Location
United Kingdom, - London College of Communication
Dates
Dates flexible
Course Type
Postgraduate Course
Accreditation
-
Language
English
Price
$14,048

Course Overview

Course summary:

Places available - Home/EU applications

MA Television delivers the skills needed to design and make fact-based television. Learn about pitching, budgeting and translating your ideas into practical, hands-on advanced programming.

About this course:

MA Television provides a uniquely balanced approach to the learning of television production, teaching commercial and financial management hand-in-hand with practical programme-making. So at the same time as learning the skills needed to make great programmes, you will also be gaining a comprehensive insight into the business side of how broadcasters and production companies work.

Reasons to apply:

MA Television offers a combination of approaches and outcomes that are not taught together in other institutions. They are:

A focus on factual programming:

The course combines advanced training in factual programme-making, with an analytical, research-based investigation of the processes by which such programmes are commissioned and funded; how their primary, secondary and tertiary audiences are defined and reached and how producers can build income streams from their work.

A focus on self-employment:

The course is designed primarily - but not exclusively - for those who wish to work in, or run, small-to-medium sized production companies, or become freelance producer/directors. The latter provides a large and constant component of the UK production base (and increasingly beyond), but one that is yet to be catered for in many Screen schools.

Business planning:

You'll produce both a programme (or other moving-image product) and a researched business plan, accompanied by an explanatory narrative, showing how the programme or product and its related assets will be taken to market. The programme and plan will be the outcome of guided market research so by graduation you will already have developed a highly-viable pitch for your first commission and/or offer to the market.

The TV studio:

LCC's TV studio is of a very high professional standard, with a new Tricaster mixing desk that allows for a wide range of effects and computer-generated imagery. Mastery of this resource will further distinguish you from the majority of media and film school Master's-level graduates.

Industry contacts:

The MA will draw on LCC's wide range of contacts in the London TV industry to provide visiting lecturers, workshop leaders, critiques and introductions to networks of graduates now working in media in London. It will allow and encourage you to take full advantage of our contacts with the British Film Institute. You will have access to the many specialist cinemas, studios, facilities houses and media events that are features of London's busy and varied media life.

Who should take this course

Anyone Interested.

Course content

Course details:

MA Television focuses on the hands-on experience of making television programmes. Working in teams, with access to London College of Communication's state-of-the-art multi-camera TV studio, you will produce a number of substantial TV shows from travel and history to art, literature, science and current affairs. You'll learn the key skills needed to make effective programming covering areas such as format, narrative, scripting, working with actors, camera techniques, lighting, sound, and editing. Other units of study will explore the nature of the TV industry, potential markets for your ideas and programmes, and setting and managing budgets.

What can you expect?

The TV studio:

Programmes made for the course will have both location and TV studio contents. Training in the use of the television studio is relatively rare in UK media schools: an omission, given that as much as 70% of TV programming is produced in this way.

LCC's TV studio is of a very high professional standard, with a new Tricaster mixing desk that allows for a wide range of effects and computer-generated imagery. Mastery of this resource will be a significant asset to graduates of MA Television and will further distinguish them from the great majority of media and film school Master's-level graduates.

Multiple perspectives:

MA Television approaches the practice of programme-making from complimentary, but interlocking, perspectives, seeing programmes simultaneously as:

  • Directed exercises of the creative imagination.
  • Vectors of ideas, information and understanding.
  • Mechanisms through which social, political and cultural norms are transmitted.
  • Commercial products that must directly or indirectly offer returns on investment.
  • Examples of project management, in which potentially-conflicting demands of time, resource, cost and quality must be continually addressed.
  • Adherents to rules of certain formats.

Collaboration:

In the second term, you'll have the opportunity to collaborate with students on other courses at LCC such as MA Journalism. This gives you the option to make a TV programme on current affairs or other topical themes and learn some of the key tenets of journalistic practice.

Media cultures and criticality:

The media cultures strand of the MA, which runs through all four terms, will underpin learning and practice through its examination of the key issues surrounding the production, uses and consumption of factual TV programming.

Their shared basis is the application of theoretical approaches in ways that reinforce and enlarge programme making, and will require you to adopt an analytical, evaluative approach to the shared norms of current practice.

This is also an iterative process. Theory and practice operate in parallel, and each will inform the other critically. The experience of programme-making will invite you to question the conventions which govern production, for example in the hierarchical nature of production teams, or the extents to which established formats can be amended and developed.

Fees & Funding:

  • Home/EU Fee

About Course Provider

University of the Arts London (UAL) is Europe’s largest specialist art and design university. Its unique creative community is made up of six renowned Colleges, each with its own world-class reputation: Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, London College of Communication, London College of Fashion and Wimbledon College of Arts.

UAL is the world’s sixth best University for Art and Design in the QS World University Rankings 2018. Offering an extensive range of courses in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts, UAL is the main talent pipeline to the UK’s creative industries.

Home to a diverse community of over 18,000 students from 129 countries, UAL has a track record for launching and furthering careers. Our graduates can be found in every part and at every level of the creative and cultural sectors, from heads of global business to self-employed practitioners, and on shortlists for awards ranging from the Turner Prize to the Oscars.

Building on UAL’s association with some of the most original thinkers in the arts, students and staff are inspired to challenge convention, generate new ideas and nurture talent. Home to award-winning staff and students for more than a century, UAL’s Colleges are at the forefront of learning, creativity and practice in their specialist subjects. This close-knit College structure offers opportunities for learning and enquiry for people at all stages of their creative development.