Master of Arts (Hons) in Creative Practice

at Leeds Arts University United Kingdom

This course offers opportunities to engage with diverse and innovative approaches to fashion image-making. It will develop your knowledge and understanding of the lens-based fashion industry and encourage an experimental, creative approach to produce visually striking photographs and films.

Our vibrant and collaborative learning environment will promote the exchange of ideas, and offers ‘hands on’ industry experience in the form of live briefs, publishing and exhibition opportunities, educational trips and commissions. Collaborating with students across the University and with wider creative communities locally, nationally and internationally is supported.

Your programme of study is informed by current and emerging industry contexts and practices, and you will work with highly skilled practitioners and specialist tutors, responding to exciting projects and briefs that develop your creativity, professionalism, preparation for the work place and offer real-life learning opportunities.

The course integrates creative practical projects with analysis of historical, cultural and social contexts of fashion image-making and you will be encouraged to take an experimental and questioning approach to your practice. We invite internationally renowned speakers to give an insight into current industry practices and offer opportunities to engage with external practitioners. In the past our students have been on study visits to Paris, Milan and New York, plus day-trips within the UK. Course related educational visits/trips experiences can take a variety of formats including physical and virtual.

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 Graphic Design explores the fascinating relationship between design-led practice, industry engagement and critical analysis.

You will build a body of self directed work informed by contemporary graphic design practice and emerging debates within the field of design. Driven by problem analysis, critical debate and design innovation you will develop briefs, engage with an audience and work collaboratively. Your investigation will explore the relationship between visual and contextual research, investigating the social, political and ethical contexts of your work.

You will be supported by a team with diverse research and practical interests within graphic design and visual culture, working closely with visiting industry professionals. You will source briefs, work with clients and apply your contextual and industry informed knowledge and understanding to question why graphic design needs to exist and who is the audience - the focus is on becoming a problem seeker not just a problem solver.

This is a practical course - you will have opportunities to write, plan and make films amongst a community of filmmakers.

You work in production teams to produce a range of films, providing the professional experience and abilities to prepare you for work in the film and screen industries. There is a strong focus on production; supported by watching, investigating, analysing, critiquing and thinking about film in order to discover your own identity as a filmmaker. Working in small groups with other passionate filmmakers, you will take an active role in all stages of development and production, learning the skills of directing, producing, cinematography, sound, editing, production design and storytelling.

Our students enjoy creative freedom and have the opportunity to pitch and initiate filmmaking projects across a wide range of productions, from fiction to documentary, advertising to music video. You will develop skills such as self-promotion, knowledge in finance and distribution, and learn to commercialise practical experiences and skills to successfully navigate the film industry.

Learning and teaching is supported through filmmaking practice: in the studio, on location, in seminars and film screenings, production meetings and class discussions, industry talks and study trips including film festivals. Course related educational visits/trips experiences can take a variety of formats including physical and virtual.

Our BA (Hons) Visual Communication course offers a truly multidisciplinary environment underpinned by design methods. Students on the course create work which both, reflects their own interests, and responds to the requirements of the contemporary creative industries.

We provide an opportunity to develop a personal and professional understanding of visual communication within a range of contexts including: studio-based practice, live projects, collaborative learning and work-related learning. Through a carefully structured three-year process, students will learn to become practitioners in visual communication or further study.

Learning and teaching is based on design problem-solving methods, which draw upon the academic and industry experience of the staff team. The teaching uses ideas and terms from film, television, graphic design, photography, illustration and event design.

External engagement through work-related learning is central to our approach, with all students having the opportunity to work on live projects and many engaging regularly with businesses and external partners. Our alumni work in a variety of fields including illustration, television, photography, graphic design, film, animation, visual merchandising, and teaching. Graduate employers include industry leaders in all areas of the creative sector. In addition many alumni are now established freelance practitioners working for clients across the UK and overseas.

This dynamic course will encourage you to take a creative approach to fashion branding with communication, and develop an individual practice that is underpinned by a social, cultural, political and ethical awareness of this global industry.

You will explore a diverse range of evolving theories and practices that underpin fashion branding, and have opportunities to develop skills in: creative direction and styling, image making, editorial copy, advertising, exhibition design and styling, fashion films, visual merchandising and experiential campaigns.

With new technologies increasingly influencing the industry, you’ll study futurology and investigate theories to apply to augmented and virtual reality, mobile technology user interface design, and digital and social media platform communications that will turn such future-facing ideas into reality.

There will be opportunities to work collaboratively with students on other courses. You will have contact with industry through opportunities such as visiting speakers, live projects, industry briefs and competitions to ensure that you develop professional skills.

Our MA Curation Practices is ideal for those who wish to focus on the expansive field of curation by contributing to growing areas of practice within the commercial, education, arts and heritage industries.

Students will develop a synthesised skill set in preparation to enter the profession or continue further study. Perfectly situated in a specialist arts community, students will be surrounded by the study and production of creative artefacts. Specialist tutors, visiting lecturers and professional curators provide a stimulating range of study topics including audience engagement. Students will also be supported to advance their object handling and installation skills.

We support students in identifying curation spaces through our partnership network. This entails students being resident with a partner organisation and in close proximity to professional curators in order to enhance their skills, experience and knowledge for a career in the discipline. Students are also encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning through forging contacts and securing space for curatorial projects.

Our MA in Digital Fashion offers a unique route for creatives interested in the digital future of fashion. It will enable through practice-led research and new sustainable methods of design and fabrication to reach a new frontier of fashion design.

Fashion is a dynamic field with trends currently pointing to significant innovations in digital design and production to facilitate the creation of multiple digital and physical products from both fashionable and functional briefs. The emergence of additive manufacturing as a new method for manufacturing, along with the increasing acceptance of smart and wearable tech, will allow students with technical abilities and/or understanding of traditional fashion design and pattern cutting skills to push their ideas into new terrain.

Students will use 3D programs, such as CLO 3D, which allows an intuitive method of design, as well as scanners and laser cutters in innovative ways throughout the modules. Graduates enjoy a wide range of employment prospects due to their transferable skills and most relevant digital skills for today’s modern fashion industry. The course supports individuals’ career aspirations and students can tailor their work towards their aim.

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.

This course will advance, widen and deepen your existing fine art practice through a series of modules designed to enable your progress through practice-led research. Dialogic exchange is at the heart of this course of study, staging, at its core, teaching and learning approaches in the form of regular dynamic group work, supported by individual tuition.

This course cradles all specialisms within contemporary practice such as painting, drawing, sculpture, text, performance, media and sound. The core seminars will use group work to explore the wider field of practice within which such disciplines are situated, and deepen individually nuanced discourses through an individual tutorial programme.

Working with subject specialists you will be introduced to practice-led research approaches to advance your knowledge acquisition of advanced critical and analytical methods and approaches in your own practice. The programme of study will explore your creative ambitions in the context of both knowledge and market-led fields.

The course begins with a sharing of personal intentions through exhibiting your own work to peers, and progresses to a conclusive moment of public sharing, where you will materialise theories, concepts, techniques, processes and crafts as artwork. You will be supported to articulate your ideas in visual, oral, written and material forms.