Film BA Honours

Why choose Film BA Honours at Middlesex?

If you want to work in the exciting world of film, you will need strong practical skills and solid theoretical knowledge. This highly respected course delivers both evidenced by the success of many of our graduates who have gone on to work on Star Wars productions, for Disney and the BBC, while some have set up their own companies or continued their studies at the National Film and Television School.

What you will gain

As well as learning foundational filmmaking skills that will help you develop your craft, you'll benefit from our extensive industry connections and placement opportunities.

Our students have produced outstanding films that have won many awards across film festivals.

What you will learn

You’ll have our state-of-the-art facilities at your fingertips to help develop your own creative identity and produce your best possible work. These include a TV production studio designed by Sony, post-production suites for editing, colour grading and sound editing, a sound dubbing studio for mixing Dolby Atmos, studios for recording ADR and foley, and a motion capture and greenscreen virtual studio. You'll also have access to our equipment loan store, The Kit Hub, where you can borrow a vast range of cameras, lighting and sound kit.

As we head up the UK-wide Creative Campus Network, you'll benefit from information and opportunities from our industry contacts. We're also partnered with Film London, ScreenSkills and the GLA Creative Academy to provide you with free access to additional industry-recognised resources and training.

Our partnerships with Avid, Canon, and others mean that you'll benefit from top equipment and development opportunities to help you with your future career. We've built strong partnerships with local film studios, allowing you to access work placement opportunities. Several of our students have worked at the London North Studios, as runners/marshals or set builders with Brandon B whose video work is seen by millions around the world.

By joining us on this course, you'll have a chance to:

• Benefit from new industry-recognised assessment strategies that we're developing
• Prepare for working life through our employability-focused modules across all three years
• Pick and choose activities that interest you through our ‘spotified’ system
• Learn to produce award-winning productions that are distributed across many short film festivals and industry events.

To find out more about this highly regarded course, please download the Film BA Honours specification (PDF).

Facilities

The facilities, studios and workshops at our £80 million purpose-built Grove building on campus in North London are recognised as among the best in the country. With a wide range of digital media, equipment, software and library facilities on-site, you'll benefit from unique levels of access to both the latest forms of technology and traditional tools with expert support to help you develop your work.

Our production facilities:

• Post-production suites for editing, colour grading and sound editing including hardware by Avid, Tangent and Blackmagic
• Audio dubbing studio for mixing Dolby Atmos with Avid S6 Console & 7.4.1 JBL Cinema Speaker System
• Motion capture & greenscreen virtual production studio.

Studio and location filming equipment:

• Over 50 high-end 4K cinema cameras
• Over 100 Canon & Sony DSLRs mirrorless kits with prime and zoom lenses
• Arri, Kinoflo and Aputure lighting kits
• Camera stabilisation systems including dolly tracks, motorised and manual sliders, GlideCam, mini jib arm and studio jib crane arm, EasyRig, gimbals
• Atomos monitors and external recorders
• Wireless video systems and wireless follow focus
• Wireless timecode systems with digital slates
• Sound Devices and Zoom sound recorders
• Sennheiser shotgun, stereo and ambisonic microphones
• Specialised location microphones including hydrophones, binaural, contact and boundary microphones
• Sennheiser wireless kits and DPA and Sennheiser lavalier microphones.

Digital media workshops:

• 80 iMacs and Mac Pro workstations
• Colour grading monitors
• Wacom Cintiq creative pen displays
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Avid Media Composer
• DaVinci Resolve
• ProTools
• iZotope RX.

Student Support

We offer lots of support to help you while you're studying including financial advice, wellbeing, mental health, and disability support.

Additional needs

We'll support you if you have additional needs such as sensory impairment or dyslexia. And if you want to find out whether Middlesex is the right place for you before you apply, get in touch with our Disability and Dyslexia team.

Wellness

Our specialist teams will support your mental health. We have free individual counselling sessions, workshops, support groups and useful guides.

Work while you study

Our Middlesex Unitemps branch will help you find work that fits around uni and your other commitments. We have hundreds of student jobs on campus that pay the London Living Wage and above. Visit the Middlesex Unitemps page.

Financial support

You can apply for scholarships and bursaries and our MDX Student Starter Kit to help with up to £1,000 of goods, including a new laptop or iPad.

We have also reduced the costs of studying with free laptop loans, free learning resources and discounts to save money on everyday things. Check out our guide to student life on a budget.

Careers

How can the BA Film support your career?

We know that it is a great time to be studying film. The industry is booming and the film and television industries are crying out for new talent. Several of our 2022 cohort have already got jobs at Envy, at Disney, on Netflix’s Top Boy, an indie for Channel 4, HBO, African Movie Channel, editing the Stranger Things campaign, even working on Queen's Jubilee BBC live coverage.

Middlesex University is fortunate to be surrounded by film studios, with which we have established relationships allowing you to find work placement and experience opportunities. Several of our students have worked at the London North Studios, as runners/marshals or set builders with Brandon B whose video work is seen by millions around the world.

Our graduates go into entry-level roles in film and television, such as runners, production assistants, social media coordinators, assistant editors, and location assistants, and then move quickly into more senior-level roles such as assistant producers, junior editors, assistant location managers, and casting directors.

Several of our graduates have set up their own businesses in videography, social media, and visual marketing, examples include Speeding Films, Aquifer Film Studio.

Our alumni are close contacts and come back to tell us about working at the BBC, Channel 4, QVC International, ILM, Shine TV, the Venice Biennale, HBO, Netflix and Sky Sports.

MDXworks

Our employability service, MDXworks will launch you into the world of work from the beginning of your course, with placements, projects and networking opportunities through our 1000+ links with industry and big-name employers in London and globally.

Our dedicated lifetime career support, like our business start-up support programme and funding for entrepreneurs, has put us as a top 10 university for producing CEOs – Novuana, 2023.

MDXcelerator Student Start-Up Support

Want to be your own boss? You'll have the chance to pitch your business to gain mentoring and grants of up to £15,000.

Global network

You’ll study with students from 122 countries who’ll hopefully become part of your global network. And after you graduate, we'll still support you through our alumni network to help you progress in your chosen career.

Interview & portfolio

Filmmaking is a diverse and collaborative activity. At Middlesex, we privilege practice-based learning and focus on employability skills. Applicants who meet our entry requirements will be invited to submit a digital portfolio. Portfolios which meet our criteria will convert your conditional offer to an unconditional one.

For your Digital Portfolio you can choose one of the following options. Whichever option you choose needs to be uploaded to the Middlesex applicant portal.

Option 1

Provide an example of one film you previously worked on and a contextual statement of 100 words or less explaining your role and contribution to the film. It is expected that the film was part of a collaboration with others where you contributed to the group effort. You can choose an example from a college or A-Level project. If you choose to submit a film as your digital portfolio you need to upload a single PDF or Microsoft word document containing your contextual statement and the URL link to where the video is hosted.

Option 2

A creative digital portfolio evidencing examples of practice related to filmmaking such as painting, drawing, photography, visual design, sonic art, narrative prose or screenwriting. If you choose this option, you need to combine your work into a single PDF document and include a contextual statement of 100 words or less explaining how your practice relates to filmmaking. In the case of sonic art, please supply a URL link to your work.

Option 3

If a candidate has no examples of prior work, we will ask you to complete a task responding to a set one-page treatment and do one of the following:

• Create a storyboard for every shot you visualise in your response to the treatment
• Create a production plan detailing how you will go about organising a film shoot to make a production based on the treatment
• Write a script for the treatment putting it into dramatic form.

If you choose Option 3 you need to upload a single PDF containing your work and a contextual statement of 100 words or less explaining your response to the 1-page treatment.

What we look for in your portfolio:

• Evidence of an informed interest in film and/or television.
• Prior knowledge of some aspects of filmmaking practice.
• Examples of creative or critical thinking in one or more of the following areas:
  • visual communication (drawing, photographs, videos, graphic design, storyboards);
  • storytelling (writing or filmmaking);
  • film craft skills (camera operating, sound recording, video editing).

Fees & funding

The fees below are for the 2024/25 academic year:

UK students¹

Full-time: £9,250

Part-time: £77 per taught credit

International students²

Full-time students: £16,600

Part-time students: £138 per taught credit

Additional costs

The following course-related costs are included in the fees:

• A free electronic textbook for every module
• All printing and copying required for your study
• Self-service laptops available for loan for a maximum of 24 hours
• Audio-visual equipment available for loan, including digital stills cameras, digital video recorders, digital audio recorders.

The following course-related costs are not included in the fees and you may be required to purchase these to complete the course. The costs are approximate and may change due to changes in pricing at the retailer.

• Your filmmaking expenses, for example, location rental, transportation, catering for cast and crew, props and set decoration materials, etc. The amount you may spend – to be shared by the core filmmaking team – varies year by year. You will generally spend more money on your films as you progress through the course, but increasingly raise your budgets through fundraising activities, including crowdfunding
• Additional books that you wish to purchase
• External hard drives for your filmmaking projects. These vary widely in price, but you will want to buy good quality drives (eg, G-Tech) to protect your work. You must plan to back up everything to at least one other drive – preferably two.

Scholarships and bursaries

To help make uni affordable, we do everything we can to support you including our:

• MDX Excellence Scholarship offers grants of up to £2,000 per year for UK students
• Regional or International Merit Awards which reward International students with up to £2,000 towards course fees
• Our MDX Student Starter Kit to help with up to £1,000 of goods, including a new laptop or iPad.

Find out more about undergraduate funding and all of our scholarships and bursaries.

Fees disclaimers

1. UK fees: The university reserves the right to increase undergraduate tuition fees in line with changes to legislation, regulation and any government guidance or decisions. The tuition fees for part-time UK study are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

2. International fees: Tuition fees are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

Any annual increase in tuition fees as provided for above will be notified to students at the earliest opportunity in advance of the academic year to which any applicable inflationary rise may apply.

We’ll carefully manage any future changes to courses, or the support and other services available to you, if these are necessary because of things like changes to government health and safety advice, or any changes to the law.

Any decisions will be taken in line with both external advice and the University’s Regulations which include information on this.

Our priority will always be to maintain academic standards and quality so that your learning outcomes are not affected by any adjustments that we may have to make.

At all times we’ll aim to keep you well informed of how we may need to respond to changing circumstances, and about support that we’ll provide to you.