Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Filmmaking

at Leeds Arts University United Kingdom

Our Textile Design* course has an outstanding reputation for producing innovative, professional designers. We look for students who will develop their own ‘handwriting’, both anticipating and setting future trends within this field. We value the importance of personal engagement and celebrate diversity that informs creativity.

You will work alongside your peers where we foster a culture of creativity. The course offers you the opportunity to develop your creative practice through experimental engagement with materials and processes. The course actively engages with contemporary and global issues, and ethical concerns relevant to the practice of printed textile and surface design, such as: sustainability, collaborative practices and innovation in surface and textiles. Tutors are experienced educators, researchers and practitioners in the field of textile and surface design. Through their diverse links you will engage with a breadth of contemporary approaches.

The course is committed to external and professional practices with relevant currency, so that our graduates are fully prepared for direct employment by high street and designer brands, further study, self-employment or business start-ups. You will be given opportunities to  participate in a number of prestigious live briefs, competitions and employment related activities to ensure that you are as best prepared for employment in the creative industries as possible.

Our BA (Hons) Fine Art course immerses you in a diverse, creative community where you are encouraged to learn the business of becoming an artist in the contemporary world.

This engaging course is housed within specialist studio communities, each led by experienced teams of artists. You will engage with a range of strategies to support the development of your studio practice with an emphasis on craft, skill and critical thought.

You will be supported to produce work that spans a diverse range of media. You will embrace appropriate forms of resolution such as painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, performance, screenings, text or sound works.

On joining the course you will embark on an initial period of orientation, induction and familiarisation which draws from our long history of traditional art education. You will then work in one of the specialist communities where there will be regular critiques, seminars and material workshops involving students from different levels of the course.

We engage with cultural visits to galleries and exhibitions, and you can take inspiration from nearby Leeds Art Gallery, the Henry Moore Institute as well as the award-winning Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Hepworth Wakefield. Course related educational visits/trips experiences can take a variety of formats including physical and virtual.

You will be encouraged to seek opportunities to exhibit your work, gaining valuable experience and practical skills that will help to prepare you for a range of rewarding careers in this exciting discipline.

This course is a creative adventure which introduces you to an exploration of communication through image making and conceptual thinking.

Central to this will be your development and understanding of skills and processes using traditional and new media, theory and production methods. It offers fantastic opportunities for you to become an innovative illustrator and creative practitioner, learning to build and manage your own professional practice.

You will have opportunities to apply your skills across a range of illustrative applications including, but not limited to, editorial, publishing, packaging, product, print, music design, advertising, character and animation.

You will use our excellent links with professional illustrators and creatives, agencies and experts across the creative industries to develop a professional focus to your personal practice through live projects, competition briefs and industrial experience. We will help you generate your own networking, collaboration and exhibition opportunities.

On graduation you will have an awareness of the professional opportunities available to you and the confidence and understanding to make informed decisions about your future.

The overall aim of the course is to help individuals to develop into independent, creative thinkers with the ability to deliver critically and visually engaged work within the professional context of contemporary illustration and the wider creative industries.

Our MA Animation course gives practitioners a year to create an animated film from start to finish. You will engage in a critical dialogue with practice, theory and the professional aspects of animation.

The course provides space for the animators to make work of cultural value, but understand commercial practices. The curriculum is designed to allow both individual and collaborative practice to take place. However, we positively encourage collaboration as it is a key part of the animation production process, enabling you to undertake ambitious projects.

The course will provide you with the space to develop animation, think and question what animation has the potential to be and how it communicates to an audience. You also will have the opportunity to explore emerging technologies and new approaches to storytelling such as the use of VR and game technologies.

You will be supported by a team with diverse research and practical interests within animation including 2D and 3D animators, modelmakers, scriptwriters and you will also engage with visiting industry professionals. The course will present you with the opportunities to work with other creatives on the course and across other MA courses within the institution. The objective is to enable students to produce engaging work across all forms of animation from animated shorts, documentary and experimental practices.

This course explores creature design through animal anatomy, worldbuilding, and believability across a range of professional contexts, production methods, and industries. 

You will investigate approaches to developing creature designs inspired by existing animals. There is a focus on experimentation to create imaginative creature designs as well as ensuring believability through considering skeletal, muscular and surface anatomies. You will develop creatures and their life cycles, behaviours, relationships with other characters/creatures and interaction with the environment. There may be opportunities for cross-disciplinary influences from science to help inform creature design. Candidates are encouraged to position their work within a professional context to help inform the visual output and production method. There are opportunities for creature designers within entertainment design and beyond, such as paleo reconstruction (visualising prehistoric life) or speculative biology (visualising possible future evolution or life on other planets).

Developing a body of self-negotiated work, you will be supported by a team with diverse research and practical interests within creature design and work closely with visiting industry professionals. You will source briefs, work with clients and apply your contextual and industry informed knowledge and understanding to question what makes a creature design believable. The aim is to create believable creatures that engage with their environment and have a past, present and future.

Our MA Illustration course encourages students to question and expand the nature of their practice, the modes of dissemination and the context in which they situate themselves.

Drawing from multidisciplinary methods of working, students will be confident to explore and extend the concepts of communication, narrative and situated illustration through research, practice and discursive critique.

The course will allow students a stimulating, open thinking space for speculation, collaboration and exploration of the boundaries of what the discipline can be. The course recognises the power of illustration as a tool for looking closely, seeing and communicating in a way that is resistant to trend or restraints of process or medium. The course situates students at the forefront of the illustration research discipline, with authorial and innovative practice at the centre.

The course is supported by a team with diverse research and practical interests from the fields of illustration and its broader visual cultures. Research and dissemination methods will be introduced and developed with the support of visiting industry professionals, workshops, lectures and seminars with opportunity to situate work in relevant professional contexts – publishing, heritage, exhibitions, conferences and events. The course methodology centres around the ideas of observing, questioning and responding to the world, seeking out ideas and examining how these are communicated.

This transdisciplinary course offers a space for you to explore comic and concept art holistically. We are a practical course where you can discover the theory, practice, and professional context of comic and concept art through a hands-on and industry-relevant approach.

You will have opportunities to apply your skills across a range of specialisms including character, environment, architecture, prop, mech, vehicle and creature design, storyboarding, narrative illustration, webtoons, comics and graphic novels. The course will enable the development of your professional understanding of studio and freelance practice, whilst acquiring specialist skills within a range of creative careers from concept art for the film and game industries, to comic art and self-published comics.

Your learning experience will be professionally focused throughout the course with opportunities for industry contact and embedded professional practice skills. Established industry links will complement the curriculum through visiting professionals, live briefs, and visiting lecturer workshops. This course promote an awareness of the comic and concept art industry practices in an international context. There are opportunities for collaborative projects within the course and across the University. You will also have a variety of opportunities to collaborate with industry, past examples include Thought Bubble – the leading comic art festival in Europe. You will be supported in developing a range of career options upon graduation.

The MA Photography course promotes innovation and experimentation. Through an examination of contemporary photographic practices you will learn to contextualise cultural and ethical uses of photography within a range of different photographic genres.

The course will examine strategies to resolve projects into different outputs such as publications, exhibitions and digital platforms, as well as emphasising the need to find an audience as being integral to a sustained and successful practice. There will be opportunities for external visits and the chance to attend events such as the Unseen in Amsterdam, Photo Paris and Photo London in order to enable engagement with the wider photographic community and industry. You will be able to attend talks by visiting professionals to the University, with examples of previous speakers including: Laia Abril, Haley Morris-Cafiero, Cristina de Middel, Guy Martin, Bruno Ceschel, Anouk Kruithof, Ewen Spencer and Elaine Constantine.

This exciting and creative course nurtures individuality through collaboration. It is designed to produce ‘Ideas That Work’ from creative professionals in advertising.

We’ve developed exceptional links with leading national and international agencies such as McCann, Ogilvy, BJL, Havas Linx, Atomic London, Intermarketing, Golley Slater, Jaywing, CreativeRace, Home, Uniform and TBWA, which will maximise your exposure to industry practice.

Creativity sits at the core of our proposition and we encourage originality and innovative thinking. Our ‘Actively Creative’ philosophy helps you to experience first hand creative challenges which are developed both in-house and through our industry contacts.

Our tutors have considerable industry experience spanning art direction, copywriting and branding. They will support you to understand and analyse advertising, so that you can use what you discover to inform and develop your own work.

You’ll have the opportunity to enter prestigious international competitions which have included D&AD New Blood Awards, YCN, The Drum Chip Shop Awards, and AdVenture in past years. Top agencies have offered coaching, mentoring, work critiques, live briefs, workshops, competition briefs and work experience possibilities. Our students regularly win work experience opportunities with agencies.

Our MA Worldbuilding brings together practitioners who want to create immersive worlds for entertainment design, production, and research.

You will design a well-researched and richly detailed world in a collaborative and interdisciplinary environment that integrates imagination and emergent technologies. You will have opportunities to explore designing cultural, historical and futuristic worlds through drawing, iterative design, and 3D prototyping.

Candidates are encouraged to position their work within a professional context to help inform the visual output and production method. The function and output of the worldbuilding will be examined through a self-determined approach, whether that’s drawing on concept art, VFX, game art and design, or analogue game design.

Embracing emerging technologies, such as VR and 3D printing, candidates will be able to explore wider contexts of worldbuilding, creating negotiated projects ranging from environment concept art, matte painting, theme park design, VR experiences or table-top game prototypes. The course provides the critical and progressive space to explore the processes and contexts to visualise and build immersive, believable and sustainable storyworlds.