MA — 2024 entry Film, Animation and Digital Arts

This module is about consolidating students’ existing skills and talents, and enhancing these with areas of creative media production in which they may be less familiar. The intention is to develop a broad armoury of aptitudes and proficiencies, enabling students to realise an expanded range of contemporary media projects, drawing on both traditional and evolving future techniques and technologies. To achieve this, students undertake a series of specialist workshops which span contemporary narrative media production, with an emphasis on current innovative techniques. The module will be assessed through the development of a cumulative portfolio. Students submit outputs from the workshops as a portfolio and accompany this with a reflective synopsis on their learning and development. The skills and knowledge acquired in this module are cumulative and can be applied to subsequent modules and workshops over the course of the Masters programme.

This module runs as a continuation from Creative Media Practices (I), and offers a range of specialist workshops in important emerging techniques in moving image media production. This enables students to further develop their proficiencies in film, animation and digital media arts production methods, and in particular explore new techniques  in audiovisual content creation such as virtual production, real-time rendering, procedural animation, performance capture, and generative AI. Students will also be instructed in state-of-the-art VFX tools and technologies, encountering and consolidating skills in compositing packages such as ‘Nuke’, and Da Vinci Resolve Fusion. Students will also become familiar with tools such as the Unreal Engine, which is increasingly becoming a powerhouse in film and animation rendering. Students also use this module to advance particular skills and develop novel production techniques where required, informed by the needs and challenges of their ongoing final project development. Projects at this level usually involve a not insignificant degree of research and development, and this module can accommodate exploration and skills development in any newly identified tool or technique not previously encountered. This may include evolving research areas, such as automated digital character animation, applied ‘denoising diffusion probabilistic models’ (such as Stable Diffusion), or location-based interactive installation and augmented reality techniques.

This module engages with theoretical and cultural contexts for film, animation and digital arts. We do this not only by critically analysing current and future developments, but also by situating these within historical and philosophical debates and dialogues around creative arts in practice and creativity in general. Initial lectures will provide sessions on Research Methods for the Creative Arts, with a focus on the moving image. Some of these sessions will be drawn from the final year curriculum of the Digital Media Arts BA programme, and are likely to share content with its successor programme. Further sessions will explore contemporary debates reflecting this rapidly evolving area, and will be delivered by active researchers within the department and beyond. The output of the module will be a research paper which complements and contextualises forthcoming work on the Final Masters Project.

Consolidating existing skills and knowledge in practical production, outputs will consist of one or more group projects requiring collaboration both inside and outside of the MA FADA cohort. Where possible, projects developed will make use of latest contemporary media production technologies, such as Virtual Production, Real-Time Rendering, Interactive Video, and/or Virtual Character Creation. Teams will comprise groups of students from both within the MA cohort and in some case from other complementary MAs and final year UG programmes if and where appropriate. The skills applied to this module will be drawn both from students’ existing skills-base and from those developed in Creative Media Practices modules. 

This module spans the entirety of the MA FADA programme, representing the students’ cumulatively developed final creative project output(s). These projects can take many different forms and formats drawn from the multitude of film, animation and digital media arts production techniques explored and developed over the stages of the course. Students can also choose to undertake a research-oriented creative practice project, informed by both theoretical and practical aspects of the programme.