MFA Study Plan Scenario
First Residency: Our student enters the program with a background in drawing and animation production work. For her first semester Art Project she would like to create a comic book about “Superman” as an anti-hero, which she wants to expand for her second semester into a short animation film.
During the residency she makes thumbnail sketches and rough storyboards to communicate her ideas to faculty, students and visiting artists. In the “Interview Faculty Sessions” she explains the Art Project, presents the storyboards and states that she is fairly sure she knows who she wants to work with for her studio project (one mentor for the comic book, a second mentor for the film) but she has no idea what kind of research she might do. She explains that she keeps herself informed by reading trade journals and magazines. She doesn’t really see the point in research for her project. She is after all an artist, not an art historian.
Through her presentations, questions and group discussions, she is reassured the research is intended to inform and support her Art Project which is the focus and essential aspect of the program. With the input of faculty and visiting artists, several ideas and directions her research might take emerge. The student decides her Research Project will deal with the myth of the hero from ancient to contemporary versions of Hercules, David, Ulysses, etc. She chooses the faculty person who suggested this approach, someone she feels connects to her work and seems excited about the project. In the “Research Planning Sessions” her plans are presented and discussed. She does several searches in specialized library databases and also collects reading suggestions throughout the residency. Our student begins to see that her film conjures up a whole history of heros and it makes sense to know who they are and what the implications of their evocation might be, especially since her film is about an anti-hero. She therefore elects to make the research a longer, more in-depth, two-semester project. At the end of the residency she outlines her plan which contains a rough bibliography of 5-10 essential titles. In the coming weeks she will do further searches and weed through them in order to come up with a working bibliography. As well, she has come up with a series of questions which she will formulate into her research intentions. She briefly explains what the connection is for her between her Research and Art Project. Finally, she includes a rough production schedule for herself which includes dates she intends to have completed various parts of both her Research and Art Projects. Her Study Plan finished and confirmed by her chosen faculty, she completes her first residency.
First Semester: By December our student finishes printing and binding the comic book. She completes her readings for the Research Project which ends up dealing with super heroes, invincibility, dreams of infinite power, eternal life, etc. Readings included:
- Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, [1984], 1962. (Selected chapters: The survivor, The Intestines of Power, Metamorphosis)
- Klaus Theweleit: Male Fantasies, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Polity Press, 1987
- Richard Reynolds: Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
- Nick Kapur: Divine Wind and Ancient Heroes: Reconstructing the Kamikaze Ideology, 1998- 2003, http://www.stanford.edu/~nickpk/writings/Kamikaze.html
By January she begins the script for next semester’s film and collects her thoughts and notes into a first draft for her research paper.
This marks the end of the her first semester. Our student evaluates her own work thus far and how things have gone with both her Art and Research Project and with the faculty and mentor she has been working with. Adjustments, concerns, projections will all be discussed. Our student will also receive evaluations from her mentor and faculty.
Second Semester: Beginning her second semester, her animation project moves into a production phase. At this point she also receives comments from her faculty advisor on her draft. It is her goal to finish the Research Project early so that she can give the post-production phase of the Art Project her full attention. She also has some new ideas about how and where she’d like to present the work which will require a bit of research as well.