Film & Tv Swansea College Of Art Uwtsd

http://www. uwtsd. ac. uk /ba-digital-film-television-production /

UWTSD Swansea’s award-winning BA Film & TV programme is creative and practice-based, centred on key creative and theoretical principles that will serve students long after they graduate. Like Film & TV itself, the course is a blend of creative thinking and hands-on filmmaking, underpinned by engaging and stimulating lectures, seminars and tutorials. The course has evolved to place greater emphasis on the philosophy and applied practice of storytelling for the screen. This has helped our student film productions win awards for fiction and non-fiction at many festivals and awards ceremonies, including the Royal Television Society Wales Student Awards, Screentest: The National Student Film Festival, Cardiff Mini Film Festival and Ffresh.

The teaching team on the BA Film & TV programme places a strong emphasis on Story as a teaching style that connects all modules within a creative dialogue that speaks to and inspires every aspect of the filmmaking process. From the initial concept to the script, from the selection of a prop to the timing of a cut in the edit, it comes back to story. Whether working as a cinematographer, an editor, a director or any of the other rewarding roles on a crew, storytelling informs the decisions that are made in development, on set, on location and in the edit suite.

As you can see, the programme is not about teaching technology, something you can do online for free. Instead, we believe a film school is about the development and visualization of ideas. Lectures, seminars and tutorials address the “Why?”, both nurturing and challenging students as they develop their creative abilities. The use of film and tv technology is provided by our excellent technical demonstrators within daily workshops that support the production process by addressing the “How?”. These workshops provide instructions in equipment operation and practice for location and studio filmmaking using industry standard equipment from Canon, Red, Sony, Dedo, Kino Flo, Manfrotto, Rode, Sennheiser, Litepanelsetc. This is an approach that we believe will better support and strengthen the student’s learning experience, with creativity and ideas driving the student production process.

We are also one of the few UK Film Schools that offer our students the opportunity to run a film festival. The Alex International Film Festival is a UWTSD student-run film festival that attracts interest from around the world, giving an insight into the wider film market and an understanding of what it takes to make an award-winning film. The 2017 festival received over 2000 entries!

But why Swansea? For aspiring film students, now is a perfect time to come to Wales and in particular Swansea as the film and television production sector is in an exciting period, with four large studios operating within an hour of Swansea College Of Art – Pinewood Wales (Cardiff), Dragon International Film Studios (Pontyclun), Badwolf Studios (Cardiff) and Bay Studios (Swansea). This has allowed the programme to develop very strong ties with the production sector, and we are the only university in the UK to have a member of staff employed partly by us working in Badwolf studios in Cardiff, liaising with studios and production companies. This helps to provide regular placement opportunities for suitable students on feature films and TV series. Students can gain work experience in various departments of a drama production crew, on location, in the studio and in the production office. This experience often gives students their first network of contacts and can lead to them securing their first work in the film and TV industries. Our students have worked on a variety of film and tv shows such as Sherlock (2012), Atlantis (2013), Fury (2014), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015), The Collection (2016), The Grand Tour (2016), Bang, (2017) Will (2017), Overlord (2018) and many more.
In terms of broadcast TV, the programme has a strong relationship with Wales’ newest TV station, BAY TV (Freeview Channel 8 and Virgin Media 159. ). Although partially funded by the BBC, BAY is an independent broadcast television company who has established a studio and broadcast facility within Swansea College of Art UWTSD. This is an amazing opportunity for our students, allowing them not only to work on live studio shows, but also to research and pitch concepts for potential TV productions.