BA Film & Theatre

Core modules include:

Analysing Theatre & Performance

How do theatrical stories allow us to examine and reimagine our impression of the world today? What practical qualities do theatre makers return to – or reinvent – in creating meaning in performance?

In this introduction to theatre and performance, you will share your interpretations and expand the ways you see and think about theatre in relation to the world today. You will learn how to be a confident spectator and reader of theatre through a range of diverse and topical performances in local or in London-based venues. Previous trips have included the National Theatre, RSC Live, Peking Opera, the West End, and smaller, innovative fringe venues.

Approaches to Film

How do films tell stories, make meanings, and contribute to our culture? What questions can, and should, we ask of a film? This module includes a mix of cinema screenings, seminars and lectures, exploring a range of fiction and non-fiction films. Class discussions and assignments will challenge you to explore the meanings and cultural significance of moving images, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Introduction to Filmmaking

Through a series of workshops and small group practical projects, you will develop your technical and creative skills in filmmaking, and understand how research and collaborative communication are central to this process. You will explore key decisions in design and production, and how these are inevitably rooted in the cultural and socio-political contexts in which filmmaking occurs.

Staging Texts: Production Skills, Design and Performance

In a series of dynamic seminars and technical hands-on workshops, you will focus on a range of behind-the-scenes practices involved in production, performance and design ahead of an assessed final project. Over the course of the term, you will develop new understandings towards technical skills and scenography (including sound design) to broaden your perspectives and practical skill sets across theatre production. You will work collaboratively to conceptualise a final project that creatively and critically investigates the set texts and the assessment brief. You will also develop an understanding of the professional contexts and working conditions of theatre careers in these areas through you own application of skills to performance contexts.

Approaches to Television

In an era of intensified competition for audiences and technological innovation, the box in the corner has expanded to include a vast universe of televisual content that can be slipped into your pocket. In this module you will learn the tools to both analyse this wealth of programming and the industry that produces it. Considering contemporary developments alongside the extensive history of the form, it examines continuities rather than disruption. Centred on close analysis and critical reading, you will explore a range of exciting viewpoints and frameworks through which to approach television.

Introduction to Scriptwriting

No creative practitioner can make an outstanding screen or stage production without advanced knowledge of storytelling. This is a practice module in which you will create original scripts for the screen or stage. Learning in this module develops your critical understanding of key storytelling issues such as narrative, character, dialogue, and place. Scriptwriting practice will include both individual and collaborative forms of writing and rewriting. You will engage with discourses around scriptwriting emerging from screenwriting and playwriting studies, including projects for decolonising scriptwriting traditions.

Please note that all modules are subject to change.

Core modules include:

Please note that students can select one of the following three core modules.

Creative Screen Practice

You will develop, shoot and edit a short film, documentary or television project in a creative team. Your film, documentary or television production will be rooted in research, and in the critical and theoretical concepts and traditions of industry practice you have encountered so far on the degree.

You will explore key production roles and practices within the industry, and build your awareness and skill in processes of creative design and story development. You will focus in particular on the short film form informed by industry contexts, drawing on festivals, visiting speakers, and your own independent research.

Independent Critical Project

This module represents a major piece of independently researched written work, with a limited individual creative component. It provides you the opportunity to engage with an independently selected topic of interest, as well as enhances your independent critical thinking and self-directed study skills, while being guided by a supervisor. This module may be offered in place of the practical strand in Year 2.

Community and Collaborative Performance Practices

In this module, you will have the opportunity to develop your professional practice by collaboratively making a creative project for a non-traditional theatre context for and/or with, a particular community setting. You will work with professional community partners to make creative work that may include theatre in education, theatre for young audiences, drama workshops in community centres or nursing homes, museums, educational theatre resources, performances in parks, playgrounds, other site-specific locations or work in disability arts or LGBTQIA+ contexts. In this applied theatre project you will develop areas of specialism such as workshop facilitation, performing, writing, devising, producing, technical management, design and marketing.

Please note that students can select one of the following two core modules:

Film Forms and Cultures

This module will broaden your knowledge of historical and contemporary global cinema through screening a variety of exciting film forms. This will deepen your understanding of the relationships between films and their artistic, social and cultural contexts. The module includes art cinema and experimental in documentary, giving you the opportunity to engage with, analyse, discuss, research and write about a diverse range of carefully selected films and relevant critical/theoretical material.

Performance, Identity and Culture

On this module, you will explore the construction, representation and theatrical performance of diverse modes of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, nation, ethnicity or disability. We will consider how these intersect with the performance of identity in culture more generally, asking how theatre and performance can both reinforce particular identity positions and stereotypes, and can also expose or contest narrow, oppressive or exclusionary identity positions. We will investigate the work of theatre practitioners in relation to specific socio-historical, theoretical and theatrical frameworks, and will consider a range of performance forums such as public installations.

Optional modules include:

Documentary

This module introduces you to some of the key issues in documentary, exploring both film and television, with the opportunity to put some of these ideas into practice. Through a consideration of documentary form, argument, authorship, representation and ethics, you will develop an understanding of the form’s position as social advocate, educator and entertainer. You will also consider how the form has evolved to play with and challenge traditional expectations of realism and blur fact and fiction. This will equip you with the skills to engage with documentary’s complex and sophisticated engagement with the real. Through a case-study format, you will approach key theoretical concepts through discussion, close analysis and brief practical exercises.

Professional Roles and Screen Industry Pathways

This module enables you to develop specific knowledge and understanding of a key creative or organisational role in the production of film and television. You choose one area of professional responsibility from this list: producing, screenwriting, directing, cinematography, sound recording and design, production design, editing. The module is focused on practice, with workshops to help you develop key skills and then collaborate on a professional-style studio shoot that will demonstrate core areas of essential knowledge, including on-set protocols, workflow and time-pressured creativity.

Directing and Dramaturgy

On this module you will explore the roles of director and dramaturg as artistic leaders and examine these roles within collaborative theatre making practices. Through a series of hands-on studio workshops, you will develop an understanding of key research, rehearsal, and staging processes involved in creating performance. You will consider the ways in which directors and dramaturgs work with actors and creative teams to create performance. There are three core areas that this module focuses on:

• providing you with a firm grounding in play analysis and dramaturgical strategies so you can confidently interrogate the connection between text (in the broadest sense) and live performance
• enabling you to experiment with rehearsal techniques in a studio environment and to learn new ways of analysing the practices of other directors
• offering you models of directorial practice that you can draw on to realise your creative ideas in performance.

Reworking Shakespeare in Performance

This Shakespeare module encompasses a range of media, including adaptation, international performance and contemporary theatrical experiment. It invites you to think about Shakespeare as a prism through which contemporary issues, such as decolonisation, gender, race and social class, have been reflected and inflected. How can we rework Shakespeare to speak to relevant social and political issues of today? Working in groups, with reference to these examples and to relevant theory, you will produce your own creative response to a Shakespeare play and reflect critically on the creative and intellectual choices you make.

Placements and Employment Skills

Through taught sessions you will gain relevant employment skills. You will then have the opportunity to apply these skills through self-directed study. You will either a) self-organise a placement to undertake in an industry or organisation of your choice or b) undertake a detailed examination of an industry, organisation or role of your choice. You will develop your approach to the written assessment supported by workshop discussion, and tutor and peer feedback, and in doing so will also develop your pitching and presentation skills.

In the summer term of the previous year, a session will provide advice on how to secure a placement.

Television and Contemporary Culture

This module deepens your understanding of television form, industry and the complexity of the medium and its programming. It provides the tools to critically engage with issues of representation and identity, explores industrial concerns (who has the power to make television and how does that impact how and what stories are told) as well as global production and trade of television. It considers different approaches to television storytelling and representations of the world around us through a selection of television genres and forms, which may include reality tv, documentary, period drama and sitcom.

From Acting to Performance

On this module, you will practically explore the actor’s role in theatre making and learn how it has been shaped and practiced in different cultural and artistic traditions. You will reflect closely on your practical experience of approaches to building and performing a character, before exploring practical strategies aimed at decentring and challenging the idea of character. Drawing on these strategies, you will develop an assessed solo performance exercise, working within the vibrant tradition of Performance and Live Art. Through the process of researching, creating, and performing your unique solo exercise, you will discover and communicate what it can mean, in this context, to act.

Please note that all modules are subject to change.

Core modules include:

Please note that students can select one of the following four core modules.

Advanced Film/TV Project

In this major creative project, you will collaborate in groups to produce a piece of film or television work, building upon your understanding of film and/or television theory and practice in earlier parts of the degree. Each group will have collaborated to devise and begin pre-production of the project in a previous module. Here, you will enter production and post-production, culminating in screenings of the projects as part of the Department’s Festival.

Advanced Theatre Making Project

The Advanced Theatre Making Project represents the culmination of your creative practice theatre and performance. This major project is an opportunity to achieve your practical ambitions, to engage with key critical debates and to develop your own theatre making specialism within a group. Forming an ensemble, you will research, prepare, plan and deliver the performance work alongside supervision, culminating in showings at the end of year festival.

Creative Research Project

A major piece of independent research with a creative component (realised individually or in pairs), which builds on practical work in any of the disciplines of film, theatre and television in earlier years of the degree. The written work will be carried out individually. Projects can include, for example:

• a script (any medium)
• desktop documentary
• video essay
• filmed demonstration/experiments (max. two minutes)
• storyboard
• a theatre design project with one realised element
• performed fragments/experiments (max. 15 minutes)
• performance lecture.

Each creative research project will need to be approved by the department before commencement and will be allocated a supervisor. Supervisory meetings may be individual or, where appropriate, in groups, where individual work in progress may be shared.

Dissertation

This module represents your major piece of independent work, the culmination of your critical writing on the course. As such, the module aims to test your ability to apply accumulated skills and knowledge to an area of individual interest in an extended essay on a topic not directly taught on the course, and which is initiated and developed independently but under supervision. You will have the opportunity to develop core skills related to your dissertation through taught classes in the autumn and spring terms.

Optional modules include:

Commercial and Community Filmmaking

In this module, you will develop your professional practice by collaboratively developing a creative project for and with a particular community or client. You will work in creative teams to make a short film/video output in response to a brief set by community partner or commercial client. Taking on specific creative roles within your teams, you will undertake research to develop critical and practical understanding of local/global issues, build relationships with local communities or commercial clients, and apply participatory and/or collaborative methodologies to your creative work.

You will develop a range of professional and creative skills through the collaborative filmmaking process, including opportunities to meet community partners or clients for project ideation, planning and development, design and facilitate workshops, and successfully create and deliver practical outputs. You will explore areas of specialism within and new approaches to short form filmmaking, while simultaneously engaging with the ethical dimensions of community participation and professional collaboration.

Performance & Design: Site, Scenography and Installation

Performance & Design will explore the scope and potential of theatre and performance design by investigating historical and contemporary approaches to scenography. In a mixture of practical and critical workshops, you will study the creative application of the visual, aural and spatial elements of design through a rich array of performance environments and a dynamic range of innovative and international performance practices, from digital experiments to site-specific performances. The module will support you in analysing the practice of pioneering designers (such as Jocelyn Herbert and Josef Svoboda), facilitate collaborations with the National Theatre Archive, and enable masterclasses on contemporary approaches to design with visiting designers and/or scholars.

Practice as Research

It is a practical theatre module and focuses on making research-led creative work. The integration of other mediums, such as film, installation and digital work will be welcome. In small groups, you will make practical responses to a series of research-led case studies. You will also extend your knowledge of craft, technical, performance and creative skills.

Adaptations across Stage and Screen

You will explore contemporary practices of adaptation in performance and on screen through a series of creative experiments and case study analyses. You will also examine the politics and the disruptive potential of adaptation as a process. Areas of exploration may include: relocating narratives in time and space, intercultural adaptation, queer adaptations, cultural appropriation, transposing stories across form and genre, retelling stories. You will be able to specialise in the discipline of your choice (film, theatre, television), thinking about adaptation in relation the particular area of practice that interests you.

Identity, Agency, Advocacy: Diversity and Representation in Film, Television and Theatre

In this module, we explore questions concerning diversity and inclusion that are currently receiving much high-profile attention and debates in a number of different contexts, within and across film, television and theatre. We undertake close analysis of screen and stage representations that pertain to the complex interconnection of issues such as class, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. We combine our intersectional approach with an examination of relevant industrial, political and socio-cultural contexts and debates, and we explore how diversity and inclusion work intersects with the process of making. We pay particular attention to different kinds of minority and/or marginalized identities, as well as the efforts made by campaigners and advocates to push for equitable and meaningful representation. Films, programmes and plays to feature on the module may include: Fresh Off the Boat; Get Out; Goodbye CP; Jubilee; Kiss, Marry, Kill; The Slave; Transparent.

Independent Essay

With the agreement, support and feedback of an academic supervisor, you will independently shape your own research project. You will choose a focused aspect of the film, theatre and/or television industries that is of special interest to you, and that you have questions about. In dialogue with your supervisor, you will develop these questions, and plan the best way to conduct research into your area of special interest, so that you can find out what you want to know. You will write critically about your research journey and your research findings in a 5000-word essay.

Television: Exploring Fictional Worlds

This module explores the immersive nature of television fiction storytelling in both long-form and limited construction. Television’s fictional worlds can span years, shifting and changing across their lifetimes or be told in their entirety over a short serial. They are constructed and explored through creative decisions pertaining to the use of camera, performance, post-production, and so on. Through a set of case studies we will explore a selection of programme in depth, each covered in two to three weeks of teaching. Looking at a selection of episodes (or a whole run for short serials) we will explore these fictional worlds from different angles, which can include aesthetics, storytelling, social and cultural contexts, marketing and distribution, audiences and fandom, production and industry contexts. Genres may include but are not limited to telefantasy, soap, melodrama, crime drama, period drama (these are subject to change based on staffing availability).

Cities on Screen

The city has long been a favoured subject of the cinema, which has shaped, influenced, mythologized, and invented the city. Television’s representation of the city, both its interiors and exteriors, has helped bring the world into our homes. This module explores film and television’s encounter with the city through a series of city case studies. It explores iconographic cinematic cities as well as less familiar spaces worldwide. It explores humans’ relationships with the city, the everyday routines, the struggle to survive and the flights of fantasy. This module will consider how the city is intertwined with class, race, migration, labour, architecture, geography and nation, along with wider concerns of space and place.

Contemporary Documentary

The module examines some of the fundamental issues in recent and current documentary film-making for film and television. The module does so by exploring a number of case studies that, individually and collectively, consider documentary in terms of the aesthetic diversity and complexity of existing practice, and particular attention will be paid to the relationship between production process and aesthetics as well as politics of representation. The case studies are drawn from both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts, and may include: animated documentary, Chinese documentary, docudrama, documentary and authorship, documentary and poetry, ethnographic documentary, mockumentary, and observational documentary.

Cinema, Spectacle, Technology

Cinema has a long tradition of seeking to guarantee its market share through the spectacular, but the spectacular is also frequently derided as just entertainment, unworthy of sustained examination. In this module we will explore the ways in which film style, technology, economics, narrative and culture intersect at key moments in the history of spectacular cinema. We will also study how spectacular cinema has been understood and responded to, looking at key debates in film scholarship, film criticism, and in mainstream and trade press.

World Cinema: Creative Peaks

World Cinema: Creative Peaks looks at film history and geography through a democratic and inclusive approach. Rather than separating Hollywood from the rest of the world, it frames world cinema as a polycentric phenomenon with peaks of creation in different places and periods. Instead of establishing primacies and hierarchies, it identifies common tropes and cross-pollinations beyond national and cultural borders. Focusing on new realist movements and new waves from around the world, the module will analyse productions from France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Iran, as well as from the Inuit and other indigenous populations, demonstrating how they compare and inter-relate.

Please note that all modules are subject to change.