Course summary

MA Film and Television Production is an interdisciplinary course that combines work and learning in the film, television and screen-platform formats and genres. Its aims are to produce advanced level students with a sense of social responsibility, combined with the skills and knowledge to meet the needs of the growing screen media sector. This is in line with Ulster University’s civic commitment to wellbeing and economic prosperity. To achieve this the course will deliver a range of industry-focused creative and technical and research skills, supported by theoretical and historical knowledge of screen media. The course is focused on the staples of contemporary screen media - work in-studio and on-location; dramatic and documentary forms; coverage of live events, light entertainment, serial and feature length drama. Students will produce screen artefacts that use the effective manipulation of moving visual images and sound, including understanding relevant industry standards and how they are defined and achieved. This will be done through an understanding of key production processes and professional practices relevant to screen industries. To complement the production skills acquired through practice, students will develop an advanced knowledge of the central role that film and television, and broader media agencies play at local, national, international and global levels of economic, political and social organisation, and the ability to explore and articulate the implications of this. They will also develop a knowledge of a range of texts, genres, aesthetic forms and cultural practices, associated with screen media, and the ability to produce close and informed analysis of these. As students progress through the course, advancing this skills as independent learners, practitioners and researchers, they will carry out various forms of research for essays, projects, and creative productions involving sustained independent and critical enquiry. This will always be developed in concert with practice that experiments, as appropriate, with forms, conventions, languages, techniques and practices in the field. The invitation here to students is to employ production skills and academic knowledge in ways that are innovative and seek to challenge or advance existing forms and genres. MA in Film and Television Production students will work and learn in a context that rewards their knowledge and understanding of screen production processes as intervening in the public domain and aspects of democratic participation and citizenship. In addition, students will be able to reflect upon the ways in which participatory access to the central sites of screen production and public culture is distributed along axes of social division, such as disability, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, location, nationality, and sexuality. Successful graduates will have demonstrated technical skills in the various forms of screen production; the ability to think and act creatively and innovatively in the sector; critical media literacy; and a sociological imagination with regards screen industries and culture and their potential work within it. Students will engage with skills determined as scarce and in global demand in production management, virtual production, virtual reality, postproduction, live broadcast and fiction production.