Lsf london film school

LSF London Film School
United Kingdom

Presentation & Philosophy:

The LFS was founded in 1956 by Bob Dunbar as The London School of Film Technique. It is only one of two institutions which provides post-graduate film courses in the United Kingdom. The LFS is a UK Skillset Film Academy.

Through many technological changes, the London Film School is held together by three ideas: insistence on creative freedom, openness to innovation and commitment to craft excellence.

The school’s teaching is built on the conviction, learned over a long period, that film professionals, and writer-directors who have done all the jobs on the set, to a genuinely professional level, are more creatively resourceful, effective and employable than those who accept the specialization ideas of the old studio system too early in their training.

There’s a balance in the LFS programmes between technical training, the ‘boot camp’ in which students gain key skills through making films, and the area of creative development, the ‘hothouse’ in which they try and make them extraordinary. The school aims to provide a fertile environment for hard work, exploration and creative dialogue.

Number of students/ full time 140

Number of international students: 75%

Number of teachers: 22 full time faculty

Degree category / length of studies: 2-year MA Filmmaking Course, 1-year MA Screenwriting course, 1-year MA in Film Curating

Programme objective and content:

The LFS MA Filmmaking is a programme for the new filmmaker with certain aims: reaching professional standards in the key departments; learning to collaborate creatively – from fellow students as much as from lecturers – and to think about cinema practically. It is composed of three units:

1.Image, Meaning, Style
The first term gives students a thorough grounding in the basics of filmmaking. The centre of the term

is the film exercise, which provides the platform for basic teaching in camera skills, exposure control, and editing. The term is dedicated to the principle of learning how to tell a story in pictures.
The Second Term introduces students to lighting skills and to sound recording and digital editing. Students work in units of five or six, directing their own films and camera operating, lighting and fulfilling other supporting roles on the films of their colleagues, so that they are intimately involved in all their unit’s projects.

2.Non-Fiction and Fiction
The remit of the first term is wider than that of the ‘classical’ documentary, and students are encouraged to think of the expressive functions of images of the real world and their use in new forms.
In Terms Four Students choose scripts and crews. Student producers are then required to develop a set of production forms detailing all the film’s requirements, and these, together with the scripts are presented to production conferences with all heads of department to initiate the process.

3.Industry and Independents
In the fifth term students make a drama up to fifteen minutes long, in colour and 35mm, on location and in the studio. Crews are built around the scripts. Scripts are broken down by producers and presented to production conferences with heads of the various departments.

MA Screenwriting: The LFS MA Screenwriting course is an intense one-year programme with the emphasis on developing the writer’s original voice through small group and one-to-one mentoring from industry professionals.