Since 1956 LFS has been a working studio, in which every student on the two year Filmmaking programme works on a minimum of six films. We’re accustomed to delivering in excess of 170 films a year. Around this work and its associated teaching we maintain an insistence on creative freedom, a drive toward innovation and a commitment to craft excellence.
LFS has been selected by Creative Skillset, the UK government agency for audio-visual training, as one of three ‘Film Academies’. This recognises the school as an industry level graduate school in Britain offering professional film training, and the only one in that scheme with an all-department Filmmaking programme. The support has made it possible for LFS to offer two-year bursaries for some UK qualifying students, and to develop our teaching and our links to the film industry, supporting graduates as they make their first steps in building a network.
LFS offers courses for students with certain aims: reaching genuinely professional standards; learning to collaborate creatively – from fellow students as much as from lecturers – and to think about cinema practically; getting the habit of interrogating their assumptions rigorously and then taking their instincts seriously. The students we want are resilient, collaborative, imaginative people who learn through doing (and sometimes failing), people who will have the courage and energy to develop their ideas to the limit. The MA Filmmaking is staffed by people who believe that pre-specialization (deciding before you study film to be a director, or a cinematographer, or a sound recordist – now very common in film schools) can deprive talented students of a full education in the craft of filmmaking.
We encourage them to explore and develop their special strengths while they’re here. We also believe that understanding the structures of industrial filmmaking will allow graduates the freedom to innovate, find employment and help invent the cinema and television of the future. Many graduates are directors, and the majority of students come to the school expecting that they will direct. What is important is that they will have other skills. We frequently use the term “filmmaker”, meaning a person for whom a proper command of this collaborative craft is of vital importance. In the MA Screenwriting at LFS, we want students to see writing in the context of real filmmaking, rather than as an abstract end in itself.
We’re not called a ‘film and television’ school because we believe that the craft skills and modes of expression encompassed by ‘film’ provide the base from which to take on the special creative demands of other media from television and advertising to streaming web video. Rather than second-guess the audio-visual business and its markets, we want to instil the creative flexibility to contribute in every area.
There’s a fine balance between technical training, the ‘boot camp’ in which students gain key skills through making films, or writing exercises, and the area of creative development, the ‘hothouse’ in which they try and make them extraordinary. The starting-points at LFS are to learn through the work, and to remain sceptical about whether filmmaking’s creative challenges can be taught in conventional ways. We aim to provide a fertile environment for hard work, exploration and creative dialogue. In this prospectus you’ll find course work referred to as ‘the exercises’. Turning them into ‘films’, ‘scripts’ and‘events’ is our challenge to you.