Abstract:

University Faculties of Fine Arts in Spain have recently started offering classes which, up until a few years ago, were taught exclusively to advanced vocational students or those studying in Audiovisual Communication Faculties. These classes use audiovisual media as a creative tool. This stems, firstly, from artists’ need to use all the technological instruments available to them throughout the creative process, and, secondly, from the boom in the use of alternative digital media, primarily via the Internet. What was once used only by a privileged few, who could afford the extremely high costs of audiovisual material, is now available to anyone with a computer and a digital camera, so that they too can produce high-quality audiovisual creations.
It is now, in this period of democratisation of audiovisual creation, when art teaching becomes particularly important. Students need to know about scriptwriting, audiovisual language, storyboarding, filming and, above all, postproduction using highly-specific, difficultly-mastered software packages. Current curricula limit the teaching of these subjects to just a few hours each week during one term, but the changes made to university courses in order to adapt to the European Higher Education Area mean that we will be able to provide students with the tools that they need to learn these techniques independently.
A group of lecturers from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Granada is working on a Teaching Innovation Project, which is financed by the University’s Vice-Chancellorship for Quality Assurance. The main aims of this Project are:
1. To provide students with the tools that they need to carry out post-production processes on audiovisual materials independently.
2. To use interactive methods to show students the different steps that need to be taken in the pre-production stage.
3. To create audiovisual materials which can be consulted by all students so that they can correct their work themselves.
The pre-production stage is the part of the process of audiovisual production which requires the most time, but it can also be learnt outside of the classroom, provided that students have access to the necessary educational resources.
However, once students have completed the second stage – production – they find that they have to edit their audiovisual creation and adapt it to the final format and media used. To make this task easier for students, the Teaching Innovation Project aims to prepare two tutorials to teach them how to use the video editing programmes Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS2.
We believe that this Innovation Project will help students enrolled on audiovisual courses (video creation, animation, etc…) to learn about the basic concepts of audiovisual creation, as well as about the advanced tools that can be used to complement their training within the framework of the European Higher Education Area. Our work at the Conference will be centred around showing attendees the advances that have been made in the Project and the results achieved.

Keywords:

Audiovisual, self-learning.