Film & Television Studies [MLitt] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last winter I spent two evenings re-timing the subtitles on a Danish crime episode so that our community film club could screen it for members who are hard of hearing. The file we had been given was drifting by almost a second, and by the final act lines were appearing after characters had left the room. Fixing it meant watching the same scenes frame by frame, and I began noticing how much the editing depended on reaction shots held just long enough for a viewer to read a face. That close, slightly tedious attention to how television is put together is the kind of work I want to develop properly at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in English and Media gave me a grounding in close reading and in the history of British broadcasting. The module work I found most rewarding dealt with television rather than film, partly because television is so often studied as content rather than form. For my dissertation I looked at how two Scottish continuing dramas from different decades used accent, location filming and studio sets to construct a sense of place. I watched around forty episodes, logged where scenes were shot and which characters spoke in broad or softened Scots, and compared this with what was said in contemporary press coverage. My conclusion was modest: the later series used more location footage but narrowed the range of voices heard on screen. Writing it taught me to build an argument from evidence I had gathered myself and to be honest about the limits of a small sample.

Reading around the dissertation pushed me towards questions I could not fully answer. Raymond Williams's idea of television as a planned flow, rather than a set of discrete programmes, made me wonder how streaming platforms, which remove the schedule, change the way regional drama is encountered. John Ellis's distinction between the glance of television viewing and the gaze of cinema seemed persuasive for the broadcast era, but I am less sure it holds when people binge a series on a laptop. I would like to test these ideas against particular programmes and audiences rather than repeat them.

Since graduating I have worked at the box office of an independent cinema, usually on evening and weekend shifts. It is ordinary work: selling tickets, handling refunds, answering questions about accessible screenings. It has nonetheless given me a practical sense of how audiences choose what to see. I have noticed, for example, that event-cinema broadcasts of stage plays draw a different crowd from our foreign-language seasons, and that subtitled screenings sell better when the programme notes explain the context. I now help write some of those short notes, which has been good practice in explaining a film clearly without flattening it.

The film club is voluntary. Alongside the subtitle checks, I help choose the monthly programme with three other members, which involves a lot of polite negotiation between people who want comfort viewing and those who want something challenging. Outside cinema, I swim twice a week and look after my neighbour's allotment plot when she is away, which is mostly a lesson in how quickly courgettes get out of hand.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want a structured environment in which to read more widely in film and television theory, to learn research methods beyond the improvised ones I used for my dissertation, and to write at greater length. I am especially interested in regional and small-nation television, accessibility and subtitling, and the shift from scheduled to on-demand viewing. I bring careful viewing habits, experience of working with real audiences and a willingness to do the patient, detailed work that good arguments about moving images require.