Birmingham City University

M.A - Feature Film Development

MA Feature Film Development will help you to understand what is required to make sure a major film is ready to be pitched to investors. You’ll learn all about the extensive pre-production activities all big-budget movies currently go through before they are green-lit. You’ll be taken through each stage of pre-production development to navigate, understand and avoid common problems.

MA Feature Film Development is suitable for Directors, Producers, Editors, Film Makers, Screenwriters, Directors of Photography, Concept Artists, Production Designers, Art Directors, Animators, Technical Directors, Story Artists, & Pre-Visualisation Artists looking to start or further a career in the feature film.

This course is part of Birmingham City University’s Film Futures suite, designed with industry to reflect the growing need for highly skilled film graduates who can fulfill roles within the international film industry. Focusing on film development, pre-production, story art, and pre-visualisation, you’ll become part of a vibrant and multidisciplinary film community.

What's covered in the course?

You will create, as part of a team, a full feature film story and pre-visualisation reel, demonstrating all the film's narrative and action elements. You will learn how to workshop the essential narrative from a screenplay in order to create a believable, immersive animatic that plays out the core story in full, including all key performance and action components.

How you will learn
You will take part in story workshops, extracting key structural elements from a narrative structure and iteratively develop action and performance staging through a multi layered story process. This will help you gain an understanding of character arcs and resistances essential to immersive believability.

You will learn how to make a story and pre-visualisation reel that grabs an audience and takes them on a believable journey. You will gain experience working within a pre-production team, obtaining a unique perspective of feature film development pipelines - how it is project managed and implemented within milestone scheduling.

Practical Application

During the course, your contribution to the pipeline will become your ‘portfolio of practice’ showcasing your specialism and team skills, therefore proving your professionalism.

The assignments reflect real-world pre-production practices and are designed to develop the key skills that are necessary to work in the international film industries.

You’ll have access to industry-standard software, utilized by major film studios.