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University of Reading, Film, Television and Theatre

My name is Adam O'Brien. So I am a lecturer in Film at the University of Reading, where I am also the Admissions Lead for this department, which is Film, Theatre and Television. It is nice to be able to connect with people virtually today and still be able to, still be able to communicate with you but I have to confess, it's a little bit of a shame not to be able to welcome you and introduce you to our departmental home, which is Minghella Studios. It was designed very much with the aim of sort of supporting and enabling this mix of academic research and creative practice. As well as being obviously home to our staff and our students, it's home to a team of specialist technicians. So we've got theatre specialists, we've got television specialists, we've got film specialists who work in this nice kind of interim space almost between the staff and the students, where they help us sort of deliver our teaching, but they also work quite closely with the students who are trying to always resolve particular kind of, sort of technical challenges or realise particular creative ambitions. The buildings also home to student led festivals, which every year kind of showcase and celebrate and give a really sort of significant platform to Film and Television Theatre work produced by our students. As well as this work being created for assessment purposes, it's also sort of put on in a way that can be celebrated by sort of friends and families and it's a nice combination of a sort of creative celebration but also a sort of vital part of our student studies and our building is also home to a great range of talks and Masterclasses from visiting professionals,whether these be sort of theatre makers, filmmakers, set designers, you know we got a range of experts who come and talk to our students sometimes as part of a course, sometimes just as a sort of bonus event, so to speak, which was very much the case last year when we were really excited to welcome Fernando Meirelles, who's not pictured here, but he was the filmmaker behind The Two Popes, which was recently quite a smash on Netflix and he's a Brazilian filmmaker and he kindly agreed to give our students a sneak preview of The Two Popes before it even screened on Netfli and visited our department and held a really exciting, sort of, masterclass with them, talking about his process, his sort of decision making and creative adventure preparing this film and also some of the sort of industrial business questions about how he liaised with Netflix, what Netflix let him do, what they didn't let him do. So I mean, it was a great event not least because Fernando Meirelles is the director behind City of God, which is a film that many of our students have actually studied as part of their work before and during their degree. So it was a lovely sort of example of the way we like to sort of position and approach creative work in our department.

So in this department, there are the following degree programs, Theatre and Performance, Film and Television and Film and Theatre, as well as joint honours programs with English Literature, Art and Creative Writing. There's an awful lot of opportunity for collaborative and extracurricular work, in which students move between the areas. So for example, we often find that our Film and Television students, maybe they want to sort of practice their lighting work or their sound work and they will then volunteer to participate in sort of theatre performances. So although these different degree programs are sort of different programs, it is worth remembering that there's really a real strong sense of sort of possibility between the disciplines. This is a useful breakdown of broadly how the different sort of components of study are portioned out for our students. So you'll see here that part of their studies are focussed on context and criticism. So, here where we might explore more, sort of, histories of Theatre and Film, particular debates, particular kind of theories of representation, of screen practice. So those modules, those studies tend to be a little bit more sort of essay and project based and then you'll see there's sort of equal emphasis over on the right hand side, on practice. But then all the opportunities to take options as well, whether this be an option to study sort of performance skills, whether to do sort of more theory for people who do want to do that, or as you can see, the opportunity to do professional placement. So this is a sort of module that supports students who identify a placement and to take that placement and then they write essays projects to kind of to sort of demonstrate how they've developed and what they've learned from those placements. It is worth mentioning that students can choose to pursue a non practice pathway if they want to focus on the writing and this also goes for joint honours students, joint honours students have the option to pursue practical work or a sort of theory only pathway.

So our department, Film Theatre and Television has for many years, had particular areas of expertise. So these would include sort of modern British Theatre, experimental Film and Theatre and Hollywood cinema. We've actually got one of those sort of oldest, longest running Film Studies departments in the country and this initially, as with a lot of Film Studies, has had quite a strong emphasis on American Cinema but more recently, there's been a real broadening and diversifying of that. So more recent developments include more of an emphasis on citizenship, thinking about how creative work, how Theatre, Film and Television, how it sort of participates in communities and can allow certain sort of movements and discussions and ideas to emerge in socially positive ways and it's more of an emphasis on digital forms and we've got more work being in the form of sort of video essays and digital sort of digital projects and also questions of sort of ecology in performance and film. I myself am a specialist in the questions of the environment in Film and Television and another colleague specialises in Ecology and Theatre and Environmental Theatre. So, this has been a real sort of developing sort of strength of the development in more recent years. After Christmas we're launching a new module on comedy, I think is one that students are particularly looking forward to. There's quite a range of assessment types that students do. So, I mentioned video essays and performances but there are blogs, there are projects, there are presentations. You can imagine, we're exploring the sort of virtual presentations as well as in-person presentations. Scripts, storyboards, lighting designs. So we really try to sort of support and enable various students with different and diverse ambitions. There is a central question of how and why certain creative decisions and techniques have the effects they do. Those effects might be social and political, might be sort of more immediate in terms of a particular film or particular theatrical performance but it's always sort of thinking creatively about sort of critical questions and thinking critically about creative questions. So I hope I've been able to communicate a pretty good sense of our department without being able to invite you to the building in person. So not just the content of that degrees but also the culture of the Department. So our students graduate not only with practical experiences and skills, but also a really thorough appreciation of how important creative practice is to our world. To representing that world and to contributing to it. So thank you very much for listening.