MA in Production Design for Film and TV

Having graduated from St. Mary's last year I spent the summer deciding what my next course of action would be and what direction I wanted to head in regarding my career. During my final year at St. Mary's I had thoroughly enjoyed working on a variety of shows inside and outside of uni, focusing on set and prop design. By the end of the year I had designed and constructed a number of sets and props for a variety of shows at uni and gained a huge amount of experience in professional theatre. It was such a joy to wake up every morning head down to uni and spend the day in the workshop sketching out designs for props and set pieces and then spending the day bringing them to life using a variety of materials. Needless to say once I graduated I was at somewhat of a lose deciding what I was suppose to spend my time doing. It wasn't until a month or so after graduating that my girlfriend suggested I apply to do an MA in set design. This was a stroke of genius as, although I had loved spending the year designing and building things I lacked the technical skill required for professional work and as I explored the idea of an MA I found that it would give me the additional skills I needed to properly seek employment in the industry.

I applied and was accepted onto the course at Kingston University studying an MA in Production Design  for Film and  TV and have spent the last year working intensely on a number of projects tailored to give you the skills required for working in an art department for film and television. This included technical drawing/ hand drafting of plans for sets, as well as constructing accurate, scale models of our sets which we then photographed and created visuals from, showing close-up, mid and wide shots from a cameras perspective. Also we worked on prop and texture boards, giving an insight into the set on a more detailed level, and in some cases creating a variety of pieces intended to give the overall impression of a set prior to construction. Over the next few blogs I shall be presenting a selection of the projects I worked on during the last year, having now completed my MA and begun the exciting albeit daunting task of seeking employment!