Program Overview

MA Filmmaking (Experimental Film)

Overview

The MA Filmmaking (Experimental Film) programme is designed to help you develop your distinctive authorial voice as a filmmaker and storyteller, offering training, mentoring, masterclasses, and facilities that nurture an innovative approach to film practice as a self-shooting, self-editing director.

Why study MA Filmmaking (Experimental Film) at Goldsmiths

• This MA is designed to help you develop your distinctive authorial voice as a filmmaker and storyteller, offering training, mentoring, masterclasses, and facilities that nurture an innovative approach to film practice as a self-shooting, self-editing director.
• You will gain a rounded set of creative and professional skills in conceptual development, cinematography, sound design, pitching, animation, producing, and editing, making you highly employable in the independent film, promotional media, and digital content production industries.
• The Experimental Film pathway is one of seven pathways in Goldsmiths MA Filmmaking. It is housed in a new purpose-built media facility with state-of-the-art teaching spaces including film and photography studios, a range of professional cameras including Sony FS5s and Blackmagic Cinema, edit suites with Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere, animation studios, and Pro Tools audio post-production suites.
• The programme offers a unique blend of hands-on workshops, studio and location filming exercises, filmmaker masterclasses, conceptual development, and industry pitch experience. It also offers private edit time and technical support to ensure the professional-standard completion of your projects.
• You will work on ten short films and one longer-form 20-minute project during the year, building a creative, diverse portfolio of work that showcases skills in different modes and genres. Your moving-image work will span fiction, documentary, gallery film, short form for the web, promotional content, and music video as well as hybrid and experimental genres.
• Your final project, a 20-minute film, will be in a style or mode of your choice.
• In your optional modules, you can choose to attend classes in related disciplines such as cinematography and editing, as well as the opportunity to take more theoretical modules exploring subjects such as race, gender, social justice, producing, activist film, media law, and promotional content.
• The programme will prepare you to enter the global job market, armed with an enhanced understanding of your practical, intellectual, and creative capacities as a filmmaker.

What you'll study

• Compulsory modules:
  • Experimental Film: Specialist Skills (30 credits)
  • Short Film Practice (30 credits)
• Final Project (60 credits): a 20-minute film with a subject and style of your own choice, assessed alongside a portfolio of development work.
• Optional modules (examples):
  • Social Activist Film (15 credits)
  • Adaptation and Script Editing (30 credits)
  • Camera Fundamentals (15 credits)
  • Contemporary Screen Narratives (15 credits)
  • Experimental Media (15 credits)
  • Film Producing Fundamentals (15 credits)
  • Sound Design Fundamentals (15 credits)
  • The Ascent of the Image (15 credits)
  • Visual Storytelling (30 credits)
  • Practical Law for Film-makers (15 credits)
  • Mediating Violence: Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Perspectives (15 credits)
  • Embodiment & Affect (15 credits)
  • Virtual and immersive media experience (15 credits)

Entry requirements

• You should have (or expect to be awarded) an undergraduate degree in a relevant/related subject. You might also be considered if you aren’t a graduate or your degree is in an unrelated field, but you have relevant experience and can show you can work at postgraduate level.
• International qualifications: We accept a wide range of international qualifications. Find out more about the qualifications we accept from around the world.
• English language requirements: If English isn’t your first language, you will need an IELTS score (or equivalent English language qualification) of 7.0 with a 7.0 in writing and no element lower than 6.5.

Fees

• Home - full-time: £16,200
• International - full-time: £30,750

Careers

• Our alumni are active in the film, media, and cultural industries around the world, working and winning awards as documentary producers and directors.
• Recent alumni are active in the film, media, and cultural industries around the world as:
  • Content Producers
  • Documentary Filmmakers
  • Cinematographers
  • Producers
  • Media Creatives
• Award-winning alumni: Our former students have gone on to win awards including BAFTA for Best Student Documentary & Best Fiction, Grierson nominations for Best Student Documentary, Postgraduate Prize at the Royal Television Society Student Awards, Student Award at the One World Media Awards, and RTS Award for Best Editing.