ObjectivesThis new programme is designed to provide a critical and creative space for practical experimentation and innovation with no preconceptions as to how films should be made and what they should look like.
Academic titleMA Contemporary Film Practice
Course descriptionGeneral programme structure
The advent of accessible digital video technology has changed the profile of independent film-making: low-budget and no-budget film-making is flourishing, demonstrating that ideas expressed through moving images, sounds and words, even though they do not possess high production values, can be culturally and socially potent and innovative. We aim to offer opportunities to explore and exploit this imaginative energy and intellectual buzz.
Through student and practice-centred projects a range of work will be produced: from single-issue documentaries to avant-garde animations, from work using archive materials to DIY narratives.
How do experimental film-makers address new audiences and create new constituencies? How do we talk about those practices which do not fit into existing exhibition venues and environments? What other pleasures, emotional and intellectual, are on offer?
Modules provide a supportive context for working on the practical project: critical screenings and discussions; collaborative work which offers the chance to develop links with exterior organisations such as the South West Film Archive and production companies, and two pre-production and development modules examining where ideas come from and how to capture them on the wing. In all modules there is an emphasis on tracing the intricate and synergetic relationship between theory, research, thinking and making.
Detailed programme structure
-Critical screenings: mapping out the interconnecting territories of independent film-making
-Aesthetics and technologies: the relationships between ideas and technologies
-Ideas and sources: pre-production in a creative mode
-Negotiated project: working with an outside film/TV organisation
-The MA project: at the heart of the programme, a practical project