University degrees: Postgraduate
Course length: 2 years full-time
This course provides a thorough education in editing skills in a professional filmmaking environment – with every student working in their own editing suite.
This course provides a thorough education in editing skills in a professional filmmaking environment – with every student working in their own editing suite.
Graduate Úna Ni Dhonghaíle won the 2018 Editing: Fiction BAFTA for her work on BBC drama Three Girls.
Students will have the opportunity to work on a wide range of practical projects, including animations, fiction films, documentaries, natural history programmes, and commercials.
Students are encouraged to consider their craft as part of the whole process of film and television production and not merely as the final stage. They will collaborate with those in other specialisms to put into practice the skills they learn throughout the course – with all production costs met by the School.
Editing graduates have a high rate of employment on feature films, shorts and television programmes. Many new graduates quickly become editors on independent productions or assistant editors on features or TV drama, while others gravitate to visual effects, promos and i-dents.
All NFTS students can attend the School’s masterclasses programme, with recent guests including Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, Killing Eve), Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna, Diego Maradona), Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, We Need to Talk About Kevin), Louis Theroux, and M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Glass).
The NFTS is an Avid Education Partner.
This course is industry recognised by ScreenSkills, the industry-led skills body for the UK’s screen-based industries, and carries the ScreenSkills Select quality-mark which indicates courses best suited to prepare students for a career in the screen industries.
The emphasis of the editing curriculum is firmly on storytelling and the relationship between editor and director. Students learn to apply their craft to the demands of fiction, documentary and animation, creating visual narratives while working with sound, music and, where appropriate, special effects. Workshops with other departments develop concepts of visual storytelling, mise-en-scène, storyboarding, sound design, music and scriptwriting.
In the final year, students will collaborate to make a digital fiction short film, and three graduation films in animation, documentary and fiction.
