Master of Arts in Film and Screen Studies

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

The world of news and journalism is changing at an unprecedented rate. This programme offers an individual and innovative blend of contemporary multimedia journalism that ensures you will be prepared for the future of a rapidly developing news industry.

You’ll learn a range of cutting-edge digital skills to help you investigate news stories. You’ll also learn how and why good journalism matters by putting it in its wider cultural context.

Why study BA Journalism at Goldsmiths?

• Learn from media professionals with extensive industry experience and leading academics involved in ground-breaking research.
• Work on a real-world news website (EastLondonLines), covering breaking news stories that really matter to the local community.
• Develop an arsenal of digital skills, and learn to integrate them with a core of essential reporting and news-writing skills. Digital skills taught on this programme include:
  • Video journalism
  • Data Journalism
  • Mobile Journalism
  • Web programming
• Get training with a range of digital video equipment to support your practice, including DSLRs, and ENG (electronic news gathering) cameras.
• Produce a long-form news feature on a subject of your choice, which will allow you to bring together all the digital and news-writing skills learned over the course of this degree. Examples of previous projects can be found below.
• Build up a portfolio of work, get advice on careers and work experience, and benefit from our close links with London’s thriving world-class media industry.

MA Filmmaking (Sound Recording, Post-Production & Design), is housed in a new purpose-built media facility equipped with state-of-the-art teaching spaces including a film studio for sound shooting, Pro Tools suites, Audio Postproduction facilities with Foley recording studios, Avid Media Composer, screening rooms and an Avid ISIS SAN network linking all teaching spaces.

You'll learn the fundamental technical skills necessary to begin a career in screen sound, both as a location sound recordist and post-production sound designer. But equally importantly, you will gain an understanding of how a film’s narrative relies on the precise partnership between image and sound.

Within this MA programme you'll expand your existing knowledge of sound. Through recording and design you'll investigate what it means to listen with awareness and to translate that experience to your audience. And you'll study how sound is created, how you can manipulate its form, whether it’s natural, synthesised, digitised or analogue, and how to work with sound as a storytelling medium.

The Sound curriculum focuses on the structure of the soundtrack, deconstructing it from its beginnings in pre-production to the final mix, experimenting with the ways in which different components (dialogue, atmospheres, sound effects, music) allow an audience to engage with a film’s story. Through iterative exercises, group reviews and regular feedback, you gain the awareness and ability to construct soundtracks that interpret stories through sound.

As a sound specialist you work on one film each term, ending with a major production. You learn about related fields such as directing, editing, producing and documentary, and work with students across specialisms within Goldsmiths Screen School. As well as developing your awareness of the discipline and learning software such as Pro Tools, the Options modules provide the opportunity to learn the concepts and debates informing the wider filmmaking industry. This means you have the chance to explore your craft with other filmmakers and get used to the unique dynamics of the industry

Whether your sights are set on being behind the camera as a producer, appearing on screen as a foreign correspondent, or heading off to far-flung parts of the world to make investigative documentaries - it’s vital you get a solid understanding of the basics, from the ground up.

That’s exactly what this programme will teach you: newsgathering, production, reporting skills, writing for broadcast, filming and self-shooting, video editing, presenting, online longer-form current affairs, using social media, mobile journalism, researching stories and verification. We provide a broad curriculum to the highest professional standards, so you’re prepared to work in today’s ultra-competitive, ever-changing media environment.

The programme is accredited by the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC), which represents broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV News, Sky, Reuters, Channel 4, and AP. The BJTC also provides valuable input from key figures within television to make sure we teach the skills the industry demands and supports the provision of work placements.

What will you learn as an MA Television Journalism student?

• Employers tell us that when they’re recruiting the journalists of tomorrow, they’re looking for all-round skills, innovative ideas and a can-do attitude. You’ll also get a thorough grounding in media law and ethics, media theory and journalistic research skills and tools.
• You’ll learn your craft from dedicated, hugely experienced media practitioners with careers in broadcasting and extensive teaching experience. Our teaching staff get to know all of our students personally, helping them to achieve their full potential by providing continual feedback and support.

The BA in Drama and Theatre Arts is designed to foster creative, radical theatre-makers and thinkers. It is adventurous in form, international in scope and hands-on in practice.

The Complete Theatre Maker

• This degree supports you to become the complete theatre maker. At the heart of the programme is a balanced integration of theory and practice. Knowledge gained through making and doing adds to your conceptual understanding, while the insights gained in writing about theatre and society inform the choices you make in your practice-based work.
• Tutored by our diverse and talented team, you will develop technical skills in acting, directing, writing, sound, lighting, scenography, and costume. Bringing these skills together, you will learn how to collaborate and operate in companies, ready to take your own show on the road.
• You will be introduced to a wide range of theatre thinkers, and explore the history and cultural diversity of performance. You will develop a complex understanding of what it means to make theatre in an increasingly global 21st-century society. And with London’s rich theatre culture on your doorstep, you can draw on an exciting range of contemporary practice to inform your thinking and making.

The BA Drama and Theatre Arts is a radical and innovative degree. The curriculum is responsive to the global reach of our teaching staff, including expertise in African, American, Francophone, Japanese, and South Asian performance, as well as British, European, and Russian theatre traditions. We prepare theatre-makers who are socially, culturally, and politically engaged.

The degree explores what it means to perform in contemporary culture, mobilising a range of theatre and performance practices from the interpretation of play texts to devised ensemble work and the possibilities opened up by political protest, live art, and the avant-garde.

This Masters programme in Cultural Studies offers you the opportunity to engage with some of the key theorists and the significant debates in Cultural Studies, spanning from its inception in Britain in the mid-1970s, to the present day. Cultural Studies has developed a distinctive set of concepts and methodologies to help better understand social institutions and practices, objects, items, and their circulation in consumer culture. Cultural theory permits close analysis of topics including race, youth, music, fashion, and the creative economy, and embraces the history of sexuality, emotions and affects. This course will consider current permutations on key topics such as music, sound and technology, national identity, the rise of ‘public feelings’, the cultural dynamics of precarity and austerity, art, and cultural expression for the new feminist activism.

Why study MA Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths?

• Explore the impact and influence Cultural Studies has on a wide range of research interests, not only in the English-speaking world, but also internationally. The programme will teach you about a range of Cultural Studies methodologies that you can then apply in your own writing and research. It will also include a Critical Ethnography Afternoon where students explore the place of this kind of research in the cultural studies tradition.
• Examine the effect media technologies have on the cultural practices of production and consumption. As the course has a strong focus on new developments in sonic technology, this might include, for example, emerging local music scenes. This might also involve mean a focus on changes in fashion consumption, such as platform providers, and the role of influencers.

This unique international laboratory programme brings diverse individuals into collaborative research, acknowledging the challenges of creating original, performer-driven theatre in today's complex, globalised culture.

Why study MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths?

• Studying at Goldsmiths gives you access to all the cultural stimulus that London offers, allowing you to enhance your practice and develop compositional, critical, technical and management skills and strategies for forging independent and self-motivated careers. Our graduates work as practitioners, teachers and cultural leaders worldwide.
• The Masters will help you conceive, research, construct and deliver your ideas, and articulate what motivates them. You will study with distinguished international artists and scholars. The emphasis throughout will be on encouraging collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and on contextualising practice within its social, political and architectural environment.
• You’ll undertake physical training, scenographic/environmental exploration, and hands-on introduction to technologies (lighting, video and sound), to support your composition and artistic experimentation. You will identify your own practice within the historical and contemporary field, and write critically and creatively.

On this International Relations degree, you will engage with a variety of approaches essential to understanding contemporary world politics. You will learn the foundations of classic International Relations, and will also be challenged with a wealth of critical and unorthodox approaches.

You will learn to move beyond the standard canon of textbook theories, and to study International Relations using an interdisciplinary approach, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between power, culture, and identity.

Instead of replicating state-centred and Eurocentric caricatures of international politics, the programme also offers a broad view of 'the international', which explores alternative ways of experiencing the world. This will help you develop your own critical analysis of crucial questions of power, conflict, and justice.

The MA Promotional Media explores the impact of digital platformisation and automation on promotional professions, skills and techniques

You will explore the convergence between public relations, advertising, and marketing roles, as well as hybridised fields such as digital marketing, social media management and UX/UI design. This MA isn’t about studying ads or press coverage, but about becoming a professional who can cross-examine and critique the power dynamics between promotional professions, their client-organisations and today’s platformised media landscape.

At its core, this masters looks at how you can better serve society by improving communications across the promotional disciplines, and how public relations (PR), advertising, and marketing professionals can best develop within a challenging digital world. You’ll learn how to reflect on contemporary intellectual theories – including digital media studies, sociology, feminist theory and algorithmic culture – and apply them to workplace realities so you plan the next decade of your career.

This Masters, a pathway of the MA Filmmaking, will encourage your understanding of the politics, aesthetics and ethics of documentary production, and the nature and diversity of documentary practice in contemporary society.

What we offer

• The programme is housed in a new purpose-built media facility equipped with state-of-the-art teaching spaces including a range of digital cameras, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Film Editing suites, Animation, Digital Special Effects, Pro Tools Audio Postproduction suites.
• You will be able to make your own documentaries, learning and refining research, interviewing, self-shooting and editing techniques – but also have the unique opportunity to be part of a programme that includes specialised producers, cinematographers, editors, sound recordists and sound designers, so that you can develop the scope and range of your filmmaking by collaborating with them.
• You work on at least two films during the year, culminating in a major production towards the end of the degree. In addition you can attend classes in related disciplines such as Cinematography and Editing and may collaborate with students across other specialisations on film projects. This framework is designed to provide you with a breadth of filmmaking knowledge combined with a high level of expertise in your chosen filmmaking discipline.

The MA encourages you to develop

• An awareness of documentary production techniques, ethics and aesthetics
• Specific filmmaking and production management skills
• Technical skills (including camera, lighting and sound editing)
• An understanding of the workings of the media and their broad cultural and social impacts

The MA Global Political Economy explores the dynamics of our changing world. You will work in small groups with world class experts at the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), as well as across a number of other Goldsmiths departments, and learn how to hold the world up to scrutiny.

Why study MA Global Political Economy at Goldsmiths?

• Learn about the political economy of ecological break down, the challenge of building a sustainable world, and how to make these issues central to the analysis of politics and economics.
• Learn about the relationship between global financialised capitalism, global inequality, and the possibility of a sustainable future.
• Work closely with academic experts in small-group workshops and seminars.
• Learn in a truly interdisciplinary programme that allows you to see the global political economy from a variety of perspectives.
• Choose from a wide variety of options to build the bespoke degree programme that best suits your interests and ambitions.
• Join the series of job talks from insiders at policy Think Tanks, NGOs and the private sector.