Compulsory modules

Filmmaking Fundamentals
This first-year practice-centred module provides you with the foundational technical knowledge and theoretical tools for approaching creative filmmaking work, and an understanding of the ethics of creative work in contemporary AI contexts. Whether your interests lie in film direction, cinematography or editing, you’ll develop skills in these varied areas of practice, building experience of digital camera-work and post-production tools. The final short film output will demonstrate your acquired technical skills and your creative application of theory and practice. 

Delivery, Performance and Other Platforms: All the Writing Selves
This module prepares you for studying creative writing at university, introducing you to all the ‘writing selves’ needed when seeking publication and building an authorial profile. You will explore how self-narratives, new journalism, guerrilla-writing, and broadcasting platforms foster ways to extend and complement your practice outside traditional routes; how to deliver manuscripts to publishers, agents, and competitions, including how to respond to commissions via authentic briefs. You will also gain a practical foundation in performing your work publicly on/offline. 

Writing Scripts
This module will introduce you to the key dramatic principles required to write scripts for stage and screen. Drawing on texts from contemporary theatre, film and television, you will learn a series of fundamental skills, developing your understanding of character, dialogue, and structure. You will engage in a combination of lectures, seminar groups, and practical writing workshops, and guided by feedback from peers and tutors alike, you will work towards writing your own original script.

Becoming a Cultural Citizen
This module provides you with the foundational tools and skills you need to develop your student profile. You will learn about the different pathways in your cultural or creative field while developing your own identity as a cultural critic, creative, and citizen. You will explore and map out your personal and professional development goals and plans, ensuring you make the most of your time at university and beyond. You will gain professional skills in communication and team working. 

Optional Modules

Writing Fiction
This module introduces you to key characteristics of fiction. You will gain an understanding of how these can be employed to explore the meaning of a text. Engaging with prose writers from all over the world, you will learn how to analyse core elements such as narrative voice, structure and the evocation of place, and develop your own ability to write short, creative prose pieces. You will attain a solid foundation for writing longer prose pieces in the future.  

Writing for Children
It starts at a secret location. You receive a blank book and start to write. It’s a journal: you submit it later, alongside your creative or critical piece. Back in Keele you look at children’s writing from different periods and cultures. You consider imagination and myth, the politics of representation, the construction and subversion of gender roles. You think about voice and vision. Your expressive skills flower as you explore storytelling techniques and the transformative power of narrative.  

History in Media and Film
In this module you will encounter how the past is presented in a number of disciplines, including contemporary film and media. Through considering 'public history', you will examine visual culture representations of the past as central to collective memory, constructions of identity, and contemporary politics. Working with students from different subjects, you will begin to develop key skills for Humanities students, including how to evaluate and interpret sources and communicate your arguments to audiences of all backgrounds. 

Sights and Sounds: Analysing Film
This springboard module provides you with essential tools for understanding and discussing film as a vital art form. Looking at films from diverse contexts, you will develop the vocabulary and methods needed for your studies, both from a critical and creative perspective. By producing a visual- or video essay you’ll display your acquired knowledge and skills in film analysis, focusing potentially on film style and history, film genre, or critical ideas around the representation of race, class, gender or sexuality. 

Compulsory modules

Genre, Form and Modes
This module will develop and deepen your understanding of how narrative forms, genres and modes are used in creative writing. It introduces you to forms of creative prose besides fiction.  It asks questions about how genre writing and creative nonfiction are formed, how writers read other literary texts – not as critics, and not necessarily as fans, but as practitioners – and aims to equip your own texts with the structures and techniques which are necessary to develop your own writing.  

Global Cinemas: Beyond Hollywood
Global Cinemas expands the focus of your work and knowledge up to this point, looking towards an increasingly diverse horizon of filmmaking traditions and theories. The module identifies key movements and figures in international filmmaking, looking also at the role of film festivals, exhibition and streaming services in promoting contemporary cinemas. Encouraging you to draw critically on your own viewing of film, the module provides an invaluable platform for the longer research project you might undertake in your final year. 

Screenwriting: Principles and Practices
This module forms a gateway to the worlds of professional screenwriting and story development. You’ll explore key screenwriting concepts in practical, writing-based seminars, as well as analysing a range of film and TV industry texts. You’ll then produce a number of screenplay samples which respond to the theme of the seminars, receiving feedback in regular writing workshops. You’ll go on to develop your own creative project plan, which provides an invaluable basis for any project work in your final year. 

Professional Experience for Film Studies and Creative Writing (Year 2)
This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside Keele either through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients), or working as a team to deliver a successful festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module’s requirements). 

Pathways with Film and Creative Writing: Developing Your Profile
This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support a literary or film festival, you will build your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employers.

Students at Level 5 must choose EITHER Professional Experience for Film Studies and Creative Writing (Year 2) OR Pathways with Film and Creative Writing 

Optional Modules 

The Power of Cinematic Representation
This module explores issues of representation, inequality and activism in global film culture. You’ll build on your knowledge from the first year, critically assessing theories of cinematic representation around aspects of identity including gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Through an array of both mainstream and experimental films, you’ll extend your understanding of film form, spectatorship and industry, as well as cinema’s capacity to engage with society and culture, exploring issues such as poverty, migration, transgender rights, and the environment. 

True Stories: Approaches to Documentary Film
This module builds on the critical and practical work of your first year, focusing on the arts of documentary filmmaking. Drawing on a range of films, theories and practical methods, you’ll explore the varied creative ways in which real-life experience – from the global, to the political, to the personal – can be depicted on screen. Guided by expert tutors, you will take control of your final project, in the form of your own creative piece, or essay on a chosen case-study.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 5)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

Compulsory modules

Employing Film and Creative Writing: Putting Your Subject into Practice
Now you are preparing for life after graduation, this module enables you to put your degree skills into practice and work with employer-clients on a series of real-life projects. Enhancing the creative and collaborative skills you developed in your second year, this final-year module will develop your ability to work effectively with clients from a variety of settings, such as charities, publishers, museums, and will enhance your confidence in presenting your work to your chosen employer-client.

Professional Experience for Film and Creative Writing (Year 3)
In your final year we offer you another opportunity to complete a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of clients), or work as part of a team to deliver a successful festival or event. Completed during the final stages of your degree, the module gives you cutting-edge experience of the sector you wish to enter following graduation as well as valuable employer contacts, thereby providing you with an effective career launchpad.

Extended Screenwriting Project
This final-year project is the culmination of your critical and practical work on screenwriting, building on modules undertaken in years one and two. With the consultation of tutors, you will identify and devise your own screenplay idea (for a feature film, TV show ‘pilot’, short film or adaptation), producing a professional-standard treatment to showcase your skills. The module will therefore provide a significant platform and output for anyone hoping to move into careers within the creative film and TV industries. 

Students at Level 6 must take EITHER Employing Film and Creative Writing OR Professional Experience for Film Studies and Creative Writing (Year 3). Students who took Professional Experience for Film Studies and Creative Writing (Year 2) are eligible to do Professional Experience for Film Studies and Creative Writing (Year 3).

Optional Modules 

Extended Research Project in Film Studies
Your Extended Research Project is the chance to explore in depth a subject of your choosing, specialising in interests built up over previous years of study. With the guidance of a supervisor, you’ll hone your skills in independently seeking out, analysing and making use of film- and critical texts. The form of your project will be matched to your strengths and interests – potentially, a dissertation, a video essay or potentially a blog – showcasing your creativity, knowledge-base, and professional skills. 

Science Fiction Cinema
This module takes a consolidated and interdisciplinary approach to this exciting area of film, building on your prior work in film, combined with an in-depth analysis of the cultural and political contexts informing science fiction’s development. You will produce a case study focusing on an area of science fiction specific to your developed interests and skills: such as an analysis of representation in the genre, a history of its technologies and styles, or a study of science fiction’s special effects. 

Britain on Film: Trends, Theories, Debates
This final-year module provides you with the critical frameworks for understanding the histories and current state of British filmmaking, both as part of Britain’s creative industries and a vital means of expression and representation. Alongside the study of key movements and styles, you’ll develop your own research project on a subject of your choice. Your key outputs – potentially a film pitch, film history, or video essay – will display your understanding of the forces shaping British film, both then and now. 

Youth and Film: Growing Up on Screen
From infancy to adolescence, to the cusp of adulthood, growing up remains a powerful cinematic subject. Youth and Film allows you to explore this topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives – from the analysis of genre, to aspects of film style, to developmental psychology – encouraging you to take an independent and intensive approach. Your final output will demonstrate your understanding of youth on film as a distinctive aspect of global cinema, highlighting your awareness of the form’s narratives and styles.

Shakespeare on Film
How have the works of Shakespeare been adapted by the film industry in the modern era, and what motivations lie behind the creative decisions made by screenwriters and directors? In this module, you will explore a range of Shakespeare plays on film, and develop your understanding both of the original works and the possibilities they offer for reinterpretation and adaptation. You will also have the chance to practise film adaptation for yourself, engaging practically with cutting and modernising Shakespeare’s text for the screen. 

In the Matrix: Postmodernism in Fiction, Film and Theory
In this module you will explore ideas around postmodernism, a cultural phenomenon developed in the second half of the twentieth century. The module develops work introduced in your second year and encourages a critical assessment of the implications of postmodern thinking for contemporary notions of history, identity, sexuality, politics and consumer society. You will assess the influence of these ideas on writers and directors and study the main themes and techniques in selected postmodern fiction and film. 

Life Writing
‘Autobiography’: that’s writing about the self, right? Wrong! That’s Rule One. You look at canonical texts by saints and sinners, scientists and sages. You study key theories. Then you look for other voices. You construct a counter canon and interpret it. This is about your creative practice as well as your academic development, though. What grain of sand will be your pearl? Workshops provide support, but this is your journey through the self to the world. Remember Rule One.

Writingscapes
This module enables you to specialise in various forms of place-writing. It introduces you to some spatial theories, including sensoryscapes, geopoetics, and psychogeography, offering you different approaches you might adopt in your writing. You are supported to reflect on the relations between theory and practice, and read published examples of creative texts (poetry, prose, creative nonfiction) by English-language and bi-/multi-lingual writers from the UK and elsewhere, to help you develop your writing and situate it within broader literary landscapes.

Working Class Fictions
This module introduces you to the practices of working-class fiction, a genre grounded in matters of identity and social realism. You will explore literary traditions through a series of set texts (e.g. Angry Young Men of the 60s, Shuggie Bain), film adaptations, and protest songs to inspire your own practice. You will be alerted to debates and propaganda that continue to influence whilst exploring how to experiment with medium to best represent the class-subject past and present.

Thresholds: Young Adult Fiction
Young Adult Fiction, mindful of its borderline status between children's fiction and adult fiction, often focuses on moments of crisis, its characters caught between innocence and ruin, naivety and understanding, or sometimes literally between two worlds. What is it about young adulthood that invites these explorations of the threshold, the liminal, or the disastrous? How can we read 'growing up', through these fictions? Is it a gradual development or is it a series of shocks?

Other-than-human worlds: nature writing, environmental writing
This module supports you to hone your place-writing to focus on non- or other-than-human worlds. You’ll study a wide variety of nature and environmental texts by global majority writers, working-class writers, disabled writers, queer writers, and others. You’ll analyse various uses of form, reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of, for example, hybrid, multimodal, and critical-creative writing. The module thinks about interrelations between humans and the other-than-human, and the potentials for writing to effect social and environmental change.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 6)
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support.

You do either ONE or BOTH of the modules Extended Screenplay Project and Extended Research Project in Film Studies. You then do either 45 or 75 credits from remaining programme-approved optional modules and GCP options.