Professor Leaf is really awesome! It's clear that he cares a lot about his students and the class content. You are expected to watch several music documentaries each week which can kind of become a drag, but the accompanying written assignments are super easy as long as you paid attention to the films. Grading in this class is lenient, so as long as you answer the homework questions thoroughly, you should do very well. There are no tests in this class, just a major report and a final project. Overall, I would highly recommend taking this class. Just be sure to spread watching the documentaries out each week (unless binge-watching is your thing). Is the workload somewhat tedious? Yes. But is it easy and interesting? Also yes.

Very Easy GE. Take this class if you want an easy GE. No final/midterm. Class is once a week and class is off during holidays. Only have to do 1 major essay around week7, a final project which is a 2-4 minute trailer to a music documentary you would make, and weekly essays in class based on that days lecture.

Class is interview style where professor asks a director questions's about life, job etc. Near finals week a major paper/essay on a famous artists(Bob Dylan) is due. Final Project is a 2-4 minute trailer on a music documentary you would make.

Class:
Professor brings a guest director to class each week and asks interview style questions to the guest for 3/4 of the class. The remaining 1/4 of the class is student qna and the professor gives out extra credit to those that ask questions to the guest by taking attendance. Near the end of class professor releases the password to access that weeks paragraph prompt that is about the weeks guest and weekly assigned documentaries. These essay/paragraph prompts are due by the end of class so you have to finish before you leave (these are really easy).

HW prior to class:
Professor assigns 3-4 weekly videos (around 1-2 hr long). Yet you can survive in the class without watching the whole thing, as long as you pay attention to the guest in class.

Discussions:
Discussions are mandatory as the TAs take attendance. The first half of the quarter the TA asks a couple questions based on the videos assigned in class and has a conversation with the students about different topics. Near the second half of the quarter, discussion is for working on your final project.

Final Project:
You have plenty of time to work on it and Professor is pretty lenient with grading. The TA's are also really helpful during discussion. Any form of video editing is allowed for the trailer and there is no set rules/rubric for the assignment.

Major Essay Project:
This was a essay on whether Bob Dylan was famous or not. The professor assignes 3 different videos and 3 different articles about Bob Dylan. Your essay needs evidence from atleast 2 videos and a couple of these articles. Prompt is assigned pretty early and you have a long time to work on essay.

Overall this is an easy GE and a great class(you get to meet famous directors(some even won Oscars) from Hollywood).

This class is so intriguing. There's guest speakers every week and they talk about the documentaries that they produced and who they documented and how it was meeting them. For one of the weeks, one of the film producer's (R.J. Cutler) of Billie Eilish's documentary came in and talked about working with her as well as just how it is filming documentaries. You can ask questions the second half of the class and gain great insight on how to go about things to end up where they did, etc. It allows you to see what it takes to get there since they share how they got there and their life story. Some weeks can be a little more boring then others but it's still worth it! You have a mini 3 to 4 question quiz at the end of each class which basically consist on your take aways from the guest speaker to make sure to be paying attention at least a little bit. Overall the class isn't hard but it can be a little disorganize honestly so utilize the TA's and ask questions if you don't understand something. Lastly, the final project was so fun!!! you make a 2-3 minute documentary trailer on an artist of your choice and pitch it to the professor, explaining why he should give you money to film this documentary. It's cool practice to learn how to pitch ideas and he gives great feedback. I recommend taking this class!!!

I was looking forward to taking this class, but as the quarter moved forward, I began to dread it. The subject material had a heavy focus on white men in the music industry; there was only one week that focused on an artist of color, and when we were assigned documentaries featuring female artists, they were never the sole focus of the week. The amount of work that was assigned to us also felt like it disrespected our time. One class had 9 hours of documentaries to watch as the prep work before watching the accompanying lectures. And this was after the professor said he had lessened the workload. I'm a full time student, and I took this class as a lower division GE but ended up having to spend more time doing work for this class than my two upper divs for my major. Also, for a class that relies so heavily on watching films, I was incredibly frustrated that none of the documentaries hosted on CCLE had subtitles or captions. This made doing the required watching for class difficult because at times it was difficult to follow the docs. I switched into this class so I wouldn't have to do a 10-page research paper in a different GE, I wish I'd just done that instead. Knowing what I know about this class now, I would not have taken it. My TA was amazing though, she made an incredibly frustrating class better, and I really appreciate the work she put in.

prof leaf is awesome and super knowledgable I loved all the topics we covered BUT you will be expected to watch at least 6 hours of film and interviews every week which is kind of a lot. you write a short essay every week on everything you've watched and there are some final projects. it was all kind of unorganized at first but it was overall a good class if you like the topic.