Ten Quinnipiac students will travel to Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa this winter to take part in a four week intersession trip that will complement a spring semester media production course.

The course, which concentrates on documentary production and filmmaking, also focuses on subjects such as South African colonialism, the Boer Wars, and the Apartheid.

Students, led by Professor Liam O’Brien, will start in the field in South Africa to create three short field projects, an ethnographic and historical oral narrative field tape, and two short documentaries.

Students depart December 27, 2004 and return on January 22, 2005. The second half of the course will resume at the Quinnipiac University campus at the beginning of the spring semester.

While in Cape Town, amid the high summer season, students will stay twenty nights at The Breakwater Lodge, a renovated 19th Century prison. The lodge overlooks Table Mountain and the Victoria and Albert Waterfront complex.

In Cape Town, students will take classes three hours per day while afternoons will be devoted to shooting video and recording audio projects.

Students will also take part in field trips to the top of Table Mountain by cable car, visit Nelson Mandela’s cell at the Robben Island prison and experience penguin, baboon and ostrich videography at Cape Point, which looks out to Antarctica.

Students will also hear guest lectures on South African history and issues in documentary filmmaking, and tour different sites to highlight Cape Town’s documentary taping locations.

Students will then fly to Johannesburg and stay at the Johannesburg Lion Park and Tlopi Tented Safari Camp in the heart of the Waterberg Mountains. Students will sleep in tents among baboons and monkeys as well as larger game such as rhinos and elephants.

Upon returning to Quinnipiac in the spring semester, the course will continue with a study in documentary production through lectures about documentary film history, genres, style and technique.

The second half of the course will also include pre-production, production and post-production of documentary projects.

This course is open to all upperclassmen students regardless of major. There are three remaining spots open for the trip.

All students outside of the School of Communications are required to submit a letter from the appropriate school’s department chair stating that the course applies to a plan of study that leads towards graduation.

Interested students should contact Professor Liam O’Brien at Liam.O’[email protected].