This National Progression Award (NPA) is designed to equip you with the knowledge, understanding and skills you will need to succeed within the creative industries sector or to progress to further study. It is designed to bridge the gap between entry level education and professional career development. The NPA will allow you to develop a skill set, linked to National Occupational Standards for Sound, which has a thorough grounding in audio recording practice and allows individual and personalised skills development through the optional Units.
SQA Course Units:
• Sound Engineering and Production
• Sound: Understanding the Signal Path
• Sound Reinforcement
• Music Remixing
Film is a dominant art form, both reflecting and influencing society and culture. This A level will give you a broader knowledge of film, exploring it over a range of time periods and movements including silent cinema, Hollywood, British film, American film, global films, documentary films and experimental films.
Learning to read films as more than a form of entertainment will develop your skills in analysis and interpretation. You will also have the opportunity to work on a practical film project of your own.
Visits to the cinema, and other course related places such as the National Media Museum, are planned to ensure that students gain a wider perspective of the film industry.
Why choose this course?
This is a unique programme that allows you to explore ways of working with light. You will have the opportunity to learn and work with world-leading designers, learning from their working methods and practices, before moving on to develop and test your own practice as a performance maker working with light. On completion of the course you may wish to work as an independent lighting designer for performance, or return to your own specialist practice with an enhanced understanding of how light can be used in performance.
The course is international in nature and ambition, and is strongly supported by a range of key industry partners.
The programme is aimed at lighting specialists who want to develop and expand their practice in designing with light, as well as non-specialists who want to expand their knowledge of working with light, such as directors, designers, choreographers, dancers, musicians and artists.
The programme includes 8 weeks of practical workshops in fully-equipped performance spaces, led by four world-leading lighting designers. For 2020-21, these will be: Andi Watson, Michael Hulls, Paule Constable, and Willie Williams (subject to confirmation). You will work with each of the designers one at a time, learning from their working methods and processes.
The programme also offers a range of practice-based opportunities to explore collaborative and inter-disciplinary creative processes, work placements at a range of partner organisations both in the UK and abroad, and an opportunity to further develop your personal practice through an individual or collaborative realised lighting design project.
Location: Lewisham
This degree is based at USW’s purpose-built campus, in the creative centre of Cardiff.
At the nexus of creativity, technology and business, the MSc Music Engineering and Production is designed for graduates who want to further develop their music engineering and production skills, to establish a career as a professional producer in the music industry or related fields.
An important element of the music engineering masters is the practical application of your knowledge to generate highly creative work.
Allied areas are also examined, which allows graduates to apply their skills in many other media-related fields, including film and animation. Such a strategic approach to your higher-level study engenders responsibility, critical thinking, problem-solving, and the highly creative generation of musical and visual tangibles.
This Master’s programme is based at USW’s purpose-built campus, in the creative centre of Cardiff.
The MA Songwriting and Production course is delivered in the context of a thriving contemporary music and cultural scene in Wales. This innovative Songwriting and Production programme will inspire you to develop your own artistic voice, and make serious connections within the world of songwriting.
As well as offering numerous opportunities for collaboration, the course embraces the DIY philosophy of being able to fully produce your own original songs.
Designed for those interested in songcraft and studio production, you’ll learn a range of traditional and contemporary songwriting approaches, and have access to our well-equipped studios, rehearsal and writing rooms.
Your major project is reviewed and judged by an industry panel that includes our course ambassador, Gruff Owen CEO of Libertino Records.
Songwriting & Production and Blended Learning:
In most cases we prefer to be on campus, experiencing our songwriting workshops and creative events in real time. However, just like the rest of the music industry, we have had to rethink our approach and embrace new models to help minimise the risk. This has been an invigorating refresh, and one that has brought about new habits to embrace more permanently such as asynchronous songwriting co-writes, overseas guests beamed in via satellite, remote mixing and mastering etc.
This course has been devised in response to industry and student-led demand for practical training in make-up and hairdressing techniques for theatre, film, TV, fashion, festival, carnival and entertainment arenas.
Key features
- All tutors are industry specialists
- Campus facilities include a working theatre and photographic studios
- Students gain work experience on high profile films, TV series and West End shows
- Graduates are now working on major films, TV series, adverts, West End shows and magazine shoots
With pathways in Stage Management, Production Management, Lighting Design and Sound Design, this course offers practical and vocational training in our professionally equipped theatre and studio space.
Key features
- The Northbrook Theatre – our on-campus professional theatre
- Studio 21 – double truss studio space for rehearsals and performances
- ETC ION Lighting Desk and extensive selection of intelligent and generic fixtures
- Digico SD Series consoles
- Counterweight, hemp, motors and truss for flying and rigging
- Prompt desk, radio comms and cue lights
- Ten on-campus rehearsal studios
- AV mixer, projectors and video mapping software
An exciting course combining strong technical training, creative opportunities and industry experience. The course programme involves the study and practice of both traditional and innovative areas of musical performance. It includes in-depth vocal training, a wide range of acting techniques and technical dance training in jazz, tap, ballet, contemporary, pas de deux and commercial.
Key features
- Taught by professional performers, directors and choreographers
- 11 rehearsal studios, five with sprung dance floors and mirrors
- Professional-standard theatre with industry-level equipment, recently over-hauled with new lighting and sound systems
- Collaboration with make-up, costume and technical theatre students
- Alumni have been working in West End and UK touring shows, TV and film, and for many of the leading cruise ship entertainment companies
Recent alumni include Helen Woolf, who has been starring as Glinda on the Wicked UK tour having previously played the role in London’s West End; Alfie Parker, who has been performing in Kinky Boots having previously performed in School of Rock in London’s West End covering the lead role; and Blake Patrick Anderson who was in Starlight Express.
A dynamic and exciting course combining strong technical training, creative opportunities and industry experience. You will have the opportunity to train in acting and explore your own artistic practice.
The BA in Acting allows you to develop acting techniques through a series of different approaches to ensure that you are most employable and well placed to critique and contribute to the cultural landscape. The training focuses on different aspects of acting; the actor performer, the actor-director, the actor-activist, the actor-producer, the actor on film.
There are opportunities to collaborate with our theatre design, make up, props, technical and music students. In the second and third-year students will have the opportunity to specialise in writing, directing, producing, film, transmedia or comedy and design their own projects.
You will benefit from a variety of visiting practitioners and specialised workshops throughout the three years. This academic year we have had over 15 different practitioners run projects and workshops, including an audition workshop with David Gyasi.
The Year will cover the core acting principles and the craft of the actor, from a range of different practitioners and directors perspectives, both through theatre and screen practice. Students will cover, voice, movement, characterisation, text work, improvisation and impulse, presence, rehearsal process through to performance and audition technique, industry preparation.
We believe in an integrated and holistic approach to actor training, and that an actor never really concludes their learning, its is simply a continuous cycle of research, doing and reflection from workshop to workshop, job to job and year to year... So the course is content fluid and reflects a year cycle of doing, reflecting and learning suitable for all backgrounds and experiences.
To enable this we have articulated six key core elements of the actors craft or we like to refer to as the six DNA strands that make up the actor. These strands will be the focal point of the training and are also the same strands we work on in 'The Actor's Gym' with our professional actor network.
