Opening Credits
Your name will be credited on the poster, the film, the DVD jacket ... in very small type after everyone else’s. Emerson’s 12-credit Screenwriting Certificate pushes the undergraduate or graduate with Woody Allen– or Quentin Tarantino–like screenwriting aspirations to finish a feature-length script. Structure your story in small weekly workshops. Market and sell your script with industry-seminar advice. Dialogue, image systems, and an agent-worthy pitch realize the unfinished plot in the span of just two semesters.
Emerson College | 120 Boylston Street, Boston | emerson.edu
R-Rated Requirements
Animation Workshop, Ceramics: Wheel Throwing, and Color Photography — all viable summer courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. But we pick the Body Revisited. It’s described as a “fresh and energetic approach to rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting this timeless and compelling subject.” Did they just use three R’s? Because we’re thinking R-rated. Live models and “short-timed gesture poses” (wink wink). The body, your choice of charcoal, oil, acrylic, gouache, ink, or mixed media, and “frequent demonstrations.” Jump on it. The course description says you should be prepared to work the first day; we don’t think that will be a problem.
School of the Museum of Fine Arts | 230 The Fenway, Boston | smfa.edu
Seriously
MIT Professional Institute’s Applied Nanotechnology Department offers a four-day summer workshop in Nanostructured Fluids and Particles in Materials, Chemical, Biological, and Pharmaceutical Technologies. We’re speechless.
M assachusetts Institute of Technology Professional Institute | 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge | mit.edu/mitpep/pi/
A Course In Prime Time
“It’s amazing that everyone has their own sound.”— Ornette Coleman
What’s your sound? Dave Bryant, Prime Time pianist, helps you figure that out with the Avant-Garde Ensemble at the Longy School of Music. Soloists collectively learn the free jazz of avant-garde composers such as Ornette Coleman and get to compose convoluted interval relationships rather than traditional chord-scale pieces. Coleman once said, “That’s how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themself, but to be with me.” Play your instrument and play with yourself (you guys are dirty).
Longy School of Music | One Follen Street, Cambridge | longy.edu
Cram Session
The intimidation of songwriting: sometimes it feels as though it’s all been written before. Snow, in his hit "Informer," sings, “A licky boom-boom down” (at least that’s what we think he’s saying). Grammy Award–winner Mariah Carey, in her recent tune "Shake It Off," sings, “Just like the Calgon commercial/I really gotta get outta here/And go somewhere.” (Calgon is an exclusive spa line carried in local drugstores.) We couldn’t have said it better, Mimi.
Whether your instrument is guitar, keyboard, or voice, Berklee College of Music’s Summer Songwriting Workshop lends lyrics to your art. Taught by Berklee faculty, the four-day workshop covers melody writing, lyric writing, MIDI demo techniques, and the business of songwriting. Perform your work in front of instructors and peers in daily singer-songwriter workshops and pitch songs to guest publishers and producers. Come on, “licky boom-boom down” (I hope we used that in the right context).
Berklee College of Music | 1140 Boylston Street, Boston | berklee.edu
