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. 

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

Animating the Screen
Animating the Screen illuminates the histories, theories and practices of film animation in its various forms, across an international context. You’ll explore the evolving principles and techniques shaping animated film, from Disney to anime to Aardman, as well as the uses of animation in videogames and cinematic visual effects. Your production of a case study, storyboard, or short animated film will showcase your discoveries, and provide a critical and creative platform for later work in film theory or film practice. 

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 

History in Media and Film: The Presentation of the Past in Contemporary Culture
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. 

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. 

Compulsory 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. 

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. 

True Stories: 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. 

Professional Experience for Film (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: Developing Your Profile
This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling and enable 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 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 to do EITHER Professional Experience for Film (Year 2), OR Pathways with Film: Developing Your Profile

Optional Modules

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. 

Teenage Dreams: Youth Subcultures in Fiction and Film
Youth culture has had a profound influence on society. On this module you will examine the historical development of subcultures from the ‘classic’ period to postmodernism and study a range of representations of youth subcultures, from the 1950s to the present, including fiction, film, fashion, and music. These texts will be explored against prominent theories on subcultures with especial reference to issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. The module builds on critical skills acquired in year 1. 

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

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. 

Britain on Film: Trends, Themes, 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. 

Professional Experience for Film (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. 

Employing Film: 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.

Students at Level 6 can also choose to take the Extended Screenwriting Project, in addition to (but not in place of) the Extended Research Project in Film Studies. They must choose to do EITHER Professional Experience for Film (Year 3), OR Employing Film: Putting Your Subject into Practice. Students who took Professional Experience for Film (Year 2) are eligible to do Professional Experience for Film (Year 3).

Optional Modules

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. 

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.  

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. 

The Apocalypse will be Televised: Extinction on Film since 1945
Since 1945, we have been fascinated and horrified by the threat of our own extinction, whether real or imaginary. And since the moment of the first nuclear bomb, those fears have been captured on film. In this module, we will focus on film as historical source to guide us through the debates and complexities of environmental crises, extinction panics, and cold war fears that have defined recent history, and their relationship to the real crises of our times.

Social Media Work
From Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to live streamers, influencers, and crowd workers, on this module you will explore what work really looks like in the global digital economy. You will deploy critical tools to understand the role that digital work plays in contemporary political and economic structures and apply this to analysis of working lives by engaging with guest Q&A sessions with workers. The module allows you to communicate your critical ideas about social media work in a creative format.

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.