With an upgraded campus, additional courses and a fresh focus on engaging with the UK industry, the London Film School (LFS) is entering a new era.
The LFS campus on Parker Street in London’s Covent Garden district opened for business in January, after 60 years of being based at nearby Shelton Street. “It is a much better dressed building,” confirms LFS director Chris Auty.
While the school will continue to operate out of Shelton Street, Parker Street has become its main hub. As well as offering a more modernised setting and facilities, it has the benefit of being adjoined to an exhibition space, the Garden Cinema. The move was possible due to the philanthropy of the building’s owner, former lawyer and publisher and founder of the Garden Cinema, Michael Chambers (son of filmmaker and former LFS lecturer Jack Chambers).
Across the two sites, the school offers four shooting stages, two cinema screening rooms, post-production facilities and seminar spaces.
Change is also afoot at board level, with the announcement today (March 10) that film finance specialist Anne Sheehan, former Bafta chair Jane Lush and Neil Blair, literary agent and co-founder of The Blair Partnership, have all been confirmed to join.
New vision
Around 80% of the LFS intake is from outside of the UK. “I’m very focused on taking us now out into the UK industry so people understand the quality and award-winning nature of the work we do,” says Auty.
LFS is launching two specialist master’s programmes, an MA in film marketing and an MA in film producing, both set to commence in September 2025 as one-year courses.
“I’m an ex-producer – producing is the heart of filmmaking, whether you’re doing it the old-fashioned independent way, or for a studio or platform. The skillset remains the same. It seemed like a missing piece of the architecture of the school,” says Auty.
He also hopes to capitalise on the school’s proximity to the likes of Warner Bros and Netflix’s London offices through the marketing MA.
“Marketing is the beginning, the middle and the end of all film and TV activity. I thought that was missing from the school’s ecosystem, and a crying shame not to engage with the marketing industry, because London is the European harbour for the marketing of all those [studio and streamer] companies.”
It’s hoped that these courses will help reconnect the school with prospective UK students. “I’m keen to make these two new courses very accessible for British applicants, more directly joined up with the [local] industry,” says Auty. Financial accessibility plays a part in this, with new MA courses cheaper per term than the filmmaking course.
The Shelton Street building, a former banana warehouse, remains part of the school’s infrastructure, and will house the school’s new short course and workshop strand. These additional courses, both public and industry-facing, will cover emerging technologies and a variety of storytelling formats. And yes, this will include AI.
“I’m a fan of AI,” confirms Auty. “AI is not a threat, it’s just another tool, in areas like post-production workflows and marketing options. AI, at the moment, doesn’t tell you how to think up a film as a short, and the students are not about to hand that work out. They’re passionate about the filmmaking.”
Auty joined LFS 16 months ago. He previously was at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) for 10 years, as head of the producing department. The NFTS operates on a bigger scale to LFS, with campuses in Leeds, Wales and Scotland, in addition to its main Beaconsfield campus, and another in the works in Camden. How does the LFS distinguish itself?
“The teaching method is completely different,” explains Auty. “At NFTS, you don’t apply to the school, you apply to one of 23 technical specialisations. Here, if you apply to the filmmaking programme [a two-year programme which makes up around two thirds of the NFTS intake], it’s a bit like a music conservatoire, in the sense that in year one, every student that gets onto the programme has to train across directing, editing, camera and sound.
“That’s why I don’t think the schools are competitive – the level of overlap [of applications] with the NFTS is surprisingly low. Our main competitors are in California.”
LFS isn’t about to follow in the footsteps of NFTS and open satellite schools across the UK. However, Auty is keen to engage with students from all corners of the UK, with the hope of setting up additional scholarships to support this.
LFS is the UK’s oldest film school, founded above a butcher shop in Brixton, south London, in 1956. It is the second oldest in Europe, after Rome’s Centro Sperimentale De Cinematografia.
Key LFS alumni include directors Mike Leigh, Franc Roddam, Horace Ove, Menelik Shabazz, Daina Pusic, Chris Andrews and Koby Adom; producers Fiona Lamptey and Corin Taylor; and execs such as Film4’s head of creative Farhana Bhula and Curzon’s interim executive chair Philip Knatchbull.
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