University degrees: Postgraduate
Course length: 2 years full-time
Course city: Sydney
In the Master of Arts Screen: Music you will learn how to apply different styles of music to screen narratives. You will discover how music works with images and performance to create meaning and move audiences.
Throughout the course, you will develop your own unique voice as you produce music for the screen. You will record with professional musicians live in the school’s state-of-the-art recording studios, and experiment with the most effective technologies to help you realise your ideas.
WHY DO THIS COURSE
This course is designed for those looking to become screen composers, orchestrators, copyists, music editors and/or programmers in film, television, documentary, advertising or web-based and interactive screen projects.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
The course will combine coursework with practical exercises. The coursework will look at the history of film, television, and interactive narrative, and discover what filmmakers and composers have done in the past (and how and why they have done it), with close attention paid to shifting styles in music scoring.
You will be required to write and produce music for a range of projects in collaboration with your fellow Masters students. These projects will increase in scope and complexity as you progress through the course. You will focus on exploring the possibilities of the form and developing an individual voice.
Industry practitioners contribute to the coursework program, providing insights into their practice. Seminars and collaborative productions will help you develop your understanding of the role of music in screen narrative.
In your final year, you will develop and produce a funded major project. The course concludes with a professional placement.
Overall, the course will allow you to consider who you are as a creative practitioner with an adaptable skill-set. Learning to analyse your process through the development of a practice-based research project, you will understand how your practice is informed by the past – but also how it engages with contemporary screen culture and emerging trends and technologies.
The Master of Arts Screen: Music enables you to work at a professional level on screen narratives of all kinds.
AFTRS screen composing alumni include: Antony Partos, Animal Kingdom (2010), The Slap (2011), Jasper Jones (2017); Caitlin Yeo, President, Australian Screen Composers Guild, The Rocket (2013), The Butterfly Tree (2017), Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (2019); Matteo Zingales, The Hunter (2011), Fahrenheit 451 (2018), Mystery Road (2018).
