Redesigning Undergraduate Directing Curricula Beyond The Auteur Model

Abstract

This article reports on the redesign of a curriculum in the undergraduate directing course of the Audiovisual Studies Program at the University of São Paulo (USP). Drawing on theories of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and productive constraint (Haught-Tromp, 2017), it argues that project-based film pedagogy — inherited from the auteur tradition of the 1960s — is misaligned with the developmental needs of students between eighteen and twenty-three years old. The text documents how the previous model, organised around a sequence of increasingly ambitious personal short films, produced authorship conflicts, recurring technical errors, and superficial feedback. It then describes the intervention that replaced those projects with structured scene exercises using The Book of Sides II (Kost, 2017), designed to increase the density of learning through constraint, repetition, and immediate feedback. The account is based on practitioner observations over several iterations of the course. Future work should incorporate systematic assessment data. The article concludes by discussing the implications for film education, including the potential role of artificial intelligence as a tool for multiplying cycles of practice and feedback within this pedagogical framework.