Film, Television and Digital Production with Integrated Foundation Year

Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities will take you through a carefully-designed programme to help you to progress confidently onto your undergraduate degree.

Arts and Humanities subjects, like Film, Television and Digital Production, provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures.

The Foundation Year provides progressive structures in which you are able to gain knowledge and understanding of approaches to humanities study and your chosen degree subject.  All Foundation Year students take ‘Global Perspectives’, then four subject-based courses provide approaches to the study of arts and humanities subjects, giving you critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.

Once you have completed your Foundation year, you progress onto the full degree programme, BA Film, Television and Digital Production.

Film, television and digital media affect every aspect of our lives. When you understand them and have a passion for how they work – in practice and theory – you'll find doors to any number of careers in the creative industries, media arts and beyond.

Studying Film, Television and Digital Production, you will become part of our creative and critical community, learning how to analyse and judge a range of cinematic, televisual and digital media forms. Then you’ll create them, from screenwriting to cinematography, directing to digital media, sound design to documentary. It's this equal combination of critical theory and creative practice that makes this course at Royal Holloway so uniquely compelling and rewarding.

You will develop critical and creative skills, including the ability to produce a range of work across media forms – from short films, screenplays and documentaries to a range of digital, interactive and immersive media. These creative practices are underpinned by a range of critical abilities, from historical and ideological analysis to an understanding of aesthetics, economics and power structures that inform media production.

Work with world-leading experts in European and World cinema, and award-winning practitioners from across the media industry. You'll trace the development of film, television and digital production across a range of national and international contexts.

Course Modules

Core Modules

Foundation Year

• Digital Cultures

• Cultures of Thinking

• Society on Screen

• Textual Cultures

• Media/Drama Research Project

Year 1

• Introduction to Media Practice 1

• Introduction to Media Histories 1

• Critical Theory and Textual Analysis

• Introduction to Media Practice 2

• Introduction to Media Histories 2

• Critical Theory and Creative Practice

Year 2

• The Creative Industries

Year 3

• Media Arts Dissertation

• Media Research Project

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• All modules are core

Year 2

• Directing Screen Fiction

• Screen Documentary

• Cinematography

• Creative Interactive Media

• Animation and Visual Effects

• Screenwriting

• Producing Film and Television

• Creative Digital Arts

• Creative Social Media

• Creative Post Production

• Film Theory: Hitchcock and Point of View

• Post-Classical Hollywood

• Television Histories

• Modern European Cinema

• Contemporary Chinese Cinemas

• Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference

• Modernism and Avant Garde Film

• Beyond Bollywood: Indian Cinema in a Transitional Frame

• Digital Aesthetics

• The Creative Industries

• International Film 2: Readings and Representations

• Cinema in France

• Representations of Childhood and Youth in Modern German Culture

• 20th-Century Mexican Visual Arts and Film

• Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spanish Film

• Rebels, Revolution & Representation in Latin America

• Postwar Italian Cinema: the Auteur Tradition

Year 3

• Directing Screen Fiction

• Screen Documentary

• Advanced Screenplay- Major Project

• Producing Film and TV

• Cinematography

• Transmedia

• Creative Digital Arts

• Creative Sound Design

• Creativity, Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

• Contemporary British Cinema 1

• Television and Digital Cultures

• Film Aesthetics 1: Issues of Interpretation and Evaluation

• Psychoanalysis and Cinema

• Film, Television and the Holocaust

• Media Technologies

• See This Sound - Audiovisuology

• Cinephilia

• 360º Cinema

• Political Cinema: From Eisenstein to Youtube

• The Poetics of Contemporary Television

• Contemporary British Cinema 2

• Film Aesthetics 2

• Transnationalism, Diaspora and Globalisation in Contemporary Film

• Text and Image in France: from Cubism to the Present

• Ethics and Violence: Murder, Suicide and Genocide in Literature and Film

• National Socialism and the Third Reich in German Film and Visual Culture from 1933 to the Present

• Shooting History: Dictatorship, Terror and Crime in Italian Film

• Horror Cinema in the Hispanic World

• Contemporary Mexican Cinema

• Seducing the Nation: Spanish Film 1940s to 1980s

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/media-arts/film-television-and-digital-production-with-integrated-foundation-year/

In your Foundation Year, teaching methods include a mixture of lectures, seminars, workshops, individual tutorials, and supervisory sessions. Outside of the classroom you’ll undertake guided independent reading and study. You will also be assigned a Personal Tutor, who’ll be with you for the duration of your degree, and will have regular scheduled sessions to support learning and the development of study skills. Assessments are varied; quizzes, short written exercises, essays, examinations, poster preparation and presentation, blog/vlogs, short digital films, dissertations and personal development plans. In addition the Foundation Year offers a full range of skills-based training and also the opportunity to take a micro-placement to enhance your employability.

Once you progress onto your full degree course, you will continue to be taught through a combination of lectures, seminars, small-group tutorials, screenings, online tools, group work, guided independent research and practical workshops, including location work or using our purpose-built TV studio and multimedia labs. Private study and preparation remain essential parts of every course, and you will have access to many online resources and the university’s comprehensive e-learning facility, Moodle.

Assessment is carried out by a combination of written and practical work. Critical written assignments include essays, blogs, reviews, reports, dissertations and exams. You will produce a wide range of creative work, from short films and documentaries to TV studio productions, interactive installations, screenplays and production portfolios.

Outside the tasks and assessments required by their curriculum, students are encouraged to take full advantage of our technical facilities which are available on a 24/7 basis to create a portfolio of individual creative work.