Learning is based around short films. Each term these film exercises become more technically sophisticated, more considered and more complex in their ambitions. The School specifies the skill base for each exercise, provides the equipment and trains the students up to the new levels in each of the various craft skills. Students take all the aesthetic decisions, solving problems similar to those faced by professional units, on a steeply increasing slope of difficulty. Their work is constantly assessed and criticised. Students themselves are required to reflect on and assess their own learning in Work and Research Journals. This is the centre of the LFS method. Students learn best by applying themselves to aesthetic and practical problems generated by the actual process of filmmaking. This way new skills become meaningful and integrated into an increasing repertoire. Against a background of practice, lectures and classes become vivid and full of recognisable content. This is why we push through so many productions, and why students have more opportunities to work on films than they can realistically take up.

Two three and a half minute, 16mm, black and white, mute films are shot on location. All students are expected to produce a script. The first term gives students a thorough grounding in the basics of filmmaking. The centre of the term is the film exercise, which provides the platform for basic teaching in camera skills, exposure control, and editing. The assumption is that students all start from a similar background and all need a full, fast introduction to professional procedures. The term is dedicated to the principle of learning how to tell a story in pictures. Scripts are subject to detailed scrutiny and discussion. Students have to practise basic production management skills: organising location permissions, securing props and costumes. They have to cast and work with professional actors. In parallel, all through the term, courses run in film history and in the close analysis of directors’ strategies, showing and discussing work from Hitchcock to Lang via, say, Spike Lee and Kiarostami. There are classes on photo theory, directing syntax, producing, production management, production design, camera practicals, use of light meters, and editing.