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.

On this page:

Overview
Benefits
Curriculum
Modules

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)

The Creative Laboratory

Today, there is a vast array of books and courses that claim to explain what creativity is and how you can harness it. So, what tools and methods can we use to help creativity to flourish? What works, and why? This module combines the study of key definitions of creativity - historical, philosophical, those of artists, practitioners of various sorts, and so on – with an exploration, in a practical and hands-on fashion, of the way that things like play, improvisation, serendipity and the aleatory can result in creative outputs. Learning that failure is part of the creative process, and how to move forwards from that, as well as adapting and resilience skills, are also key parts of the module.

The module will be assessed by an individual diary made up of different media.

How Writing Works I

This module introduces you to the critical study of writing in relation to its historical, technological and social dimensions. We will explore the origins and development of writing systems and the technologies through which they are mediated, from proto-writing systems such as the quipu or ‘talking knots’ of the Inca people, to cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts inscribed in clay, and on to alphabetic scripts transmitted in handwriting, print, or digital code. We will consider the impact on writing of developments in print and digital cultures, and the proliferation of new interfaces and devices through which it is practiced and encountered in the twenty-first century. Theories of the written word and its relation to memory, orality, the body, the brain, thought, artificial intelligence, haunting, magic and ideology will be introduced.

The module will be assessed by a 3,000 word critical essay.

Writing I

This practical module will explore and apply key concepts, approaches, and techniques necessary for the shaping of narratives in writing. The possibilities of writing today will be investigated in the widest possible manner: from writing that exists in socially diverse spaces, outside of any formal context of publication (graffiti, tattoos, public inscriptions, protest banners, asemic writing, concrete poetry), to writing for legacy media forms on page and screen, and writing for digital and social media. Relevant genres will extend from spoken-word poetry to screenwriting, from expository writing to the personal essay, and from literary fiction to SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy), YA (Young Adult), and suspense and historical fiction.

The module will be assessed by a 3,000 word portfolio made up of short written pieces.

Understanding Performance I

This module will explore extra-theatrical performances through the work of event makers in various contexts. It will introduce you to performance studies and examine how words, images, and performances are used in different contexts to create emotional, visceral and intellectual responses in their audiences and/or participants. You will consider the socio-cultural contexts, decision making processes, and the different roles undertaken to make extra-theatrical performance.

The module will be assessed by a 3,000 word critical essay.

Preparation for Performance I

This module introduces some of the fundamental preparatory practices vital for exceptional performance, and students will develop expressive and technical skills in voice and movement that will enhance their capabilities to respond in imaginative contexts. You will focus on your own functioning while working together to explore the processes that allow the mind, voice and body to work in unison for expressive communication. There will be a focus on unlearning to encourage you to identify and release habitual body and speech patterns that will allow you to extend the range of your physical functioning.

This module will be assessed by a 6-8 minute short movement and vocal presentation and a 1,000 word reflective learning diary.

How Moving Images Work I

This module will introduce you to the critical study of the traditions of moving images from their origins to modern and future applications; from Muybridge’s kinetoscope of a horse in motion to six-second films on Tik Tok.

In the first half the term, we will address with the immediate philosophical questions raised by the phenomenon of moving images: what are moving images beyond a trick of the mind, or 24 frames per second of still images received by the optic nerve? Are they more than Plato’s shadows on a cave wall? And how do they tell stories? We shall take this last question as the basis for our work in the second half of the term where we will explore the way that moving images draw on sources from the humanities (as myth, literature and history) as the stuff of narrative. Here, we will study the way that these materials are adapted into film and the shaping impact of moving images on narrative.

This module will be assessed by a 2,500 words and accompanying images picture essay (a form of storyboard).

Making Moving Images Work I

This module will introduce the practice of making moving images for the future-facing modern world, building on the wide-ranging philosophical discussions emanating from the critical theory module.

Whilst learning the basics of lighting, shooting, recording sound and editing, you will be encouraged to experiment with a variety of story-telling forms. You will be tasked with adapting a brief work of your choice from the humanities, visualising the city around you: London. It could draw on an entry from Pepys Diary from the 17^th Century or an extract from the more current White Teeth. It could reach beyond the humanities to tell a narrative about a medical breakthrough at UCLH or a financial swap in the City. The key is to experiment with the potential of the moving image and to develop your skillset. Collaboration is to be encouraged but not required.

This module will be assessed by a 5 minute vlog and a picture essay reflection on your learning experience of the specific film-making process.

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:

The Collaborative Economy (30 credits)

The Collaborative Economy connects your creative and critical skills to the wider world. This module builds on the skills you have learned in the first year of study and asks you to apply those skills to issues arising when people work together in networked organisation. As our work and social systems become more and more complex and intertwined, multi-faceted problems are less likely to be solved by individuals. They are resolved by people working in networked teams, both official and unofficial.

This module introduces the knowledge, skills and processes needed to collaborate to articulate issues, formulate solutions, and create content. It’s a practice-based module that requires you to learn and implement several team working methods and processes. These skills will then be applied to answering a question introduced by a non-academic organisations (businesses, charities, campaigning groups, non-government organisations, etc.).

The Collaborative Economy is a foundation for your future activities because it asks you to apply your creative and critical university training beyond the academy. You will reflect on how different factors (including social, cultural, economic, ethnicity) influence outcomes and perspectives in group working and how this can be addressed in the way teams are set up and how they operate. In the context of the workplace of the future, students will learn and practice collaborative processes including Liberating Structures, Open Space Technology, and Sprint.

This module will be assessed by a 2,000 word reflective report, a 15 minute group presentation and peer assessment.

Collaborative Design for Society

Many of the problems we tackle and the contexts we work in are interdisciplinary in nature. No longer is one set of expertise enough to confront the challenges we face big or small. Being able to work with people, information and techniques from outside your discipline are key skills. Communication and teamwork skills can take on a very different angle in an interdisciplinary context. However, these skills are not easy to develop and require experience and practice.

In this module you will spend 10 weeks working on complex problems in interdisciplinary teams. Your team will work through several project stages, from creating a design brief to developing ideas and then prototyping or piloting. You will need to create solutions that take into account the context of the problem itself, the possible stakeholders and the constraint and requirements of the problem. You will need bring their technical knowledge from your degree programme and apply it to the problem you and your team are working on.

By viewing the UN Sustainability Goals through the lens of the local community you will be able to see the impact that your work can have. You will work on projects arising from, and connected to, the local community. You will develop your project work skills while generating innovative and effective solutions to the problems posed.

This module will be assessed by a 20 minute team oral presentation, a team design show/exhibition, a 10 page or 5 minute team design process report/project, peer assessment and an individual skills reflective essay.

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.

How Writing Works II

This module will explore the nature of authorship and the philosophical, social, critical and legal questions it gives rise to. It will focus on the intricacies of the writer’s relation to society and to their chosen material. We will consider ideas of authorship within their changing cultural and historical conditions, ranging from the beginnings of the idea of the modern author as (perhaps) a function of copyright law, mass reproducibility of texts and the rise of Western individualism, to twentieth-century diagnoses of the ‘Death of the Author’ and postcolonial hybridization of the role of the individual author with traditions of orality and collective expression.

We will also study the conditions of authorship today, when phenomena such as uncreative writing, artificial intelligence, sampling, and hypertext seem to have knocked the creative individual off his or her perch, and yet the task of the writer who wants to be read is more than ever centred on the establishment and maintenance of a personal brand within a competitive attention economy (often – ironically – achieved using social media platforms to which writers have to give up their personal data and the copyright on their words for free). Topics on this module may include, but will not be limited to: the basis of the writer’s authority and entitlement to address their chosen subject matter; the question of writerly and readerly empathy and its ethical complexities; the relation of writing to activism and to social and romantic life; the question of cultural appropriation, especially when writing across differences of race, gender, class and power; and the social consequences of writing and publication, including offence, censorship and legal challenges.

This module will be assessed by a 3,000 word critical essay.

Writing II

In this practical module, you will apply the concepts and approaches studied in year one, while exploring life in contemporary London as subject matter. You will study examples of writing about London from a diverse range of authors in a wide variety of different genres and forms, from essays, novels and screenplays to spoken-word poetry, and will analyse how they shape imaginative representations of the city and its stories. You will consider, for instance, how differences of class, race and gender figure in urban experience; how city-dwellers navigate and use space and place; how writing itself may be inscribed or articulated within or upon urban space; and how the pleasures and dangers of London living influence the kinds of story that take place there. You will be encouraged to engage with local communities in East London, with the wider life around campus, and with the institutions of writing and culture in the city, and will draw on what you have learnt to produce your own contribution to London literature, in a form and genre of your choosing.

This module will be assessed by a 3,000 word portfolio made up of a creative piece in any genre (2,500 words) and a learning diary reflecting on your critical approach to the creative task.

Understanding Performance II

This module explores the critical study of the social, cultural and historical aspects of performance. You will explore the origin and development of drama, theatre and performance as an autonomous art form. Emphasis will be given to the development of forms and genres of performance (including Greek, Shakespeare, Naturalism, Epic, Artaud, Contemporary, Post-dramatic, and Digital) and on the ways in which performance makers have understood performance and sought to affect audiences and the watching world.

This module will be assessed by 3,000 word critical essay.

Preparation for Performance II

Using the individual skills developed in Preparation for Performance I, this module introduces the knowledge, skills and processes needed to work together to make ensemble theatre performances. You will gain a working knowledge of the key vocabularies used in theatre making and will understand and employ the basic notions of ensemble work and be able to move fluidly together, and to recognise and follow shared group impulses.

A key element of the module will be gaining confidence to create innovative and detailed devised work and, in keeping with the theme of applied practice, you will synthesise the various elements of the module training into a devised performance.

The emphasis on collaboration will allow you to learn in relation and reaction to your peers. You will build a sense of trust and impulse together so that you can work instinctively as a group and take risks together. Lessons will include improvisation exercises and introductions to fundamental acting techniques.

This module will be assessed by a 10-12 minute group performance and a 1,000 word reflective learning diary.

How Moving Images Work II

This module explores modern fiction-films in order to deepen students’ understanding of narrative and of the way that films tell their stories. Our focus will be on plot and its possibilities - for example, the choices a protagonist makes at a moment of crisis – and the way that films narrate them. We shall examine film’s portrayal of conflict, crises, digressions, and variations, in order to follow the various paths that the moving-image journey can take. At the same time, we will engage with the process of filmmaking and get to grips with the skills required to film a fiction narrative: the ability to work with actors to bring a script to life, and to work with a film crew. In particular – looking first at films that followed the Dogme manifesto of 1990s Scandinavia, and continuing with other films that follow constraints, such as drama documentaries, ad-libbed films and found-footage films - we will concentrate on the often-productive effect of constraints (whether financial, political or self-imposed) on the creative process in a way that speaks particularly eloquently to the situation of student filmmakers.

Guests from industry will also continue to contribute to the exploration of specific themes, e.g. how to elicit a screen performance, how to create tension in a scene, how to craft an original aesthetic, and how to embrace the restrictions of budget.

This module will be assessed by a 2,500 word picture essay comparing and contrasting case studies of restriction and creativity.

Making Moving Images II

This module follows on from Making Moving Images I and provides a practice-based development of skills, focused on the making of a short fiction film, which requires a more complex range of creative responsibilities. You will have the option to choose between a diverse selection of scripts, drawn from across the humanities.

Working in small groups, you will rehearse with actors in a studio, learn to block their performance for the camera and direct the shooting and coverage required for an edit. You will make one 5-minute film, intended to be shown to a live audience at the end of year. The film will be adapted either from a work that students have studied on critical Writing or Performance modules within the programme or from students’ own evolving work on related practical modules. You will have the choice of filming in the studio or on location.

This module will be assessed by a 5 minute fiction film (group), a portfolio of individual contributions to the film and a 1,500 word picture essay reflection on your own personal experience and learning curve through the film-making process.

To complete your module section, you will be required to take one of the following optional modules:

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.

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:

BASC0022 Interactions of Music and Science (not running in 2023/24)
BASC0032 Critical Race Theory
ELCS0046 Of, On and In London
LITC0013 21st Century Fiction
LITC0037 Literatures and Cultures of Play

Year 3 (Level 6)

You are required to take the following compulsory modules:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

Collaborative 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.

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.

Protecting and Managing Creative Content

The starting point for this module is the fact that a creative output can be anything from a short story, book, or research paper to computer coding, a video, film, an art installation, a blogpost or a photograph or other kind of curated output. You may have already been involved in the development of your own or someone else’s creative outputs and/ or as part of your degree programme, you are creating outputs, either on your own or as part of a group. So how can you capitalise on this creative process and develop an appreciation and practical knowledge to turn what you learn into something sustainable and accessible? What kinds of entrepreneurial thinking do you need to turn ideas into assets?

This module is distinctive in its approach and aims to promote an inclusive approach to protecting and managing creative outputs. This module will enable you to examine the relationships between creative content development and the legal protections and preventions that practitioners face. It takes a holistic and transferable perspective to the processes involved in creating and managing creative content. It will support you to develop a detailed understanding, in our digital age, of contracts, rights management, and attitudes to and application of national and international Intellectual Property and Copyright principles and laws and an understanding of related IP rights such as patents and trademarks.

This module will be assessed by a 2,500 word concept map and a 10 minute individual presentation.

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: