Special Topics Title: Multimedia Communication - This class is designed to teach students a basic suite of multimedia production skills to be used for communicating ideas, research, and other forms of student scholarship. Like a class in Public Speaking, which aims to help students develop a skill set and is informed by the study of rhetoric, students in this course will learn multimedia production with the ultimate aim of having students apply those skills towards engaging in forms of multimedia-enhanced discourse. Towards this end, students will learn: basic principles of videography & photography, video editing, photo editing, audio production, desktop publishing, elements of presentation design, data visualization, web publishing, and more. After learning basic skills, students will choose one form of multimedia communication to focus on, culminating in the production of a capstone project. The goal of the capstone project is for students to use multimedia to communicate a piece of their own scholarship, research, or other scholarly endeavor in a creative way. This could be a video essay, a mini-documentary, a podcast, a multimedia-enhanced research publication, an animated ‘explainer video’, a narrated photo essay, or a range of other potential projects. This class does not require (or expect) any prior experience with media production. Students should be willing and eager to learn, as the class will cover a lot of ground quickly in establishing the basics of production. Students who have experience with digital video, photography, video editing, or any kind of multimedia production are strongly encouraged to enroll; the class has a flexible structure to enable those students with already developed skills to work on advancing their knowledge towards mastery.