On this module you will expand your professional skills. Through iterative activities, conducted with the support of both tutor and peers, you will advance a piece of writing through sequential editing stages.

You'll develop practical and emotional strategies for managing revision. There will be a strong emphasis on the development of collaborative and project management skills. The work will be underpinned and contextualized by both theoretical discussions of the art of writing and by exploring examples from the publishing industry.

Develop key techniques for writing fiction and hone the skills you need to write short stories and/or novels.

Through workshops, discussions, set reading from a range of contemporary writers and generative writing prompts, you’ll develop confidence in creating character, worldbuilding, establishing narrative voice, experimenting with point of view and constructing engaging structures and plot.

You will draw on a range of techniques according to your own interests. In your reflective essay you will consider the various ways short fiction and the novel uniquely deploy these techniques.

This module explores how digital technologies, in their multiple forms, figure in our everyday lives and the global societies we live in. This includes social media platforms, search engines, publicly available artificial intelligence chatbots as well as the multitude of apps that mediate every aspect of our lives, from access to news and information to dating, food and consumption, education, and professional life.

We will analyse the affordances of digital technologies in connection to questions of power, context, and embodiment. This module will stimulate you to start seeing how media and technology do more than transmitting messages and information. Instead, they have an ontological role in shaping social relations, subjectivities, practices and cultures.

Attuning you to this role, this module allows you to understand media as much more than simply channels of representation or communication. The assessments in this module give you plenty of space to articulate your own experiences in everyday life to the theoretical literature and conceptual frameworks that you are introduced to in this module.

Exploring the adaption of literature to film and other media, this module focuses on the adaptation of literary texts to such forms as theatre, graphic novel, film, television, song, and game.

You will be invited to reflect on adaptation as a powerful and complex cultural process, one that interprets literature as well as adapts it.

Throughout the module you will normally complete either a critical essay on adaptation OR a creative project (plus short essay) that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms -- written, (audio) visual, musical, digital, or three-dimensional and/or take the form of a game, production or performance, etc.

Find your critical voice on this module and think and learn to communicate like a media and cultural critic. You will look at how to take key theoretical frameworks and set these to work through the analysis of contemporary media and cultural phenomena.

You will deploy a range of critical approaches, taking into account historical and critical contexts, and the varied texts, audiences and producers we are working with.

Learn to write drama for the theatre and audio, and develop your awareness of the processes by which a written script makes its way to live performance and recorded production.

You will be taught through weekly seminars/workshops in which you will explore the effects that different staging/recording approaches and performance strategies have on your scripts.

Over the course of the module, you will develop your own writing styles and gain an awareness of the professional requirements of playwriting for the stage and for radio and podcasts.

How does our lived experience translate into poetry? And how does poetry crystallize or transform experience through language and form? These and many other questions are explored in this module as you will read as well as write poetry; for the writing of poetry is dependent not only your experience but also your abilities as a reader and interpreter of poems.

You will study the base structures of poetry – from the line-ending to more complex forms like sonnets and sestinas; and you will be encouraged to seek out new reading as a result of class discussion.

In this module, you will collaboratively develop, produce, and complete a short dramatic film while engaging with sustainable industry-standard production practices. The emphasis is on technical competence, creative problem-solving, and reflective collaboration.

At the start of the module, you'll form your own production groups and assign yourself one of the key creative roles within the team—Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Art Director, Sound Recordist/Designer, or Editor. Where needed, roles may be shared or doubled up to ensure all production responsibilities are met.

The module is supported by advanced technical workshops in camera, lighting, grip, sound, editing, and post-production workflows, preparing you to meet contemporary professional standards while reflecting on sustainability and resource-conscious filmmaking.

Our everyday lives are saturated by images of all kinds. This module will introduce you to some key ‘ways of seeing’ our world of images. We will explore questions such as:

• How are images made, who gets to produce them and, importantly, from whose point of view?
• How do pictures circulate?
• How do viewers read and interpret images?
• Who gets to look and through whose eyes?
• How do these processes and practices relate to power?

We’ll consider these questions in relation to a range of media texts, from photographs and advertisements to television and film.

How many advertisements have you already seen today? From moving billboards to advertisements between games on your phone - advertising is everywhere.

How many advertisements have you already seen today? From moving billboards to advertisements between games on your phone, advertising is everywhere.

In this module, you will learn how advertisers use language, visuals, sound and music to influence behaviour. You will discover how to differentiate advertising from marketing by examining hard and soft selling, influencer advertising and the role of “prosumers” on social media. You will explore consumer research to ask what makes a good advertisement. Rich examples show how advertising has borrowed from prose, poems and plays.

You will explore aspects of language including:

• Phonetics (sounds in a language)
• Stylistics (linguistic analysis of literary texts)
• Pragmatics (meaning in context)

By the end of this module, you will be able to analyse the creative use of language in advertisements, understanding the role that advertising plays in wider marketing efforts and reflecting on its uses in your future professional and personal lives.

This module will allow you to spend the year working in a graduate-level placement role in the industry or sector that interests you most. Throughout the year, you will build an awareness of what is required in the professional workplace whilst developing a range of transferable skills.

During the module you will reflect on and critically analyse: your own career readiness, the ongoing development of your self-awareness in terms of skills and professional knowledge, and your understanding of current workplace practices and professional etiquette.

Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.

In this multi-genre writing workshop you will develop your writing toward professional levels. Taught through a mix of lectures and tutor-led workshops, the focus is on the development of your own portfolio.

This portfolio could take any form and be devoted to any genre (poetry, prose, drama, screenplay etc). The lectures will include expert guidance from our author-tutors on how to develop your writing professionally and towards publication.

How has the experience of being part of a media audience transformed in recent years? How do we make sense of being a fan nowadays? In what ways do fan culture and audience community manifest social transformations on both local and global scales? This module aims to provide you with a critical understanding of fandom and audiences in a global and transnational context. The module will focus on issues such as participation, pleasure, performance, and power by investigating fan culture and audience communities of a wide range of transmedia texts in a global perspective. You are encouraged to analyse the multi-layered dynamics between individual fan, fan community, audience participation, media texts, and industries through interdisciplinary lenses, for example, feminist studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies.

• What will our digital future look like?
• How could AI transform global societies?
• What media will we watch, listen to, wear, be tracked by, or collaborate with – whether in smart cities, virtual workplaces, or even in outer space?

These are the big questions that this module will explore, addressing how past visions of technological futures inform the speculative digital landscapes we imagine today. This module examines the social, cultural, and political implications of these technologies, addressing issues such as personalisation, surveillance, platform governance, and digital inequalities. You will explore critical debates on issues such as automation, data governance, digital labour, and ethics while reflecting on the future of digital media in everyday life.

This advanced, practice-based module provides an industry-informed approach to documentary filmmaking.

Working in small groups, you will research, develop and produce a short documentary, choosing either to pursue an independent concept or respond to a stakeholder brief. The module supports a broad range of documentary genres and styles, encouraging experimentation with form while maintaining professional standards.

Through workshops and practical training, you will refine your skills in cinematography, sound recording and editing, while gaining awareness of ethical considerations, industry expectations, funding opportunities and distribution strategies across traditional and digital platforms.

Collaboration is central to this module, requiring you to navigate real-world production challenges, from research and planning to post-production. By the end of the module, you will have created a completed short documentary and developed the technical, conceptual and professional skills essential for careers in documentary filmmaking and beyond.

Many cutting-edge forms of creative writing work beyond written text. This module will develop your understanding of popular contemporary writing and writing industries with an advanced study of two key forms that incorporate visual elements and elements of narrative design – specifically: graphic novels and games.

You will explore the possibilities of narrative design, including its visual and interactive elements, and this will allow you to engage both critically and creatively with a branch of writing largely associated with the digital domain.

Working in small groups, you will develop your own ideas, and through workshopping and playtesting, reflect on the narrative and design decisions you have made.

In this module, you’ll delve into the structure, function, and evolution of ‘traditional’ and digital media industries, ranging from journalism and consumer industries to streaming services and online content creation. You will consider the economic, cultural, and technological forces driving these industries, and their societal impact. You’ll debate the role of media regulation and policy in shaping the ever-changing media industries today.

‘The body’ is a key site of both control and resistance in media culture. This module explores how media representations, cultural norms, and societal structures shape perceptions of the body, identity, and agency. Thinking about body politics through an intersectional lens, you’ll critically examine issues like gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and body type, unravelling the intricate connections between media and the lived experience of the body. We’ll think about what kinds of bodies fit social and cultural norms, how these norms are circulated and embedded in the public imaginary, and whether bodies can be re-imagined as sites of resistance.

In this module you will work in a combination of prose and creative non-fiction to explore how personal experience can fuel both fiction and creative nonfiction and how authorial voice is created in dialogue with the self. You will learn to critically interrogate the ethics of speaking on behalf of ourselves and of others.

The reading list is refreshed annually in response to developments in the field, as is appropriate for an advanced course. An indicative reading list might raise questions of consent in the personal essay, or questions of responsibility when writing for young people and how coming-of-age is handled by adult writers.

As you enter level 6 with a grounded understanding of traditional and emerging forms of creative writing, this advanced module offers you the space to examine and practice experimental and radical contemporary forms that challenge what writing can mean, for the moment and beyond the moment it is written.

Specifically, this module will be focusing on contemporary short forms – including (but not limited to) lyric poetry, the vignette and flash fiction. You will explore the way that form responds to the moment – both a moment in time and the moment we are living in – and how these forms respond to questions of identity, politics, the body, mental health, disability, the climate crisis and more.