About

LFS Philosophy

Through many technological changes, the London Film School is held together by three ideas: insistence on creative freedom, openness to innovation and commitment to craft excellence.

The school's teaching is built on the conviction, learned over a long period, that film professionals, and writer-directors who have done all the jobs on the set, to a genuinely professional level, are more creatively resourceful, effective and employable than those who accept the specialization ideas of the old studio system too early in their training. The same is true for our many graduates working as top level cinematographers, editors, sound designers, production designers and producers - they all gained from having to direct, light, operate, edit and record at a serious level. We frequently use the term "filmmaker", meaning a person for whom a proper command of this collaborative craft is of vital importance.

The school isn't geared specifically either to the studios or the independents. Many of the LFS's graduates are working in industrial cinema all over the world, and we teach filmmaking including two compulsory 35mm studio exercises - very unusual around today's film schools - we have noticed that vibrant and creative film and television cultures are based on multi-skilled, flexible, highly collaborative groups - and we want to train people to belong to such energetic groups in any kind of audio visual production.

The MA Filmmaking programme is progressive and experiential. We don't believe in modularising skill areas and teaching them in any order. A group of 18 - 25 people, usually split into units of 5 or 6, work together through a complex series of tasks, changing jobs, over two years - and in the process discover a great deal about their creativity. Craft and Art are hard to disentangle in retrospect, and indivisible when you're working.

Since 2000 the school's programmes have been overhauled. The result is the original LFS structure, based on lots of filmmaking (still a minimum of five exercises made on film and a graduation work), with an additional focus on creative preparation, on up to date professional practice, on quality and detail in all departments including production and production design.

LFS graduates are established in film and television production in more than eighty countries. From 1974 to 2001 the school was known as LIFS: The London International Film School. In 2001 we reverted to our shorter name. But we remain film education's most cosmopolitan institution - only 25% of current students are from the United Kingdom.When the school hosts professional development events for the UK film sector, like the 2005 Abbas Kiarostami filmmaking workshop, they are distinctly international in flavour, though often aimed specifically at professional sectors in the UK industry.

LFS has always been structured as a working studio. We have studios, cinemas and workshops, but not really classrooms. Every student works on a minimum of one film in every twelve-week session and usually more, so that we'll deliver more than 160 exercises and graduation films, almost all originated on film, every year. Every year LFS film play at more than 90 festivals.

The LFS MA Filmmaking is a programme for the new filmmaker with certain aims: reaching professional standards in the key departments; learning to collaborate creatively - from fellow students as much as from lecturers - and to think about cinema practically; getting the habit of interrogating their assumptions rigorously and then taking their instincts seriously. The students we want are resilient, collaborative, imaginative people who learn through doing (and sometimes failing), people who will have the courage and energy to develop their ideas to the limit.

The school's new MA Screenwriting is an attempt to offer a creative and stimulating environment to writers committed to building up their craft skills in the specific challenges of writing for film, and an understanding their own voices and creative instincts as writers. The course is based, like the MA Filmmaking graduation term, on visiting lecturers and mentors, working professionals who commit to detailed work with students over the course of a feature development. We are particularly keen to work with students who have written for other areas, whether theatre, journalism or fiction, who also have specific tastes in and convictions about about film writing.

We're not called a 'film and television' school because we believe that the craft skills and modes of expression encompassed by 'film' provide the base from which to take on the special demands of other media from television and advertising to, in 2004, streaming video material for a website. Rather than second-guess the international audio-visual business and its markets, we want to instill the creative flexibility to contribute in every area.

There's a balance in the LFS programmes between technical training, the 'boot camp' in which students gain key skills through making films, and the area of creative development, the 'hothouse' in which they try and make them extraordinary. The starting-points at LFS are to learn only through making work, and to remain sceptical about whether filmmaking's creative challenges can ever be taught in conventional ways. We aim to provide a fertile environment for hard work, exploration and creative dialogue.

In our publications you'll find filmmaking work referred to as 'exercises'. Turning them into 'films' is our challenge to you.

BEN GIBSON, Director

February 2006

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