Master in Audiovisual Arts in Brussels

Animation

For your MA degree, you formulate your own final project and develop it through to completion. In this way, you prove that you are ready to be a critical and innovative animation filmmaker. Our students often participate in the Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France. This festival is the most famous of its kind in the world and brings together a wide variety of players from the industry. It is therefore an important networking opportunity for our master students.

Curriculum

Your MA project is central to the programme. You choose a topic, a research question and an objective. Under personal guidance you not only realise an artistic project, but also write a thesis in which you reflect upon your practice, methodology and ideas. The MA atelier provides a platform for discussing your work during one-to-one meetings with your tutors and in group discussions with and presentations to fellow students. Moreover, through guest lectures, study trips and portfolio viewings you’ll come in contact with experts in the various aspects of your specialisation. In this way you raise your practice to a professional artistic standard. Meanwhile, you’ll continue to feed your theoretical knowledge. Via intensive, small-scale seminars and public lectures you’ll be exposed to contemporary critical thinking about film and audiovisual culture and learn how to link theory with practice. You’ll graduate with a single screen work, which you’ll present to an external and often international jury.

MA Atelier

In preparation for your MA project you’ll follow a three-day MA Session during which special attention is paid to the (un)truthful aspect of storytelling. In this Critical Practice you’ll reflect on the extent to which a balance can be achieved between truth and lies. A second Critical Practice revolves around the link between ‘mimesis’ for the actor and ‘kinetics’ for the animator. During workshops you’ll explore how these aspects can enrich your own MA project.

Film

The MA Film programme puts great emphasis on the interaction between the school’s input and the student’s contribution. It builds on skills gathered in a Film or Audiovisual Arts BA Programme and offers no specific training anymore in terms of acting directing, lighting, editing, script writing and so forth.

Within the framework of author cinema and Art Film, it offers instead a continuous programme of mandatory activities that includes workshops, seminars, lectures, presentations by visiting filmmakers and visual artists, group presentations, group discussions, film screenings and excursions to exhibitions that offer a wide range of ideas and positions from the contemporary field of cinema culture and audiovisual arts. Students contribute their own knowledge, sensitivities, skills, aspirations, motivation and commitment. In regular peer to peer meetings, they report and communicate to each other on the progress of their MA project. By using this input and through ongoing dialogue with tutors, lecturers and fellow students, they develop a critical vocabulary and learn to formulate adequate questions and responses as well as to reach solutions independently, culminating in the showing of a personal and creative finished audiovisual work. This single-screen film work should demonstrate a personal signature as well as the mastering of directing skills.

The programme is designed to take a closer look at both the possibilities and difficulties that arise when students/future film makers develop creative work. It does not discriminate between narrative or documentary or experimental cinema practices. On the contrary, it helps students position themselves in the film practice(s) of their choice and achieve their artistic intentions by understanding the achievements of others.It lets students understand the strategies and tactics as well as knowledges and skills involved in the production of audiovisual art work. Individual practice is at its very center: a continuous and independent working pattern that seeks for a dialogue  with similar as well as different practices. During this process the students can rely on an ongoing dialogue about the work’s content and form as well as about its practical and technical aspects in individual tutorials.