Film & Visual Culture and Contemporary Performance BA (with Foundation Year)

FILM & VISUAL CULTURE

If you want an exciting career in the creative industries, but also want to understand the role that Film and Visual Culture plays in wider society, studying at Liverpool Hope is the right choice for you. Film and Visual Culture is an intellectually stimulating degree that combines practice and theory, giving you the opportunity to both create and analyse a range of cultural texts - from fiction film and documentary, to photography and animation. 

This degree is underpinned by creative and critical practice. It is creative because it gives you the opportunity to develop practical skills in the fields of screenwriting, filmmaking (drama and documentary), photography and animation. It is critical because it involves the in-depth study of film history and theory, including the way in which cinema intersects with a range of social and political issues. You will graduate with a degree underpinned by academic rigour, but with the transferable skills needed to pursue a wide variety of careers in the creative industries.

The degree is taught by leading international scholars and practitioners and you will also benefit from access to outstanding library resources and an extensive range of practical equipment and studio space. Extra curricula activities support the curriculum by widening critical and creative horizons. Recent activities on the degree include fieldtrips to the National Science and Media Museum, Tate Britain, and the Manchester Animation Festival. We also have regular group visits to local film screenings.

- Study in the most filmed-in city in the country outside London.

- Our local partners include FACT, one of the leading independent cinema venues in the North West.

Hear from student Hannah Guzman Gonzalez on what it's like to study Film & Visual Culture at Hope.

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

On this course you will be making work that physically brings the audience into the performance environment. It is about exploring drama and performance through the interactions between bodies and environments and how different technologies can facilitate this. How can light function as an actor? What are the merits and limitations of devising a performance for an audience of one person? What staging possibilities does virtual reality and video gaming provide the performance-maker? Here you will learn about the different approaches to creating your own immersive performance environments as well as gaining an important understanding of the digital creative sector.

Located within the Creative Campus, this community of artists, musicians and performers is a vibrant and exciting environment to create work. Throughout your studies you will be equipped with the relevant technical knowledge and skills to realise and manage your own projects, supported by a team of highly qualified tutors. These will include acquiring skills in digital coding, lighting design, audio and video editing, 360 film and sound recording, motion capture and projection mapping. In addition to making performances, you will present ideas verbally, as well as enhancing your skills in critical and reflective writing.

Your three years begins with an introduction to immersive performance practices before you journey into the exciting challenges of audience participation and interaction. Moving outside of the campus, the city of Liverpool itself will become a site for performance, echoing the work of immersive practitioners such as Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak and Shunt. Your final year will involve a push into new and experimental performance technologies, presenting performance projects in virtual worlds. This will culminate in you selecting either to complete a placement within an arts organisation or to take the lead as project manager of a major performance project of your own devising. This final year will also require you to complete an independent research project on a topic of your own choice.

This course is for those interested in making innovative and dynamic worlds for their audiences to interact with and explore. It will appeal to students interested in contemporary performance and its overlaps with creative technologies.