MA
Film Production

Module Overview

This module is designed to enable students to use a chosen medium (radio or single or *multi camera production or screenwriting or photography or design or new media) as a means of personal expression.

The module will be organised around providing students with the opportunity to further develop technical skills and techniques in their chosen specialism so as to: develop an original concept, undertake appropriate production research, schedule the project, produce the project and edit the project. A smaller project within this module aims to enable students to conduct the research, development and planning necessary for the final masters project in their chosen specialism.

*Dependent on the numbers of applicants wishing to specialise in this production platform.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide students with the opportunity to realise the project idea which they developed in Project Pre-Production. The project is expected to be, depending on the student’s chosen specialism, a programme, a script, an extensive still image or design portfolio or new media project. It is intended that the project will contribute to the development of the student as someone capable of conceiving and realising a creative project to a professional standard. It is designed to provide students with the opportunity to develop their conceptual, critical, creative, technical and organisational skills to a high order.

Module Overview

This module is designed to provide the opportunity to develop an understanding of the ethical context of media production, media law and regulation in the UK (EU) and the USA. The module will be organised around discussion and examination of: ethics of media production, rights of free expression, common law of libel, ECHR and HRA, current UK and US communications acts, journalists’ codes of practice and content regulatory codes.

Module Overview

This module is designed as an introduction to the work of professional practitioners in film such as the screenwriter, director, cinematographer, art director, sound designer and editor. Guest speakers are professionals from the industry and aim to share their craft secrets with students. Assessment is via presentation.

Module Overview

Providing an advanced introduction to recent debates on film, culture, and society in various national, international, and transnational contexts, Approaches to Screen Studies seeks to promote a deeper understanding of a ‘world of cinemas’. Looking to examples of film industries that challenge or disrupt the dominant Hollywood paradigm, it turns its attention toward concepts such as censorship, exile, propaganda, resistance, underground, dissent, identity, and repression, as well as to new modes of cultural production, policy, and their transformation.

Module Overview

This module provides the opportunity to develop an understanding of the structures of media systems regionally, nationally and globally, with a specific focus on private and public funding sources and the organisation of media production, distribution and exhibition for traditional as well as new media platforms and outlets.

The module will be organised around discussion and examination of:

- UK creative industries and their relation to global media systems and markets.

- Existing media markets and the identification of future markets

- The development of new media technologies and their impact on media markets

- Normative practices operating in media corporations and small and media sized businesses

- Case studies of innovation and creativity in media production.

The module will also have contributions from visiting media professionals.

Module Overview

This module examines the multi-directional and variable relationship between gender, media and culture. We will interrogate the category of gender as a tool of cultural analysis and its relation to media and popular culture. Gender will be presented as central to media and cultural formations, while media, mediation and culture will be presented as central to gender formations. Key concepts to be examined in relation to gender will include body, class, power, sexual difference, masculinity/femininity race/ethnicity, identity/non-identity and subjectivity. These concepts will be introduced and examined in relation to case studies, media practices and texts from a variety of historical and geo-political contexts.

Module Overview

Taking as its point of departure the ‘Anthropocene’, a concept that acknowledges the entwined future of human and material worlds, this module continues to explore the ideas, questions, and debates central to political life today, attending to the collapse of the traditional dualisms of humanist thought: self/other, mind/body, free will/determinism, organic/technological, culture/nature, human/animal, one/many, etc. It considers the expression and mediation of these issues in popular culture, dominant discourse, and creative practice.

Module Overview

This module is designed to tackle critically the current disintegration between discrete media forms. It recognises that long established boundaries between modes, practices and conventions of media have become diffuse. Where, in the past, individual media forms were comfortably self-contained and distinctive, today these forms are experienced as a type of informational content that we access on multiple devices and in multiple contexts.

The module understands contemporary media to be a complex, entangled ‘ecology’, a dynamic system in which any one product, device or image is always multiply connected, and in which our use of such media is necessarily informed by such connections. It insists that media activity is informed by a pattern of relations between individuals, political and economic institutions, commercial brands, and technologies.

Module Overview

This module is a practice-based and practitioner-led experience, in which students will have the opportunity to create materials relevant to the construction of a feature screenplay.

The process will begin in earnest with AfterEight, an entire eight hours dedicated to kick-starting feature ideas and developing these into robust and sustainable screen stories. At the end of this intensive process, supported by lecturers and practitioners, and modelled on the highly popular 24-hour film challenges, students are expected to have the bones of a feature film story, which they can develop further and use as a basis for their screenplay.

A series of masterclasses and guest lectures by screenwriters, directors, writer-directors, cinematographers and producers will provide an insider overview of the film industry today, with advice on getting employment and credits. Students can learn how to survive as a freelancer in the early years and how to approach screenwriting/writing-directing as a long-term career. The demands of being a screenwriter are different to those of the writer-director and each will also be addressed.