Congratulations on being accepted for the BA Filmmaking course. I hope you are as excited about joining us as we are about having you with us for the next three years.
With only a matter of weeks to go until the start of term, these are exciting times for everyone. We are putting the finishing touches to the timetable and this will be explained to you, along with an overview of your year, at a welcome meeting in your first week with us.
Please note a AY23-24 handbook will be available once you have matriculated.
Your welcome week timetable can be viewed here:
BA FM Welcome and Induction Schedule 2023
There are a number of events organised during this week which will help you prepare for your studies and give you an introduction to the Conservatoire. You will also have the opportunity to meet your Head of Programme, your Head of Department and other key members of staff. These events are compulsory and it is important that you look carefully through the schedule and identify those that apply to you. You will matriculate (register on your programme) on Monday 25 September.
Also in that first week, you will be required to pay the £450. Please see – https://portal.rcs.ac.uk/matriculation/ for how to pay this. For other additional costings please view this document: BA-Film-Making-Programme-Costs-2023-24.
The additional costs are used for a number of things:
- 2 x BA Filmmaking crew t-shirts (to be worn on official filming duties)
- Repair or replacement of small items of kit during a production without delay
- Subsidy of transport/admission of occasional field trips
- Avid Media Composer Handbooks
- Fully stocked unit bags.
If you are unable to pay in full at matriculation, a payment scheme can be set up.
There is an element of pre-entry work to be done in the next few weeks. We have a viewing list of films, which you will watch as part of your curriculum, however there are some which you need to watch before you join us. The films are:
City Lights (1931), Stagecoach (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Mean Streets (1973), Do the Right Thing (1989).
I appreciate you may have seen some or all of them before but since they form the basis of some of the teaching in the first term, I would like you to watch them again.
In Film and Television Studies we occasionally use social media as a teaching tool. To help in this, I would like you, if you do not have one already, to set up a Twitter account. Once you have done this, I need you to follow Dr Andy Dougan on @andydougan. Andy will not be following you back, so please do not be offended, it is simply a matter of maintaining professional distance. As a rule, staff will not be your friend on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram or any other social media.
Privacy Notice: We take your privacy very seriously. Please find a copy of our Privacy Notice at: www.rcs.ac.uk/policy/privacy.
We also have a departmental Twitter account. This is @RCSFilm which you should follow as soon as possible; this one will follow you back. Also, once you are on Twitter, it would be helpful ultimately, if you could follow your new classmates. The aim is to create not so much a class as a learning community where you can share views, comments, and information to your mutual benefit.
As part of that learning community I would urge you to establish an account at Letterboxd. This is effectively a ‘Facebook for films’ in which you can track what you have watched, share opinions and reviews, and follow classmates as well as colleagues in other years. It is a very open format that requires no sharing of personal information, but it is good for online debate and charting your viewing. Having set up an account I would encourage you to follow others on the course including Andy Dougan who, on this platform only, will follow you back.
If there are any questions about what has been outlined above, or anything else to do with the course, please do not hesitate to contact me at r.tallan@rcs.ac.uk.
We look forward to seeing you and your colleagues in September.
Ray Tallan, Head of Film