Advanced Storytelling: Documentary & Essay Craft
Research, argument, structure, and ethics of nonfiction storytelling at the highest level.
- Lectures
- 7
- Total runtime
- 5h 53m
- Attendance minimum
- 2h 57m
- Prerequisites
- B.CC — Years One to Five
Lecture Playlist
Ordered as a teaching progression, not by popularity. Attendance is recorded once half of a lecture has been watched.
- Pulitzer winner Ken Armstrong on the importance of storytelling in investigative journalism Reporting as the raw material — why narrative is what makes investigative work land, and choosing a form that fits the evidence 46 min Attended
- A Conversation with Katherine Boo Immersion research and the ethics of writing about other people's lives 86 min Attended
- Danyel Smith on developing taste as a writer and building confidence to tell your own story The essay register — memoir fused with criticism, and earning the first person 62 min Attended
- Soledad O'Brien on character-driven storytelling in documentaries, and the power of being a witness Structure — carrying a large issue on one character's shoulders 54 min Attended
- "The Unknown Known": A Film on Donald Rumsfeld by Errol Morris | Mahindra Humanities Center The interview as investigation — self-justification, evasion, and why a camera does not deliver truth by itself 61 min Attended
- Ken Burns on truth, citizenship, and the stories America tells Capstone: the selection problem — which stories are allowed to stand in for the whole 23 min Attended
- Practicum · working creator 7 things I've learned about journalism in 7 years of being a journalist A working video journalist's seven-year retrospective: putting Lecture 1's "narrative is what carries the reporting" and Lecture 5's "documentary is an argument, not a recording" into practice on a self-published channel, including where he got it wrong 21 min Attended
Every course reserves one practicum seat, listed last and marked P. It is filled by someone who has shipped the work — here, Johnny Harris — because the university lectures establish why something works and the practicum shows it being done under real constraints.