Forty-five years of history. World-class facilities. Tutors who are shaping the industry – and have the accolades to prove it. Scholarships that make sure raw talent reaches potential. Working sets on site. Award-winning projects for real industry clients. Once-in-a-lifetime masterclasses with world-famous names. A network that will catapult your career. The chance to create the future. The National Film and Television School gives you access to everyone and everything you need to make it in the industry.
NFTS Courses are based on learning and applying the crafts and skills of the medium. Students are encouraged to develop a solid understanding of how their specialist role fits into the overall process of project development, production, and program making. Practical learning is carefully integrated with seminars and other activities that place film, television, and games in a historical, cultural, and business context.
Courses are led by professionals with extensive and current industry experience, teaching to industry standards. The core staff is supplemented by visiting tutors, leading practitioners in their field, who conduct special workshops and exercises. The NFTS offers courses in all the primary skills in film and television and new media to foster creative collaboration in a shared activity, thus emphasizing the crucial role that each specialist plays in the whole.
Students are encouraged to extend the boundaries of creative expression in their specialization and experiment with new forms and styles related to their work content. The School supports the development of individual approaches to the work, allowing flexibility and freedom of choice within the curriculum's parameters. Workshops, exercises, and productions provide a framework for self-expression and a context for evaluating successful growth and talent maturing.
Practical workshops will, wherever relevant, contain screenings and seminars that relate the skills to be learned to their application in films, programs, published game titles, and other media outputs. Course elements are designed to ensure that students confront the demands of genres, formats, and styles that are current practice in the industry. At the same time, regular screenings and discussions are arranged to instill an understanding of the media's history and development. This is designed to embrace references to the use of media across all the primary cultures and traditions.
The School endeavors to keep its students up-to-date with new approaches both in technology and aesthetics with particular attention to modes of production and the refinement of the language of moving image media. A significant part of this is achieved by giving access to practitioners who visit the School or arranging sessions at facilities elsewhere in London or further afield. Attendance at significant festivals and symposia is built into course timetables. Thus an ongoing debate is encouraged to allow students to progress their learning under the stimulus of contact with change and development in the industry they are preparing to enter.
Engagement with others is an essential part of every course. Students are developing their skills to be part of an essentially collaborative process - that of program making. Therefore, the curriculum for each specialization is designed to link with others on several occasions throughout the course, most significantly during productions. Here students have an opportunity to put into practice their increasing creative, interpretative, and technical skills within the realistic constraints of production.
In 1970, Colin Young, a Scot then chairing the University of California's Department of Theater Arts, co-founded the NFTS and was appointed as the School's first director. With a loan from Rank, the NFS bought the old Beaconsfield Film Studios in Buckinghamshire - which had been home to organizations as diverse as British Lion Film Corporation, The Crown Film Unit, and the North Thames Gas Board - and set about refitting it to professional industry standards. Young established four permanent departments - production, camera, editing, and sound - and in 1971, the first intake of 25 students passed through the studio gates. Directors Mike Radford (The Merchant of Venice, Il Postino), Bill Forsyth (Local Hero) and Ben Lewin (Ally McBeal), pioneering documentarist Nick Broomfield (Aileen: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and visual effects specialist Dennis Lowe (Cold Mountain, The English Patient) were among their number.
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