Television

Overview

The MA Television programme at University of the Arts London (UAL)  focuses on the hands-on experience of making television programmes. Working in teams, with access to London College of Communication’s state-of-the-art multi-camera TV studio, you will produce four TV shows, drawing on analysis of contemporary factual genres.

You'll learn the key skills needed to make effective programming covering areas such as format, narrative, scripting, camera techniques, lighting, sound, and editing. 

Other units of study will explore the nature of the TV industry, and potential markets for your ideas and programmes.

What can you expect?

The TV studio: programmes made for the course will have both location and TV studio contents. Training in the use of the television studio is relatively rare in UK media schools: an omission, given that as much as 70% of TV programming is produced in this way. London College of Communication's TV studio is of a very high professional standard, with a new Tricaster mixing desk that allows for a wide range of effects and computer-generated imagery. Mastery of this resource will be a significant asset to graduates of MA Television and will further distinguish them from the great majority of media and film school Master's-level graduates. 

Multiple perspectives: MA Television approaches the practice of programme-making from complimentary, but interlocking, perspectives, seeing programmes simultaneously as: 

• Directed exercises of the creative imagination. 
• Vectors of ideas, information and understanding. 
• Mechanisms through which social, political and cultural norms are transmitted. 
• Commercial products that must directly or indirectly offer returns on investment. 
• Examples of project management, in which potentially conflicting demands of time, resource, cost and quality must be continually addressed. 
• Adherents to rules of certain formats. 

Collaboration: In the second term, you will develop creative, mutually beneficial collaborations with external partners, for example local charities and NGOs, small businesses, or artists/arts organisations. You will produce a programme to a brief you agree with your collaborative partner. You will gain valuable experience of real world contexts, conditions and outcomes of production. 

Media cultures and criticality: The media cultures strand of the MA, which runs through all four terms, will underpin learning and practice through its examination of the key issues surrounding the production, uses and consumption of factual TV programming. 

Their shared basis is the application of theoretical approaches in ways that reinforce and enlarge programme making, and will require you to adopt an analytical, evaluative approach to the shared norms of current practice. This is also an iterative process. Theory and practice operate in parallel, and each will inform the other critically. 

The experience of programme-making will invite you to question the conventions which govern production, for example in the hierarchical nature of production teams, or the extents to which established formats can be amended and developed.