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The BA Creative Arts and Humanities Programme

The BA Creative Arts and Humanities Programme will enable you to develop both your creative and critical skills, focusing on the role of narrative across writing, moving image, and performance.

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Overview

UCL’s BA Creative Arts and Humanities is an interdisciplinary degree that will enable you to develop both your creative and critical skills, focusing on the role of narrative across three forms of creative practice:

  • Writing: narratives for paper, screen, and the digital sphere in fiction and non-fiction genres
  • Moving image: making narratives for screen, both fictional and documentary, from static images, storyboards, texts, and scripts, to filming, final edit and display.
  • Performance: working with voice, body, and movement to communicate ideas and emotions through performance for stage, film and digital media

Working with academics as well as industry practitioners, you will develop your knowledge and critical understanding of these modes of creative practice in historical, contemporary and future-facing contexts. You will also develop your own creative skills and explore what creativity means in different contexts and how it can be harnessed for meaningful impact in society.

The degree will encourage you to ground your creative expression in practical engagement, with audiences, with communities, and with different organisations or employers. You will learn the skills of collaboration, learning how to create with and for others, and develop a range of skills that can be applied across a range of roles and sectors.

Based at our new campus in Stratford, UCL East, you will be part of a community of students studying interdisciplinary degrees in both arts and science subjects that are focused on creating, designing and making, with a strong emphasis on active engagement with the world to effect change.

Benefits

  • You will develop advanced level skills in narrative and other forms of communication across three different modes of creative practice: writing, performance and moving image. You will develop an understanding of how these modes work with and influence one another, and be able to develop your own powerful narratives. 
  • You will benefit from world-class research across the arts and humanities at UCL, ranked 5th in the world for these disciplines (THE World University Rankings 2022 by subject), as well as from creative practitioners working in different fields. 
  • You will be able to specialise depending on your area of interest to develop high-level skills in writing, performance or moving image, to prepare you to become a practitioner yourself or take your creative and critical skills into a wide range of sectors. 
  • You will learn how to think critically and act collaboratively, focused on how to use creativity to solve problems, generate fresh perspectives or influence change.
  • You will be part of a vibrant community of researchers, creators and makers at our new campus, UCL East, and have access to the rich variety of London’s creative and cultural organisations. 

Curriculum (structure)

The programme is made up of 120 credits of study each year. It is structured to enable you to engage with three modes of creative practice (writing, performance and moving image), both critically and practically. At the same time, you will study modules that focus on the role that these forms of practice play in generating interdisciplinary solutions to real world problems, and on the application of these skills in contexts outside the university. 

Please note that the list of modules given here is indicative. This information is published a long time in advance of enrolment and module content, assessment pattern and availability is subject to change.

Modules

You will take each of the following modules each year. All modules are worth 15 credits unless otherwise stated. 

Year 1 (Level 4)

You will then choose one 15 credit elective module from UCL that will complement your choices. You will make this choice in discussion with your Personal Tutor. Choices include:

Year 2 (Level 5)

You will take the following compulsory modules:

You will be required to select three of the following optional modules, which must include at least one ‘pair’ of critical/practice modules (e.g. both Writing modules) and one other ‘practice’ based module.

To complete your module section, you will be required to take two of the following optional modules. Note that choice of modules in your second year will affect the options available to you in your final year because of the requirement to have completed relevant Level 5 modules to be able to enrol on Level 6 modules (for example, you may not be able to take Level 6 Performance modules if you have not selected Level 5 Performance modules).

In consultation with the Personal Tutor, and subject to timetabling constraints, you may also be able to select an elective module in place of one of the options listed above (max 15 credits). Elective modules are typically selected from departments offering related disciplines in the Faculties of Arts and Humanities or Social and Historical Sciences. Please note that these modules may be taught at the Bloomsbury campus rather than the UCL EAST campus and so you will be required to fund your travel to the other campus. Your choices include:

Year 3 (Level 6)

You are required to take the following compulsory modules:

BASC0073 Final-year project (60 credits)

The final-year project is the culmination of your course of study. Here, you are given the space to explore your discipline or disciplines of creative practice at significant depth and breadth, drawing on their learning over your full degree programme. The final-year project may consist of a single piece of work (and extended piece of writing, a substantial, graduation film, or a fully-fledged performance, for example) or it may consist of a portfolio of shorter pieces. In all cases, it must exhibit an overall conceptual unity and an assessment of this unity will play a role in grading. You may decide to draw on a single creative practice or you may decide to use more than one discipline of creative practice. A portfolio, then, might consist of a combination of film, performance and pieces of writing, or it might simply be a substantial piece of writing, for example. 

Projects must be designed with audiences in mind and must be suitable for exhibition, screening, performance or publication, as appropriate. The products of all students’ projects will form the material of a graduation show.
This module will be assessed by up to 15,000 words of prose or up to 24 minutes of film/media or up to 50 minutes performance.
BASC0076 The Creative Professional

This module aims to prepare you for today’s rapidly changing world of work, looking at the impacts of technology on working contexts and processes, whilst balancing that with what it means to be human in these environments. The module will equip you with knowledge and skills that will help you to be resilient, flexible, and productive in a wide variety of professional contexts, irrespective of the sector you might choose to work in or the type of work you would like to do. 

Building on the interdisciplinary nature of this degree’s delivery, this final year module offers you the chance to explore which roles are best suited to your individual ambitions and strengths, giving you space to reflect on your own preferred working contexts (leader or team member? Employee or entrepreneur? Commercial, cultural, or charitable sector? Large or small organisation?) and to shape effective job-seeking materials.  

Alongside this practical career-focused exploration, you will explore recent writings on the creative workplace: for example, the work of Mikkelsen and Martin (2016) underlining the need to be both a generalist and a specialist, or by engaging with Neumeier’s five metaskills – feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning – which he believes are essential for reaching potential in the creative workplace (Neumeier, 2013).

The module will be assessed by a professional portfolio comprising of a CV and a blog or video which showcases your skills and ambitions and a 2,000 word/4 minutes film/media content response to one of the theories/works explored in the module.

You are required to select one of the following practice-based modules at Level 6:

BASC0078 Writing III

This module prepares you with the skills and techniques needed to conceive, develop and complete a substantial writing project. Through the study of a diverse range of examples from modern and contemporary writing and from writers’ reflections on their own practices, we will explore how to develop ideas, including the use of freewriting, free-association, dreaming, improvisation, chance procedures, and mind-altering techniques and substances; how to keep track of, order and refine those ideas, including the use of journals, notetaking and research carried out with various kinds of hardware and software; how to plan, plot or structure a work in progress; how to develop fruitful and orderly writing practices and habits; how to draft and revise your work; how to give feedback on work in progress by other people, and take feedback on your own; how to abandon and learn from wrong turns and false starts; and how to edit, including fact- and continuity-checking.

This module will be assessed by a 3,000 word portfolio demonstrating your engagement with the themes of the module.

BASC0074 Making Moving Images III

This practice-based module will enable you to develop your filmmaking ability in devising a creative response to a set brief from an industrial client. This could be an advert for commerce or a polemic using moving images with the sole object to persuade the client. It could be a suggested Christmas ad for John Lewis using mythology or an animatic for a charity employing a militant manifesto.   

You will design, prep, shoot and edit a “persuasive” piece, using the ideas gleaned from the course. Fiction or non-fiction, moving storyboard, or a flowing sound scape set to a single image:  the response to the brief will be up to you to decide. The intention is that this piece of work should focus them on the problem-solving ability to engage with the application of moving images. The duration of the piece is deliberately short to encourage you to distil your ideas, and to crystallise them into a moving image mode that will persuade and engage its intended client quickly and precisely. The learning experience will contribute to the future attempt to make a more developed and longer film (or approximation thereof) in the graduate project. 

This module will be assessed by a 1-2 minute persuasive piece alongside a 3-5 minute oral presentation to the client and a 1,500 word reflective piece on the process of negotiating the brief, making the 'persuasive' piece and screening it to the client.

BASC0075 Preparation for Performance III

Using the individual and ensemble skills developed in Preparation for Performance I and Preparation for Performance II, and anticipating the demands of the Final Year Project, this module builds upon and develops the knowledge, skills and processes needed to devise theatre performances from particular source material.

Inspired by examples from contemporary theatre practitioners we will explore: the criteria for choosing a stimulus; how to research a stimulus; how to establish objectives and boundaries; some strategies for starting; how to recognise forms, genres, and styles; how to identify, develop and/or impose dramaturgical structures; and how to refine, rehearse, and preview for performance.

This module will be assessed by a 12-15 minute group performance and a 1,000 word creative journal.

You will then select modules from the following list:

BASC0065 Collaborative Writing

This module will expand upon the skills acquired in the core creative modules and the concepts studied in the critical modules, by exploring writing as a collaborative practice in which we speak not just for others but with them. We will explore experiments in collaborative writing by studying examples ranging from philosophical manifestoes to found texts, from chain novels to dialogic or epistolary texts, and from fan fiction to scriptwriting produced by a ‘writers’ room’. We will also study the theoretical and practical questions raised by collaborative writing, such as the challenges it poses to concepts of individual creativity and the ownership of ideas, and the varieties of tact, self-knowledge and interpersonal understanding that it calls for. And we will apply this knowledge to the development of collaborative practices among the students, producing and revising new collaborative works of writing.

This module will be assessed by a collaborative piece up to 3,000 words and an individual 1,000 word critical reflection on the process and theory of collaborative writing.

BASC0077 Understanding Performance III The Play Making Process

This module will explore the nature of how plays work on stage, how they are heard in performance, how they are worked on in rehearsal, and how they are read by those who are working on them to mount a production. It will consider some of the traditional roles and structures of theatre making, in particular the playwright, the dramaturg, and the director (when acting as shaper of stage narrative).

We will study translation, adaptation, and new media technologies in the performance of old plays. Students will consider the issues and themes of a play, its contemporary impact, and how it relates to the social and cultural context and political circumstances of both the time the new production will be set and the current situation.

This module will be assessed by a 500 word coursework and a 2,000 word coursework.

In consultation with your Personal Tutor, and subject to timetabling constraints, you may also be able to select an Elective module in place of one of the options listed above (max 15 credits). Elective modules are typically selected from departments offering related subjects in the Faculties of Arts and Humanities or Social and Historical Sciences. Please note that these modules may be taught at the Bloomsbury campus rather than the UCL EAST campus and so you will be required to fund your travel to the other campus. Your choices include: