MA Film Practice

This programme offers the opportunity for you to develop and realise your creative ambitions through practice-based research. The course is underpinned by a team of lecturers who are experienced practitioners and researchers in a wide variety of film practice modes.

The course’s three units - Strategies for Practice: Identification, Master’s Project 1: Research, Master’s Project 2: Resolution - require the completion of set film exercises, which display an awareness of practice based study and evidence of progress towards your research goals through individual and collaborative experimentation. Also, you are required to produce a critical and analytical evaluation for each unit, which evidences research methods, academic protocols, critical, contextual and conceptual analysis and applied reflection.

Strategies for Practice: Identification

This unit is designed to orientate you and offers an introduction to all that follows. Through a series of lectures, film exercises, workshops, critiques and seminars, film, and your relationship to it, is examined. These different elements are structured to relate your practice (the work that you desire to make) and research (the critical questions you want to answer) to historic and contemporary film discourses (that consider aesthetics, technology, form, content, cultural and social concerns) and develop your work’s conceptual purpose within an informed frame of reference.

Your progress, through the unit, will focus your developmental intent and aid the formulation of the next two units. This is supported by the process of making work (and critiquing it in individual and group tutorials), better understanding your field of practice, analysing and composing your research (through developing a written and practical body of work.

Master’s Project 1: Research

The second unit builds on all you have accomplished in the first. It encourages you to further develop your specific practice related interests and apply them directly to your research question. Your research, through practical tests, contextual investigations and interrogative analysis, will expand your understanding, whilst, also, focusing your own purpose, the form and content of your final project.

Your research will interrogate related conceptional and contextual concerns, analysing your position and developing the best strategy for facilitating your final project. An important part of this process is ‘testing’ your perspective and engaging with other opinions, therefore personal and practice based tutorials, presentations and critiques, with both staff and students, are a vital part of this process. Your critical awareness, working methods, relatable structures, will help make the final stage of your study achievable, one which will find worthwhile fruition in the final unit, Master’s Project 2: Resolution.

Master’s Project 2: Resolution

In the third unit you will implement your final project plan, which was initially identified in Strategies for Practice: Identification and then developed and refined in Master’s Project 1, producing a completed major project of audio/visual work(s).

You will also assess the project’s means of presentation (e.g. single screen and/or installation) and dissemination (e.g. festival and/or digital platform) resolving the outcomes of your project in ways that communicate to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. This is augmented by completing a critical and analytical evaluation of your progress.