Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Commercial Photography

at Arts University Bournemouth United Kingdom

MA Film Practice offers a unique learning environment that affords access to industry standard technical resources and support. It is driven and inspired by a broad and diverse understanding of film cultures. Its practice based research ethos offers distinctive, exciting and challenging opportunities.

It recognises individuals and their aspirations, and celebrates ideas and creative experimentation, within individual and collaborative contexts. The programme of study will facilitate a body of work that will enable you to unpack critical and timely questions, develop filmmaking skills, create a personal practice resolution and refine your professional awareness.

Animation’s position as an interdisciplinary field that draws from Art and Design, Film, Computing, Fine Art, Graphics (and other areas besides) necessarily means that top-level graduates in the field will have mastered a cross-disciplinary understanding of a range of skills, techniques, theories and discourses.

The overriding objective is to enable all MA Animation Production students to see themselves as part of a ‘community of practice’ (that includes research and critique, and the building of a ‘production culture’), existing not as atomised students ‘doing their own thing’, but as part of a meaningful whole.

You’ll be a BA graduate in Animation or a related discipline. Although we will consider good graduates from other disciplines – having accepted them from Costume, Graphics, Digital Media, Illustration, Modelmaking, Photography and Fine Art in the past – you must have some understanding of the animation production process to prosper on this course.

Our alumni have gone on to work at Aardman, ILM, Lupus Films, Framestore, Pixar, Moving Picture Company and many other companies. We’re proud of the network of AUB graduates who are now employed in animation – many of whom return to talk to current students.

Our course is designed to develop your individual pathway into this burgeoning sector of the creative and cultural industries. Events don’t just happen. Festivals, celebrations, exhibitions, pop-up events and multi-media events need creative, energetic and well-organised people to make them a reality. On this course, you’ll develop the skills and knowledge to conceive, plan and manage successful creative events.

Events are the product of teamwork involving people from a wide range of backgrounds and interests working together. A unique aspect of this course is that you’ll work with fellow students each year to devise and deliver a live event. You’ll discover and develop your own specialist interests and have the satisfaction of seeing the events you organise go ‘live’ in front of an audience.

Our work placement unit in the second year allows you to put these skills into practice in an industry setting. You’ll be surrounded by a wealth of creative talent and will have the opportunity to work with creative practitioners and external clients in the events world.

You’ll also learn how the events industry operates, and will develop skills in digital technology and business planning. Our graduates have gone on to use their skills in organisation, management, and marketing in festival production companies and in many of the top digital businesses, such as Spotify. They also work in multi-platform marketing and events companies, fashion businesses, world-class museums, and leading charities. Through theory, technique and practice, we’ll help you to develop as a successful creative events manager, with plenty to offer the arts and creative industries.

Since the Harry Potter boom in the early 2000s, alongside a recent influx of new releases from studies, such as Disney and Marvel, the film and VFX industry has expanded at an exponential rate.

This has firmly established the UK as the leading country for high-quality Visual Effects work and created an unprecedented demand for fresh, highly-trained graduate talent from the UK education system. The course was created in response to an industry demand for visual effects artists who possess strong observational skills and the ability to apply them collaboratively in the workplace.

Designed from the ground up by industry professionals, specifically to address this demand, the primary ethos is to create the quality required for employability within the industry. Developing a foundation in traditional artistic techniques, such as drawing, colour theory, perspective, photography and composition, 125 you will learn what it takes to create your own feature film quality visual effects.

Our 2D workflow uses Nuke for all compositing, and Maya/Zbrush and Arnold for 3D, while our colour pipeline is based on an industry model with custom LUTs to ensure accurate monitoring of colour in our fully calibrated VFX labs. All of our VFX labs are equipped with top of the range industry-level workstations and are supported by our render farm, fibre network, and clustered storage. With smaller class sizes, students have full access to the VFX labs and workstations on specified lab days alongside a more personal, teaching approach. You will experience a team-based production process that replicates industry best practice; including previsualisation, concept development, on-set data acquisition, asset building, and compositing. We’ll introduce you to the underlying concepts and fundamental principles of Visual Effects work and teach you the necessary creative and technological disciplines, developing your knowledge of 2D and 3D software.

The course prides itself on the currency of its staff. You will be taught by industry professionals that between them have worked at studios, including ILM, Framestore, Double Negative, Electronic Arts, MPC, Image Engine, Weta Digital and many more. We have taken the knowledge gained at these studios and have brought it into the classroom. Having worked in the industry at the highest levels, we not only know what makes a strong artist, but also what the visual effects industry is looking for. We are focused on our graduates’ successful entry into the VFX industry, as well as them having a long and successful career.

The visual effects industry community is very close, much like a family where everyone knows each other. Through the personal connections of our industry experienced staff we are able to bring in top class guest speakers, such as Christian Manz, Creative Director, Film at Framestore and Sue Lyster, Director of Studio Operations, and ILM, to name a few recent guests.

BA (Hons) Costume offers a comprehensive approach to the study, interpretation and creation of costume. Students will become skilled at producing accurate historical recreations of costumes as well as expressing imaginative flair through creative and conceptual costume making. In addition, you will learn the art of tailoring and couture dressmaking.

Costume supervision is integral to the course and can be described as interpreting a two-dimensional costume design into a three-dimensional costume through sourcing and procuring garments. This exciting role places you at the heart of live productions, as you are key to ensuring the smooth running of the wardrobe department for all types of live performance.

The current BA (Hons) Costume and Performance Design course has been awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its ‘distinguished degree-level education in costume design for the UK’s leading creative industries’.

Our graduates go on to play an active role in the creative industries, from branding consultancies to digital design, publishers to packaging. Many of our graduates have established their own companies. Experimentation and discovery are important values on this course. There is no ‘right answer’ and you will be supported to find your own path as you learn more skills. In addition to developing creative design strategies, we encourage you to bring your own experiences and interests to your work. We value conceptual approaches that attract attention, and then evoke an idea or emotion that is relevant and on target.

As a graphic designer, you’ll have to make decisions in complex and unpredictable situations. You’ll have to react quickly to new information, evolving briefs and advances in technology. On this course, you’ll learn to innovate under pressure and handle issues such as user- centred design, sustainability, emerging technology, service design, information design and interactive design. You’ll engage with leading design companies who set briefs, give talks, and help us to develop the curriculum. You’ll discover your own approach to visual problem solving and graduate with the technical, critical, and conceptual skills that are highly prized by the industry.

Our teaching staff are exceptional. We’ve recently been awarded Gold by the TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework) which assess quality of teaching.

They’re inspiring teachers, researchers, industry practitioners and technicians who are all here to support you with your studies and help you to achieve outstanding outcomes.

A career in creative writing could see you working in publishing, a literary agency, freelancing or in education — and that’s just the start. Whether you want to create prose, scripts, poetry or nonfiction, we’ll help you turn writing into a career.

With visits from published writers and industry professionals, you’ll be able to explore career opportunities and build contacts. When you graduate, you’ll have a strong portfolio and a professional network to kickstart your career.

Writers rarely work alone, so this course will give you the opportunity to collaborate with other courses. You might write scripts with animators or filmmakers, or explore narratives with illustrators.

Through the adaptive reuse, rebranding, remodelling, recycling and recommunication of existing spaces, structures and environments, this course will offer you the skills, knowledge and work experience that you need to become a leader in one of the most dynamic, creative, economically valuable and diverse areas of design.

Interior Architecture and Design has an enviable record in graduate employment, often working with clients on real design projects in a studio-based, professionally-focused learning environment.

We offer you the chance to gain extended work experience in your second year; a uniquely valuable opportunity among UK degree courses and one which increases your graduate employment potential. This course will teach you to understand the three-dimensional potential, the atmosphere, and the identity of the spaces in which we live, work, rest, and play.

Make-Up for Media and Performance gives you the skills that you need to play a key creative role in performance, fashion, film or television.

Our recent graduates have worked on BBC and ITV productions (such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coronation Street, Casualty, Granchester and The Durrells), films (such as Beauty and the Beast), theatre productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company, musicals (such as Wicked, The King and I, Matilda and Priscilla Queen of the Desert), and at Leavesden Warner Brothers and Pinewood Studios.

The make-up artist is an important member of any production team and you’ll have the chance to work with students who are studying Acting, Film Production, Costume and Performance Design, Commercial Photography, Visual Effects, Fashion and Fashion Branding and Communication to create ‘live’ collaborative projects. On this course, you’ll learn a diverse range of make-up skills. You’ll study make-up and hair design for drama, ballet, opera and music. A different perspective will give you the skills for fashion and photography shoots. You’ll also construct wigs and hairpieces, and create prosthetic make-up FX for film and television. In short, you’ll develop skills that are a real asset to a wide range of performance industries, from theatre to TV, and from the music business to the world of fashion and film.

You’ll graduate with both a breadth of understanding and context with a specialist focus and application in design. The design course builds on the established expertise within the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, becoming a collaborative design link between disciplines just as in industry.

The design thinking, strategy and 2D communication aspects of the course link well with the Graphics and Visual Communications courses at AUB, reflecting current industry practice where the definition of the product is wider than a singular object. The 3D design, prototyping and realisation aspects complement the Modelmaking, Interiors, Architecture and Fashion courses.

Topics like design strategy, user-centred design and the commercialisation process familiar to Product Design could also be a design focus that feeds back out to other programmes through a collaborative curriculum, breaking conventional subject boundaries no longer recognised by the industry. As the course progresses through each level, you'll specialise the direction of your design focus, allowing you to join with existing units on other AUB courses.