Design for Theatre and Screen BA (Hons)

You’ll learn all the essential design, making and technical skills you’ll need in your career, and put those skills into practice as you take part in work placements and exciting collaborative projects, such as working with TV Production students at Maidstone Television Studios.

You’ll also gain a deeper understanding of the discipline, learning about the history and theory of theatre and film arts, underpinned by art and design history.

Year One

Your first year offers tutor-led instruction to the role and responsibility of the designer. Projects include text analysis, introduction to designing a scale model for a theatre or screen-based performance and establishing industry-standard processes for designing. The emphasis is on establishing a secure foundation upon which future projects will rely, as well as an opportunity to develop a distinctive visual design language through costume and set design. Alongside this, students learn key skills in costume and prop making, including hand sewing and machine sewing, woodwork, metalwork, digital manipulation and technical drawing, amongst other skills.

Visual Narrative One
This unit challenges students to create individual responses to a given text through ‘anticipating a performance’, by way of set and costume design. You will be introduced to how knowledge and research support creative thinking and design development, through a combination of text analysis, contextual research, discussion, observation, storyboard, 2D and 3D speculative inquiry.

Visual Narrative Two
Designing for theatre or screen is a collaborative professional discipline: designers work with directors and makers to deliver dramatic impact, whether for theatre or screen. This unit introduces team-working and a range of approaches, methods and techniques where creative manipulation promotes dramatic storytelling and develops important skills involved in creating a visual language for screen or stage, including:

• Developing atmospheric environments
• Theatre and stagecraft
• Manipulating material and form to support a narrative
• Dramatic impact through the five elements of design.

Toolbox
You'll be given a practical induction into the workshop environments for the course, providing you with the opportunity to develop a ‘toolbox’ of skills needed for the design and fabrication of set models, costumes, application of craft skills. Using traditional and contemporary techniques in a workshop-based environment, the unit establishes students’ skills and ability to identify appropriate methods for the creation of a range of bespoke scenic elements. You are provided with working knowledge of processes, materials and techniques which are regarded as an industry standard. The unit engages students in understanding the position of the designer-maker as a practitioner in the performance industry. The unit also introduces you to digital skill applications.

Cultural Contexts 1
You'll be introduced to the histories, theories and practices that inform contemporary performance and production design. It explores the ways in which art history, contemporary art, cultural studies and the wider world influence designers. The unit provides you with the tools for research, analysis and interpretation to make informed readings of scenographic and filmic spaces. It examines the ways in which stories can be told through images, objects and spaces, and the ways in which audiences receive and interact with this information.