Sports Photography BA (Hons)

CoLab: Research, Exploration and Risk-Taking

The collaborative learning experience will expose you to a range of new processes, building on your year one collaborative experience, and approaches that will develop your creative thinking. These will act as a catalyst to inform the solutions that you develop in response to the brief. This will include the development of creative thinking skills, design thinking and critical questioning approaches that can be used throughout the creative design process.

Through active participation with team-based problem-solving, you will work together in mixed teams on identified projects and/or themes* where you will use your creative ideas to generate solutions to the challenge or brief.

This module will be taught through lectures, workshops and seminars. This will include the introduction of the live brief, guest lectures, practical skills development workshops and independent group learning.

Participation in this module will encourage your skills development in; collaboration, teamwork, generating ideas, communication and presentation skills, decision-making and organisation, critical reflection, problem-solving and learning from failure.

You will be empowered to act as catalysts and change-agents in your response to the brief. The JOIN platform will provide community wide discussions relating to the themes and experiences within the module.

Experimental Sports Lab

This module offers students an open and creative platform to further develop their ideas and more freely pursue their interests from the end of Level 4. Students are tasked to create works that investigate different approaches to image capture and data interpretation and visualisation. These may include things like motion tracking data, sensor-informed storytelling (everything on a phone - audio, visual, haptic etc) and AI such as computer vision (data interpretation such as that used in concussive studies). Students will work beyond traditional environments to create interactive and augmented experiences that challenge interpretations and possibilities for audience engagement and experience of sport.

Live Sports Assignments

Further develop and apply the themes and practical tools you;'ve developed in the first year, through a series of simulated assignments.  Alongside exploring the latest and emergent digital capture technologies, you will continue to develop their understanding of the key issues pertinent to Sports and Lifestyle contexts. By the end of the module, you will be an expert in the use of digital image technologies to both engage and convey meaning.

Optional Modules

Optional modules are mandatory across all our courses and enable you to personalise your studies by choosing from up to eight optional modules. This is a great opportunity to expand your learning and discover new areas of interest to inspire your work, influence your future career, or postgraduate study.

• Telling Stories
• Ethical Design
• Digital Marketing and Communication
• Performance for Motion Capture
• Music Video
• Open-source 3D Art
• Interactive Narrative
• Virtual Production

Optional Placement Year (Sandwich)*

We have an option for all of our students to undertake a placement year (Sandwich) and allow you to decide whether this is right for you once you have completed years 1 and 2 of your course. This time spent working in industry provides our students with crucial work experience, which is highly prized and much sought after by employers upon graduation. If you are successful in securing a placement you will have the chance to gain an additional Certificate or Diploma in Professional Practice, dependent on duration.

The additional placement year incurs a fee.  For international students considering the transfer to the 4-yr SW route it’s important to seek advice from the International Student Support team and the Home Office regarding any potential visa implications and costs. For UK students, advice should also be sought regarding SLC eligibility, if applicable.

* If you choose to take the sandwich route option, you will still need to apply for this course with the full-time UCAS code: W643

Sketchpad

Sitting at the foot of the third and final year, this short module requires students to apply their learning over a series of discursive workshops. These sessions respond to the themes and issues brought up in the concurrent “Recent Past and Near Future of…” case study series. Short-form practical reflections are required of the student through a series of ethically, culturally and technologically focused tasks, at the same time affording the student creative latitude to develop signature responses.

Students are required to publish innovative and compelling responses to their online portfolio, to be presented and discussed in the weekly workshops. Emphasis remains on the creative processes (practical and thematic) which are reflected in the assessment weighting. By the end of this module, students will have a number of practical starting points for immediate further development. They will have identified prospective audiences and begun to formulate strategic approaches to engage those audiences, both through their work and through participation in the public dialogue.

Launchpad

Within this module students finalise and launch their campaigns for audience engagement. It is where their passion and creative vision take form as a physical or digital interface between creator and prospective client, collaborator and/or employer (audience). It is for the student to imagine their perfect brief without fear, concern or limit; to own the fullest expression of its creative resolution.

As this is a self-directed module, students lead the way, with lecturers taking a supporting role throughout, providing guidance through regular formative feedback. By the end of this module students will have identified and engaged prospective audiences with compelling visual experiences built on a strong thematic and practical foundation. They will have demonstrated their ability to speak clearly with images, to be heard and to be taken seriously in the world of photography.

The Recent Past and Near Future of Creative Storytelling

This module introduces students to a range of internationally recognised figures drawn from industry, academia and popular culture. It facilitates student engagement with a wide range of questions, concerns, ideas and practices that are animating the creative industries. The module brings student thinking into live and direct contact with industry, enabling them to road-test their theories, pitch their ideas and make valuable real-world connections. The series offers students invaluable opportunities to research connected audiences (both technologically and thematically connected) from their position at the centre of the discussion.

By the end of the series, students will have first hand knowledge of compelling storytelling, its constituent parts, its’ production process, its’ intended purposes, applications and impact. They will have been central to internationally networked conversations, seen how they and their participation has been rendered digitally, and recognised their impact and the impact of others, on that network. They will have had opportunities to extend their professional networks of industry contacts and related audiences.