Drama with Film

Core Modules

Year 1

You will take the following modules in Drama:

• Theatre and Performance Making 1
• Theatre and Text 1
• Theatre and Ideas 1
• Skills Lab

  Skills Lab offers a broad introduction to key working methods and research approaches in theatre and performance studies.

   

• Screen Narrative: Theory and Practice

  This module allows students to apply their critical understanding of screen narratives. They will do this through original creative screenwriting, detailed analysis, and theory. Students have to adapt a story into a 10m screenplay. This could be a short story, an album, or a video game.

• Screen Narrative: Theory and Practice

  This module allows students to apply their critical understanding of screen narratives. They will do this through original creative screenwriting, detailed analysis, and theory. Students have to adapt a story into a 10m screenplay. This could be a short story, an album, or a video game.

Year 2

• Theatre and Performance Making: Acting for Camera

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the difference between stage acting and acting for camera. You will learn techniques for 'translating' your stage acting skills to mediated performance. You will collaborate through the year with directing students in the Department of Media Arts on an internal monologue film, a silent film, and a short scene, and these can later be used as part of an audition reel.

Year 3

• Group Project

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• All modules are core

Year 2

• Theatre and Culture: Theatre for Young Audiences

  In this module you will develop an understanding of children's theatre and the current success of theatre for young audiences. You will look at the innovative performance styles of theatre companies such as Oily Cart and Theatre-rites, and consider how their work has been pushing the boundaries of contemporary theatre. You will examine the Unicorn theatre, the first purpose-built theatre for children in London; playwrights such as Charles Way, Philip Ridley, Neil Duffield, Mark Ravenhill and David Greig; and the work of theatremakers such as Mark Storor and Sue Buckmaster, who bring a blend of visual art, puppetry and live art to performances for children. You will critically analyse how performance installations can excite children’s imaginations, focusing on the visual, tactile and aural elements of theatre and performance.

• Theatre and Culture: Cultures of Memory

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the diverse art forms that investigate memory in dynamic conversation and the nature of art, history, and humanity. You will look at the disruption to the purpose, value, and nature of art in the aftermath of the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust, and move through the twentieth century to consider different cultures of memory, memorialisation, trauma, and witnessing. You will examine a wide range of cultural textual and performative genres, including first-hand testimony, plays, films, graphic novels, museums, and public monuments.

• Dancing Bodies, Global Culture

  In this module you will develop an embodied understanding of culture. You will look at different cultural contexts for dance production, considering the context of where, when and how you dance. You will examine the cultural production and consumption of dance, exploring theories grounded in cultural studies and their implications on dance and dancing bodies, such as Marxism, post-modernism, feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalysis. You will focus on popular dance, global popular culture, and dance on screen, and investigate the relationship between dance practices and the social, political and economic context in which they emerge. You will be encouraged to devise performances which creatively engage with cultural studies.

• Theatre and Ideas: Ideas of Gender and Sexuality
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of Tragedy
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of Adaptation
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of the Musical
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of Acting
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of Money
• Theatre and Ideas: The Idea of Casting

• Directing Screen Fiction
• Screen Documentary
• Cinematography
• Creative Interactive Media
• Animation and Visual Effects
• Screenwriting
• Producing Film and Television
• Creative Digital Arts
• Creative Social Media
• Creative Post Production
• Film Theory: Hitchcock and Point of View
• Post-Classical Hollywood
• Television Histories
• Modern European Cinema
• Contemporary Chinese Cinemas
• Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference
• Modernism and Avant Garde Film
• Beyond Bollywood: Indian Cinema in a Transitional Frame
• Digital Aesthetics

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the core concepts of the digital age, looking at how today's computer networks, devices and infrastructure underpin nearly all forms of aesthetic, cultural social and political life. You will consider the concepts of technicity, affective turn, digital subjectivity and extended mind, creative expression and participation in the digital era, amateur production, free software, fun and politics, self-organisation, media archaeology and sonic architectures. You will examine the systematic challenges brought about by digital change and critically interpret and analyse digital phenomena.

• The Creative Industries

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how creativity is constrained and enabled by the industrial logics of the creative industries. You will focus on film, television and digital media, exploring issues such as economics and financing, pitching and commissioning, policy and regulation, copyright, formats and global trade, ratings and audience measurement, branding and marketing, digital production logics, and production cultures. You will also consider a number of important industry-oriented research skills, such as interviewing, market/demographic analysis, locating and interpreting legal documents, and archival research.

Year 3

• Love, Gender and Sexuality
• Race Relations in Theatre, Film and Television
• Shakespeare
• Naturalist Theatre in Context
• Creative Learning and Theatre
• Physical Theatre
• Shakespeare on Camera
• The Actor's Voice
• Actor Training in a Globalised World
• Final Year Project - Special Study
• Final Year Project - Dissertation
• Taught Dissertation

• Directing Screen Fiction
• Screen Documentary
• Advanced Screenplay- Major Project
• Producing Film and TV
• Cinematography
• Transmedia
• Creative Digital Arts
• Creative Sound Design

  This module will examine, through the employment of practical methodologies, the work of significant avant-garde sound/noise practitioners throughout the 20th century analogue and digital eras. It will examine the relationship between significant artworks and the technology of the era. For example, in the acoustic era of music capture, before the electrification of the signal in 1925 that allowed electro-magnetic microphones and soundboard input mixing, the capture of sound was facilitated through a static condensing horn. In order to create a mix balance, the musicians would physically move closer or further away from the horn. We call this kinetic mixing. One of the first exercises will be to recreate this process and then develop the concept digitally, within an installation paradigm, employing a multichannel sound source and a range of Bluetooth speakers, allowing the different sounds to be physically moved within a defined space – 21st Century kinetic mixing.

   

• Creativity, Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

  This module aims to give you as real an understanding and experience of working in the digital industries as is possible within the context of a university. This module will help you to gain an understanding of digital business modelling; from both a value building perspective, and also a relationship building perspective which is vital to your ongoing success.

   

• Contemporary British Cinema 1
• Television and Digital Cultures
• Film Aesthetics 1: Issues of Interpretation and Evaluation
• Psychoanalysis and Cinema
• Film, Television and the Holocaust

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 has been represented and responded to across a range of both fictional and non-fictional media. You will look at the specific theoretical debates surrounding how the Holocaust can or should (or should not) be represented in art and popular culture. You will consider the role of mass media in constructing both popular and elite relationships to historical experience, and in documenting history.

• Media Technologies
• See This Sound - Audiovisuology
• Cinephilia
• 360º Cinema
• Political Cinema: From Eisenstein to Youtube
• The Poetics of Contemporary Television
• Contemporary British Cinema 2
• Film Aesthetics 2