Course summary

Turn a passion for filmmaking into a career by joining our acclaimed BA (Hons) Film and Television Production degree course at ARU. Join the award-winning students on our BA (Hons) Film and Television Production degree and develop your skills in script, cinematography, editing, producing and directing in studio and on location. As a production course, this is all about the filmmaking. Your modules will be around 80% practice-based to 20% context and research. This course is industry-recognised by ScreenSkills, the industry-led skills body for the UK's screen-based industries, and carries the ScreenSkills Select quality-mark for courses best suited to prepare you for a career in the screen industries. Gain key skills from ideas development and scripting to pre-production planning and shooting, through to post-production skills in editing and colour grading. Choose to keep a broad skillset or start to specialise in particular craft areas like producing, camera or editing. Shoot on digital formats from HD to 4K and analogue 16mm film. By the final year, you and your crew will be working with feature film industry level equipment like our new Arri Alexa Mini cameras. Learn from highly experienced filmmakers, television producers and technical officers in our specialist facilities. With an emphasis on collaborations, you'll have opportunities to work with students from all the year groups as well as your lecturers on this small, focused and friendly course. You'll be supported by award-winning, lecturers whose work has been screened on all the major UK television networks, as well as at multiple international film festivals. They have won Emmys, HUGOs and BAFTAs and continue to make films and programmes. You'll produce a range of programmes and films that may be as prize and film festival-worthy as our other recent student work. In 2022 the graduation film Roots was selected for official competition at the Watersprite International Student Festival and Cambridge Film Festival, winning the Watersprite Cinematography award and the GTC Bill Vinten Universities Award for Camera. You can see cinematographer Agata Kazmiercczak's story below. Our students have been very successful in the regional Royal Television Society Student Awards. In 2024, Eternity’s Grace won the Drama and Camerawork categories, while Therapy won first place in the Entertainment and Comedy Drama category in 2023. In 2021, Lidia Bieniarz won the Best Short Form Film category as well as the top prize – The Sir Lenny Henry Award – for A Film About My Dad, and Agata Kazmierczak won best editing. You’ll have the chance to join trips to Sheffield Documentary Festival, Camerimage in Poland and Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York, take part in live briefs with partner organisations, and attend a series of guest lectures and workshops led by industry professionals where you’ll learn more about industry practices, receive invaluable advice and have an opportunity to network with visiting film and programme makers. You can gain crucial work experience at Cambridge’s two annual film festivals, Cambridge Film Festival and Watersprite International Film Festival, the biggest student film festival in the UK. Every year, our students are part of the central organising committee and lead subcommittees like marketing, filming, events, and judging. Our final year graduation films premiere on the big screen at The Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, and we also host a selection of student work on our YouTube channel. Extra-curricular funded film projects have included shorts for C4’s Random Acts, the Kodak 16mm Commercials Competition and most recently, a collaboration with The Globe to create Sixty Second Shakespeare shorts, with the films released on The Globe’s website and also promoted on their social media and YouTube channels.