Directing is principally taught by making films. Every term students make a film. In the second term every student directs.
In the graduation term every student has the opportunity to direct if they wish. In other terms students alternate roles within their small units.
This pattern of exercises through the course offers an opportunity to students to develop their personal orientation to this most complex of all arts: their syntactic narrative skills, their understanding of the pattern of possibilities presented by a script, their capacity to find their results in, and with their collaborators, the ability to construct expressive mise-en-scène.
Classes supporting this area discuss and rehearse: preparation, shot lists and storyboards, blocking, protocols of dealing with professional actors, reading scripts, the construction of film sequence. In the second year the main teaching of directing is through workshops: the attitude of the school is that the range should vary as widely as possible to give students their own space to build their own repertoire of formal approaches. Workshops deal with script interpretation, directing actors, improvisation, mise-en-scène, use of camera, location shooting.
LFS has evolved a uniquely practical approach to discussions of directing in class: films are presented in terms of strategic decisions, made in a context of historic, technical and aesthetic limitations and possibilities. This means that students are encouraged to look at film history and their film environments in terms of developing a complex meaning-based repertoire on which to found their own directing practice.
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Consultants, guest speakers and visiting lecturers:
Terence Davies, Alnoor Dewshi, Bille Eltringham, Stephen Frears, Jack Gold, Henrique Goldman, Khaled al Hagar, Kim Hopkins, Rajan Khosa, Mike Leigh, Carol Morley, Udayan Prasad.