Film studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last month I spent twenty minutes on a subtitle that stays on screen for under two seconds. In a television drama I was captioning, a character interrupts herself mid-sentence while a door slams, and the line had to be readable, accurate and timed so that it did not spoil the cut that follows. Most of my working week involves decisions of this size. I want to study film at postgraduate level because those small decisions have made me curious about much larger questions: how audiences experience films that reach them through translation, and what is gained or lost on the way.

My undergraduate degree combined Spanish with Film, and the two halves met in my dissertation. I compared two English subtitle tracks for Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, one from a DVD release and one from a streaming service. I transcribed several scenes, recorded how long each subtitle stayed on screen and noted where wording was condensed or changed. The kitchen and neighbourhood scenes were the most revealing, because the women talk over one another and much of the humour depends on rhythm and on expressions rooted in La Mancha. In my reading, one track kept more of the overlapping speech but at the cost of crowded lines, while the other was easier to follow but smoothed away some of the regional flavour. I did not conclude that either was simply better; the argument of the dissertation was that each produces a slightly different film for an English-speaking viewer. The project received one of my highest marks, and my supervisor's comments pushed me to think harder about theory rather than only description.

That push led me to Abé Mark Nornes's Cinema Babel and to his idea of 'abusive' subtitling, which questions the assumption that good subtitles should be invisible. Reading it alongside my own transcriptions was useful, because I could see how a theoretical position might apply to particular frames and timings. I would like to take this further at Masters level, perhaps by looking at how different viewing contexts, from cinemas to phones, shape expectations of on-screen text. I am also aware that my reading so far has leaned towards European art cinema, and I want the breadth of a taught programme to test my ideas against genres and film cultures I know less well.

Since graduating I have worked freelance for a captioning company, producing subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing viewers and checking colleagues' files. The work is precise and often repetitive, but it has given me a practical understanding of reading speeds, shot changes and the conventions for describing sound, such as when to caption music and how to signal an off-screen speaker. It has also taught me to meet deadlines reliably and to accept detailed feedback without taking it personally, which I think will serve me well in seminars and in longer written projects.

Outside work I play cornet in a local brass band. It has nothing to do with film directly, though rehearsing the same eight bars until the section breathes together is not unlike adjusting a subtitle frame by frame. The band has also given me a weekly commitment to people of very different ages, and last year I helped organise our transport and schedules for a regional contest, which involved more spreadsheets than music.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I have reached the limit of what I can work out on my own between shifts. I bring a language, careful working habits and a question I care about. I want the time, guidance and wider reading to turn that question into rigorous research.