Transcript for:
Exploring UAL Media Course Highlights

What's important about the UAL is the freedom and the responsibilities passed back on the course leaders and the tutors within a media course to design something and lead the students towards them developing themselves as opposed to being told what they needed to do. The amount of freedom we have even within each unit is pretty incredible and my final project is a hyperlapse film on the city of Cambridge so it basically explores the whole city in a modern hyperlapse style. I used a load of visuals with ambient audio as well as a soundtrack made by a level 3, year 2 student who I've worked with in previous films. I'm in the final stages of mastering the audio. For my final major project I'm making a documentary about the Rwandan genocide that happened 20 years ago. I have got various interviews with some survivors so I'm just editing them together. With the brief for our final project, we basically just got given this brief to produce anything that is our own content of what we've learned in the past two years and bring it all together and through those two years I've enjoyed making documentaries, so I thought I'd continue with a documentary theme and then add that in with the genocide idea as well. With our separate units they do allow us to improve as we steadily go along. It's about making mistakes throughout the programme, throughout the year. Yes it's quantified in a final major project, but leading up to that they're just obtaining the skills, they're experimenting, they're trying, so what is very important is that they learn from those mistakes and don't repeat them. That's the creative process and that's how you develop and progress. The way that we've placed everything together, we've used practical and theoretical skills and we've placed them all together. I think it intrigues a lot more people and it allows you to prove that you are learning. Whilst learning, experimenting, pushing your own boundaries, they're also gaining an adherence to what industry would require from them. Within year 2, when the students arrive after having a very relaxed summer, in September we kick off with a 48-hour film challenge. There was a crew, there were seven groups or fourteen students and they would go off and do the production within 48 hours so that was really interesting because performing arts and music are also under UAL and there was such an atmosphere and such a buzz and it got stressful and some personalities didn't quite gel but that's an important thing for the students to learn because out on production in the workplace post-production you've got to work as a team and it's not about whether you get on with that person, it's about the objective, which is the production at the end of the day. My next step is university, studying visual effects at Hertfordshire. I guess I see myself in five years' time graduating university and looking for employment within Soho, within London and to work within the big post-production houses. My next aim hopefully is going to Ravensbourne university or Lincoln university to study digital film. I do aim to continue documentaries hopefully, but I just want to see where things take me really. Creative arts is an important part of education and it's an important industry and hopefully you know the qualification is actually sort of meeting those needs. The needs of the students and the needs of the sector but first and foremost it gives the the lecturers and the centres the tools to actually improve their delivery, improve their attendance, improve their attention and that data is coming through to us quite clearly, of that's actually making a difference. We can tailor whatever our ideas are and pass it on to the students so it is flexible, it's not rigid, it's not set in stone so you can come up with a project idea which you think will be really beneficial. What the benefit of that is, is we don't stand still as a course, we're continuously evolving, coming up, bringing up new ideas.