggregated learning model, combining a series of assignments into a progression of revelations, was paramount to getting critical “seen but unknown” information across to students and myself. I’ve learned just as much from my students as I hope they’ve learned from me. I’ve learned from their mistakes, as well as mine, and plenty from their successes.

A Personal History of Collaborative Teaching

My history of collaboration has extended ETC’s reach into other campus departments. This has been a singular passion and focus of mine for many years. In collaboration with the Philosophy Department under the leadership of Dead Richard Scheines, I led a series of joint ETC/Philosophy projects called ‘Morality Play’ starting in 2014.

Morality Play was a series of innovative project courses where ETC students worked to build creative solutions to real world problems. Once a year, from 2012 to 2017, a topic would be selected by myself and Professor Andy Norman from Philosophy to develop an interactive experience with a deep exploration of a particular complex social issue.
- Morality Play (2012), an interactive experience exploring economic inequality. (https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/morality-play/)

- Privacy in the Information Age (2013) created an interactive storytelling experience that encouraged users to think about issues of security versus privacy. (https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/cheshire/)

- A Fine Line – An Interactive Experience (2014), addressed academic integrity, on and beyond campus life. It created an environment where students confront true-to-life scenarios involving academic integrity and reflect on how they would navigate these challenges in real life. It won a Gold Medal Award in the 2016 International Serious Play Festival. https://www.etc.cmu.edu/blog/projects/true-north/

- Decisions that Matter (2015), created an interactive graphic novel that educates people towards primary intervention against sexual assault on college campuses, guiding the guest as a bystander through a situation of harassment that can lead to an incident of sexual assault. https://www.etc.cmu.edu/blog/projects/patronus/

- Mind Field (2017), an interactive video-based experience dealing with subtle forms of racism and microaggression. Students created a tool that raises awareness and evokes discussion among students on the in-explicit forms of racism. https://www.etc.cmu.edu/blog/projects/mocking-birds/

My individual teaching extended the reach of the ETC be teaching a Visual Story for Screenwriters class in the English department. I also created an innovative class for a joint IDeATe/English Film Major called, “Mediated Narrative: The Interactive Documentary”. The first couple of semesters, Mediated Narrative started primarily as a theory class about interactive storytelling. It evolved into a hands-on experiential course where the students worked together to produce an interactive documentary experience. In conjunction with my colleague, Andres Tapia-Urzua, we first brought the idea of taking a group of students to Camaguey, Cuba to work with a media arts organization and document life in this small Cuban town to the ETC Director at that time. He would not support the idea. However, Dean’s Richard Scheines, Dietrich College, and Keith Webster, University Libraries, were much more receptive and supportive. As a result, we took 12 students to Camaguey, Cuba where they interviewed and documented various people and artists ranging from National Cuban Ballet dancers, musicians, a Cuban boxer and former bodyguard to Fidel Castro, to cigar makers, creating a pastiche of life in Cuba presented in an interactive documentary format. The I-Doc is on view at the Askwith Kenner Global Languages and Cultures Room: (https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/modlang/kenner-global/current-experiences/camagu%CC%88ey-cuba.html)
The singular most important and rewarding outcome of the class was how it became a ‘transformational’ experience for the students involved. So much so, that many were so inspired, they went back to Camaguey that summer to work with youth groups, musicians, and other artists.

Further collaborations with the Dietrich College in creating Virtual Reality and interactive documentaries for the Askwith Kenner Room for Language and Cultural Studies Room consisted of a Virtual Reality Holocaust experience. “Journey through the Camps”, is an immersive interactive CG Virtual Reality experience. You ‘walk in the shoes’ of what it must've been like to enter a Nazi death camp as a Jewish prisoner. As you move through the various places in the camp you hear real-life testimony from actual concentration camp survivors.
(trailer: https://vimeo.com/421912175).

In addition to producing the VR Holocaust experience, I directed an accompanying I-Doc Holocaust, “Poland Personally – an interactive journey” (https://vimeo.com/431985828). In this I-doc you can interview a Holocaust survivor, meet a German author who discovered his grandfather was a Nazi, hear from a professor whose Jewish grandmother was a paratrooper for the Red Army fighting against the Nazi, and hear from teachers and students alike about this emotional journey. It is a powerful and moving experience providing audiences with a unique way to view history and testament.

Most recently, spring semester 2023, I co-taught a course called, “Documenting Israeli and Palestinian Food Cultures”, with Professors Michal Friedman, (Department of History) and Nevine Abraham (Arabic Studies, Department of Modern Languages). This course was designed to provide students with a historical and cultural background about the hybrid nature of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab
cultures and the multiple ethnic contributions to food cultures in Israel/Palestine, as well
as with media-tech skills, with the aim of preparing them for travel to Israel and the West
Bank during Spring Break 2023. My role was to teach students how to begin developing and creating their own personal narrative experiences in the media of their choice. During the trip, students will
participate in documenting local food cultures through film and other media. Upon their
return, they will work on the production of a collaborative multi-layered interactive
documentary (I-Doc) meant to capture their first-hand experiences with local and regional
cuisine practices in Israel and the West Bank, and present separate final projects based on
these experiences.

ETC Faculty Collaborative Teaching
The central part of the ETC curriculum is the project course. At the ETC, students learn how to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams and create engaging interactive experiences that focus around a range of areas spanning learning, health, training, social impact, civics, entertainment and more. Project teams develop games, animation, location-based installations, augmented reality, mobile devices, robotics, interactive performances, transmedia storytelling, and a variety of other experiences within one semester.
To help contextualize the project course, the ETC program is a two-year degree with four semesters of study, and we have a project-based curriculum with almost no lecture-based coursework after the first semester. During the first semester, students take four core classes together: Building Virtual Worlds, ETC Fundamentals, Improvisational Acting, and Visual Storytelling. These courses prepare them for their last three semesters, in each of which students take a Project course, and one elective that can be any course taught at CMU.
The ETC Faculty all teach project courses, in which one or two faculty are working directly with an interdisciplinary team of students, while all the ETC faculty provide input and evaluation at quarters, midterms and finals, as well as throughout the semester. Students are evaluated on their team's work and individual performance. Projects can be client-sponsored, grant or research driven, and/or student pitched. Through the project course, we emphasize leadership, innovation, and communication through challenging multidisciplinary assignments in which students learn how to collaborate, experiment, and iterate solutions, designing and developing experiences that educate, engage and inspire. The ETC faculty believe that this collaborative teaching of the project course is one of the key educational experiences that lead to the success of our graduates in the creative industries.

Conclusion

I want to thank the review committee for considering my renewal appointment. The balance I’ve achieved in my long career of teaching and as a working artist has helped me bridge the gap between theory and application, synthesizing those collective experiences into the classroom. My record of fostering interdisciplinary projects has allowed me to work across various colleges and departments. While teaching a full load of classes, I’ve served on various steering and academic committees and continue to create, produce, and direct my personal artistic work as well. Above all, I have been and continue to be a vibrant and productive part of this great academic institution.