An Introduction to the MA Filmmaking course.
The LFS MA Filmmaking Course is an intense two year programme in which the full range of film-making skills are taught at appropriate professional levels.
Learning is based around short films. Each term these film exercises become more technically sophisticated, more considered and more complex in their ambitions. The School specifies the skill base for each exercise, provides the equipment and trains the students up to the new levels in each of the various craft skills. Students take all the aesthetic decisions, solving problems similar to those faced by professional units, on a steeply increasing slope of difficulty. Their work is constantly assessed and criticised. Students themselves are required to reflect on and assess their own learning in Work and Research Journals.
MA Filmmaking Graduate Testimonials
This is the centre of the LFS method. Students learn best by applying themselves to aesthetic and practical problems generated by the actual process of filmmaking. This way new skills become meaningful and integrated into an increasing repertoire. Against a background of practice, lectures and classes become vivid and full of recognisable content.
This is why we push through so many productions, and why students have more opportunities to work on films than they can realistically take up.
All students learn all the important film-making skills, and must practise them in a working unit. There is no film career which is not greatly enriched by an active practical knowledge of the other specialisations. This makes an LFS graduate stand out from colleagues with a single specialisation, at any level. On the one hand, students with a primarily technical bent find insights into their work through an understanding of the more interpretive practices, and very often find an unexpected potential and self-confidence as writers or directors. On the other hand producers’, writers’ and directors’ range and sense of the possibilities of their art is immeasurably increased by a serious technical competence.
Students' creative abilities are mobilised and developed by multiple approaches:
They are taught to look at film history, and a great range of contemporary and classic work, in varying critical contexts, but most importantly as the outcome of practical strategies that they can use for framing, criticising and developing their own take on screen storytelling.
They develop their own work, and then get the opportunity to test it out freely with colleagues, teachers and professional practitioners in workshops designed to connect ideas and outcomes and in which their work is criticised without applying any further restriction than their own growing judgement and consciousness of effect and context.
In the film exercises students shoot their own scripts, directed in their own way. The content of all films is fully discussed and criticised, but ultimately the students have complete freedom of expression. This is an opportunity to exercise their creative abilities, for them to see their ideas brought to life, with professional actors, on film, and under production conditions appropriate to the developing skills of the crew, culminating in the 35mm studio film of the standard industry production.
The film exercises are programmed by the School, and are tightly scheduled, requiring the students to learn to work under time discipline. Crews are compact, and consequently there is always need for assistants from the lower terms. Up to sixty films are made each term, which means that whenever students are not busy with their own projects, their services are in demand on many others. This creates a constant sense of excitement, a constant presence of film-making, which becomes the atmosphere and life of the School, a tremendous motivating force.
Students are continually learning from each other and from the immense range of practical and aesthetic problems the different films offer. This process continues all day, often through the evening, and flows between the sets and locations, the viewing theatres, editing suites, the coffee bar and back again, all term.
Alan Bernstein,
Head of Studies.
