Creative Writing and Film Studies

Creative writing and film studies are disciplines that both take storytelling as their central concern. Creative writing develops your craft as a practitioner: the ability to construct plot, character, dialogue and narrative structure in ways that engage and move readers. Film studies examines how cinema tells its stories: how visual language, editing, sound, performance and the particular technologies of filmmaking create meaning and emotional effect.

Studying them together gives you both the practical ability to construct narratives and the critical framework to understand how those narratives work across different media.

This three-year full-time degree at the University of Hull develops your skills as both a writer and a critical reader of film. You will work across prose fiction, screenwriting and other creative forms, receiving detailed feedback on your own writing and developing the discipline and craft that sustained creative work requires. The film studies component introduces the critical and analytical tools used to interpret and evaluate cinema, from formal analysis of the image to the study of genre, authorship, national cinemas and the cultural politics of representation.

The combination asks you to think seriously about storytelling in both modes and to understand how the skills transfer between them.

Graduates pursue careers in writing, publishing, screenwriting, television and film development, journalism, content creation, education, communications and the broader creative industries. The ability to construct clear, engaging narratives is a skill that is valued across many professional contexts, and the critical analytical abilities that film studies develops transfer well to roles in marketing, media, research and public affairs. Many graduates continue to write alongside their professional lives, and some pursue postgraduate study in creative writing, film studies or screenwriting.