Single-unit study
You can study individual units for personal or professional development without having to apply for a full QUT course.
If you successfully complete a unit, you may be eligible for credit if you decide to apply for a degree course in the future.
Units anyone can study
These units don’t have any requirements for previous study or background knowledge.
But if your previous studies were not in English, or were completed in a country where English is not the first language, you will need to demonstrate that you meet our English proficiency requirements when you apply.
Creative industries
Communication
CYB111 Communication and Collaboration
This unit examines communication between individuals and teams in academic and professional settings. Through a theory/practice nexus, it aids in developing practical skills needed for effective communication such as giving and receiving feedback, collaborating with others, evaluating messages, presenting material in a professional manner and reflecting on communication experiences. With a focus on intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, this unit strengthens current communication practices in live and mediated settings. Presenting meaningful messages in both small and large groups, working on shared professional documents and reflecting on personal communication skills will provide a strong foundation for future studies and the workplace.
CYB115 Understanding Audiences
This unit introduces the ways in which the media, entertainment, and news industries have imagined, measured and monetised their audiences. Understanding that audiences are powerful economic and cultural constructions in the media and entertainment industries, the unit examines how researchers and industry professionals build knowledge about how people use media and the role that it plays in their lives. The unit establishes a theoretical foundation in audience studies, as well as explores a range of research methods that are used to study audiences/users, and prepares students to evaluate different types of knowledge claims about audiences.
CYB116 Understanding the Internet and Data
This unit explores the centrality of the internet as a communication tool in both the workplace and everyday life. It explores how internet technologies and digital communication platforms refashion communication practices and social organisation, including the centrality of debates around online behavior and codes of conduct. The unit also introduces students to basic data literacy and digital analytic skills.
KKB190 Yatdjuligin - Cultural Safety in Indigenous Australian Context
Culturally Safe practice is an essential element in a professional's ability to work in a holistic and accountable way with Indigenous Australian peoples and their communities. This requires deconstruction of your own cultures, values, beliefs and attitudes by taking you on a learning journey that allows you to move beyond cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity through to cultural safety.This unit will prompt you to develop your own strategies to be a culturally safe practitioner in both innovative and creative ways.
KKB193 Indigenous Knowledge: Research Ethics and Protocols
This unit critiques research on Indigenous Australian issues and articulates culturally safe research practice that reflects decolonising methodologies as an underpinning framework. The need for culturally safe research is supported by colonially constructed knowledge and the obvious gaps in understanding of the ongoing life-differentials and social determinants that impact on Indigenous Australians. Interrogation of Western research and Indigenous scholarship and international contexts will challenge you to critically analyse received perceptions of research conduct. Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies will facilitate a transformative learning journey in a process where students critique Western research frameworks that continue to represent Indigenous peoples as the 'other'. The unit will engage your learning through Indigenous knowledge frameworks that facilitate the development of a decolonising research proposal which adheres to Indigenous research ethics and protocols.
Creative practice
KKB185 Creative Enterprise Studio 1
In Studio 1, students develop both enterprise skills and collaborative foundational design thinking skills to better understand the problem space for unique industry or community-based problems. As such, the unit responds to opportunity identification and value creation aligned to industry and/or community-based real world needs. Whilst the value of disciplinary expertise remains constant in this changing world, many problems facing organisations and societies naturally span disciplines. Collaboration and inquiry into these real world problems require a breadth of knowledge and skills in ways that demand and reward curiosity and innovation. Being the first of three Creative Enterprise Studio units, your ability to respond to complex and unique real world problems is strengthened by learning to think and act in diverse ways and draw upon perspectives, methods and insights garnered from the multiplicity of disciplines in your unit cohort.
KYB101 Understanding Creative Practice
This foundational unit provides the principles and skills of creative and critical literacies in creative practice. It introduces the descriptive and analytical vocabulary for your creative practice discipline. It also looks at the principles of Indigenous knowledges and to the contribution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists have made to creative practice across a range of disciplines. The unit emphasises the productive relationship between traditional academic communication and creative practice with student responses to creative practice exemplars provided in both written and artform-based modes. This provides opportunities to practice academic writing, peer learning, and giving and receiving feedback. The unit prepares you to synthesise practical and theoretical knowledge about creative practice.
KYB102 Pathways to a Creative Career
This unit helps you develop a professional identity. It introduces the principles and skills required for professional creative practice, including tacit knowledge, education and career planning, and professional development for creative industries practitioners. As such, it addresses personal branding, communicating about your work in professional contexts, navigating ethical and regulatory questions, self-care in practice, working toward a distinctive skill set and setting career goals. Creative practitioners begin developing a professional network during the course of their studies and a foundational understanding of how to build and maintain that network.
KYB110 Art, Text and Context
This is a foundational unit in the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree that introduces you to the critical contexts of creative works and practices including: how they make meaning, their varying contexts, how they circulate, how these might change over time This is done through an introduction to: some of the key aesthetic, conceptual and technical ideas that underpin a range of creative practice disciplines; critical thinking and the critical analysis of creative works and practices; understanding what it means to be a critical viewer/reader/listener/artist; some different and diverse perspectives on various creative forms, works, and practices, including the contribution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and thinkers have made across a range of disciplines.
Creative writing
KWB104 Writing the Short Story
The writing of short stories has traditionally been a starting place for writers to begin developing their craft. Via the short story, this unit explores the elements of fiction such as character, voice, setting, plot, dialogue, point of view and modulation, and helps you acquire and practice skills in creative writing. In this unit you will also learn to analyse literary writing, in particular the short story, for craft elements in a way that informs and illuminates your own work. In addition to lectures, tutorial based peer-critique workshops are a central part of this unit. Within them, in a guided and structured way, you will get and give feedback on the stories as they are being written.
KWB113 Introduction to Creative Writing
This unit provides the fundamental skills for writing fiction and poetry as well as the basic theoretical background that underpins them. It looks at the development of these literary forms as a way of understanding how a practitioner might best approach both the writing and critical analysis of them in the contemporary context. It develops a critical understanding of your own and others’ approaches to writing life. You will be encouraged to develop the skills required for professional writing through a series of tasks that introduce key concepts such as characterisation, constructing a scene, and writing dialogue.
KWB118 Swords and Spaceships: Writing Genre
This unit surveys current trends in genre writing and popular fiction with a focus on writing for reader engagement. You will have the opportunity to develop a piece of writing that makes use of the techniques of your chosen genre and that reflects the concerns and themes appropriate to your genre. It includes focused writing exercises that will enhance the skills needed to develop, research, and write a genre text. It also aims to help you develop an understanding of genre theory. The unit develops your critical understanding of your own and others’ approaches to the writing life, and the theories of genre that underpin those approaches.
KWB212 Poetry and Poetics
This unit provides important creative and critical skills in writing poetry and cultivating an understanding of how to interpret and use poetic techniques. It explores a spectrum of contemporary and traditional forms of poetry, and is designed for those who are interested in poetics and the use of words in precise, innovative, concentrated and musical ways. It equips students with knowledge of the techniques, poetic forms and modes, and the opportunity to apply this vocabulary in analysing and reading a wide range of contemporary poetry. The unit provides key creative and critical skills in writing poetry, while offering you the chance to practice in a variety of poetic forms and modes, reflectively writing about your own poetry and analytically writing about the stylistics of another person’s work. The unit occurs at the mid-point of the creative writing major, building on KWB211 Creative Writing: Style and Technique, and preparing you for the advanced work of third year.
KWB215 Dangerous Ideas: Contemporary Debates in Writing
This unit introduces you to the key debates and ideas animating the field of contemporary creative writing, and allows you to consider your own writing practice in the context of these debates. The unit helps you to develop a nuanced understanding of the issues preoccupying contemporary writers, to gain insight into the historical and cultural factors informing those issues, and to articulate your own perspectives via conversation and debate. You will encounter a spectrum of ideas about what it means to be a writer today as well as the historical and cultural factors informing our ideas of authorship.
Dance
KDB107 Foundations in Improvisation and Choreographic Practice
This unit introduces the fundamentals of improvisation and choreographic practice. Throughout it you will participate in a series of creative laboratories that seek to enliven an experiential understanding of the body in dance and explore different practices and processes that cultivate tools for dance making. The unit focuses on exploring dance through different approaches to improvisation and task-based processes. This is an opportunity to develop your foundational skills as a choreographer in dance through developing critical skills in experimentation, physical thinking, responsivity, as well as the ability to mobilise your ideas and concepts.
KDB115 Screen Dance
Screen dance is an opportunity for you to experiment with dance created for screen. You will learn how to create screen dance works through studio-based workshops focused on choreography for the camera, choreographing the camera, the frame, mis-en-scene in relation to site specific dance, and editing choreography. You will participate in a series of studio-based workshops to learn the skills of the screen dance artist, and, independently through video tutorials, learn how to use software to enhance the creative production of your screen dance work.
KDB123 Dance Legacies
This unit will introduce you to the dance legacies that underscore dance practice. In the history of Western Arts, a number of key philosophies may be identified including romanticism, classicism, modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism, some of which are also evident in the arts of other cultures. In dance, they led to the formation of aesthetic codes that in some cases are still very much in operation in the dance industry. These will be further contextualised in relation to Indigenous Australian dance and the wider Asia Pacific region. Through encountering relevant theory and reflecting on live and recorded dance performances, you will be supported to critically interrogate how these legacies continue to inform current practices.
KDB222 World Dance
This unit aims to develop your sensitivity, curiosity, and knowledge of cultural diversity and protocols, through participating in dance styles from around the world and learning about their contexts. Through practical classes you will gain an experiential understanding of the dance styles, which will be contextualised through lectures and reflective practice strategies. The new generation of twenty-first century global citizens needs to be agile in the understandings and skills necessary to negotiate cultural difference if they are to contribute to creating peaceful communities. In this unit, participating in dance styles from around the world and learning about their contexts, provides an opportunity for you to develop these attributes.
Design
DYB122 Design Visualisations
This unit Introduces you to design visualisation practice and how to employ a variety of techniques to visualise design ideas to assist you in design thinking, research, communication and presentation.
DYB123 Emerging Design Technology
The design industry is rapidly evolving with the introduction of new technologies. This unit introduces you to existing and emerging technology and how it applies to the design process and design outputs. Designers need to be familiar with technology to aid them in the design process as well as being able to create new products, services or experiences that take advantage of existing and emerging technologies.
DYB124 Design Consequences
Design Consequences is an introductory unit employing theoretical and applied methods to explore the ways in which design influences and is influenced by cultural traditions and practices, beliefs and biases. Working across frames of past, present and future, you will learn how to critically engage with and draw upon these cultural factors and influences to shape and define your design work and practice.The twenty-first century presents designers with a challenging context characterised by the increasingly dramatic effects of climate change, growing levels of inequality, and destabilised geopolitical conditions. This unit will introduce you to a range of ideas, methods, and approaches necessary to understand design not only as products, environments, services and experiences but also as a social, cultural, political, and economic agent.
Digital media
CCB106 Popular Culture
The products, practices, and pleasures of popular culture are frequently dismissed as being superficial, unserious, or unimportant. This unit, however, celebrates popular culture as a contested and shifting phenomenon that permeates everyday life. Far from mundane, popular culture is charged with a political valence that reflects—and shapes—our lives. This unit further develops conceptual framework(s) and analytic tools to critically evaluate the texts, artefacts, and/or practices of popular culture. In completing this unit, students will understand how the communication industries produce and circulate popular culture, and will be able to critique the politics of pleasure that frame the consumption of mass culture.
CCB201 Australian Media
This unit evaluates the industrial and cultural logics of Australian media. You will develop an understanding of contemporary debates, issues and developments and will learn about how national and local media are shaped by a range of factors including digital distribution technologies, concentrated ownership structures and cultural policy. The unit engages with questions of national culture and identity, amid the intense internationalising forces impacting Australian media. Understanding the technological, economic, and policy contexts within which Australian media operate will help you to form ethical media choices and professional communication practices.
CCB202 Social Media, Self and Society
Social Media has had a tremendous impact on our lives as individuals and members of larger societies. The debates surrounding these new and powerful technologies are often multi-faceted in their complexity. In this unit you will develop skills in critically examining and contributing to debates about social media’s impact on issues such as identity, privacy and the ethics of everyday life. You will draw on scholarly research to evaluate opposing perspectives and become critically informed communication professionals.
CCB205 Digital Media Analytics
This unit equips you with critical understanding and skills in contemporary research and practice methods as they are applied to digital content, platforms and networks. From computational analyses of ‘big social data’ to close qualitative analysis of digital media platforms and practices, the approaches, methods and tools that are grounded in and suitable for the study of digital media are expanding and evolving rapidly. This unit aims to provide you with critical understanding and practical skills in how to select and implement contemporary digital approaches to the collection, analysis and interpretation of various forms of communication data, such as social media content (both textual and visual) and geodata.
CCB206 Global Media and Culture
This unit provides students with a critical understanding of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of global media industries. It introduces key disciplinary theories and debates about the creation, circulation and consumption of media content as it circulates across different locations and cultures. The unit also enables students to develop skills and knowledge necessary for living and working in globally diverse communities and professional contexts. The unit may survey a range of media industries and cultural forms and/or focus on a single site of global activity as it explores the inherently transnational nature of the content we consume.
CCB304 Social Media Strategy
This unit develops a critical understanding of, and applied skills in, best practice social media management within professional communication contexts. You will engage with the principles, tools and techniques of professional social media practice, social media presence and the development, implementation and analysis of digital communication strategies. It also provides opportunities to apply them in the ever-evolving social media landscape. This is an advanced unit that builds on individual and teamwork approaches to learning and teaching developed in introductory and intermediate units.
CCB306 Media and Communication Capstone
The ability to engage audiences is a persistent challenge in today's media and communications industries, and is therefore a highly sought-after skill. In this capstone unit you will demonstrate your proficiency in the methods, tools, and analytic approaches used to engage audiences through a ‘real world’ media and communications project. This unit builds upon core knowledge and skills gained throughout your degree, particularly your theoretical and applied understanding of audiences. In doing so, it develops your professional capacity for independence, leadership, confidence, and collaboration. This unit equips you with in-demand knowledge and capabilities to prepare you for your career in the dynamic media and communications industries.
Drama
KTB112 Drama: Theory and Performance
This foundational unit engages practically and theoretically with notions of contemporary performance practice, before inviting students to consider future evolutions of the form’s techniques and methodologies. Focussing on styles of performance that promote co-creation, interaction and participation, the unit teaches critical and creative theories and techniques needed to cultivate self-awareness, other-awareness, and greater socio-political awareness of performance practices. How these aspects influence style and form, constitute the central focus of the unit. A combination of exercises and opportunities to develop a performance persona in this unit encourages students to find comfort in the evolving modes and expressions of the form of contemporary dramatic styles.
KTB113 Storytelling and Performance
This foundational unit introduces dramaturgical and narrative theory embedded alongside the practical skills needed to create performance in a range of contexts, including that of First Nations storytelling, dramaturgy in performance-making and storytelling for drama and live performance. The unit requires no prior experience but can deepen and connect to existing knowledges of devising, dramatic text analysis, experiential theatre, and creative writing in other art forms. Students are introduced to First Nations perspectives on storytelling and how to engage with these with responsibility and respect. They develop dramaturgical skills in research and critical thinking as they write a dramaturgical critique, and the giving and receiving of feedback as they create their own performance texts. The unit culminates in a staged reading and performance of the performance texts, where the students can experience the full creative process in the writing of new performance texts.
KTB120 Diverse Theatre Practice
This unit addresses artistic practices and narratives that, for historical, societal or political reasons, have struggled to find a safe place and a voice in our cultural landscape. Through direct engagement and individual self-reflection, the unit will provide foundational knowledge of the sensitivities of practice and protocols to enhance communication and appropriate professional conduct when collaborating with artists from diverse backgrounds and cultures. An appreciation of how performance and story manifest across distinct cultural boundaries and history is essential for a comprehensive understanding of theatre practice in the 21st century. Theatre practitioners require an awareness of cultural practices and protocols, and understanding of the multiplicity and complexity of a diverse, globalised world, to ensure the voice of Australian theatre reflects a true picture of contemporary society.
KTB121 Acting in Style: The Responsive Actor
This unit engages theoretically and practically with interaction, reaction, participation and co-creation in non-realistic approaches to acting with emphasis on the different styles of comedy. The critical and creative theories and techniques needed to cultivate self-awareness, other-awareness, play and improvisation in acting in different styles, constitute the central focus of the unit. The basic premise of performance is sharing the conspiracy of theatre with the creative collaborators, fellow performers and, most importantly, the audience. Being comfortable with the uncertainty of the live act and empowered by its dynamism and ephemerality are key aspects of the development of the responsive actor. A combination of exercises and scene study will deepen the understanding and playing of action in the comedic mode.
KTB225 Radical Theatre Forms
This unit develops an appreciation of theatre innovation in both historical and contemporary contexts. It addresses concepts attributed to postdramatic theatre, immersive theatre forms, theatre as a hypermedium, and audience-centred work. Throughout history theatre has responded to changes within society and has developed styles that have reinterpreted and reinvented the notions of character, tension, audience, site, time and narrative. One way to understand new and radical theatre styles is to investigate the historical and contemporary contexts that are shaping current theatrical practice. These practices give rise to theatre that is responsive to site, places the audience at the centre of the experience and engages with non-linear narrative form. Understanding this enables theatre-makers to develop informed choices about where to locate, describe and promote their practice and product. This unit explores forms that reinvent notions of audience, narrative, space and linear time.
KTB227 Leadership in Creative Contexts: Directing Creativity
This unit investigates notions and functions of leadership in the fields of theatre, drama and performance. Through engaging with models of directorial best-practice and examining influential practitioner-leaders, you will unpack the process of leading creativity from both a collaborative and personal perspective, with the aim of achieving a unified creative vision. Whether within conventional hierarchical structures or collaborative models, delivering creative outcomes requires not only knowledge of the personal, logistical and artistic processes of creation, but also an understanding of the processes to safely navigate from concept to fullest expression.
Fashion
DFB104 Fashion Sustainability
This unit is in the developmental stage of the program and provides you with a foundational knowledge of environmental and social impacts of fashion production and consumption. Throughout the unit you will examine the environmental and social impact of different industry business models, materials and production methods in order to develop the skills and mindset to apply more sustainable practices. It also introduces fashion systems as complex supply chains spanning raw fibre through to manufacturing, design, retailing and garment use, disposal systems at end of life, fibre and textiles, industry structures, and business models grounded in sustainable and ethical practices.
DFB208 Fashion Textiles and Technology
This unit provides you with knowledge and skills in applied textile design and technology exploring avenues in speculative design into textile futures. By learning about the technologies involved with textile production you will be able to understand and forecast future design and technology trends that involve textile processes in the wider spectrum. This unit will be presented in an integrated studio environment. As such, it will focus on textiles, materiality and technology. You will be given the opportunity to design experimental textiles in line with industry trends and challenges.
DFB216 Wearables
This unit introduces wearable product design for the purposes of enhancing the user experience within a given context. It provides knowledge and skills to design interactive wearable products. It focuses on demonstrating the use of emerging technologies and rapid prototyping techniques for the purposes of designing wearable products that enhance the user experience within a given context. This unit is designed as an intermediate experience of your course and as such it is desirable that you have completed design foundation units, tangible media or textiles and technology units prior to enrolling in this unit. This unit provides you with opportunities to build, develop and apply creative design proficiency in the context of wearable design and wearable technologies.
Film, screen & animation
KNB100 Introduction to Animation Studies
As an evolving art form, animation engages both critical and historical practices in an ongoing creative, technical and narrative development. This unit will examine the key critical, historical and cultural contexts, including Indigenous perspectives that underpin contemporary animation. Starting at the early 20th century and finishing with the present day, this unit nurtures critical thinking through an investigation of the unique conditions that gave rise to important pioneering and innovative currents that distinguish contemporary animation as a genre. Students will have the opportunity to: explore important theories of colour, motion, and form; trace the journey of animation from historical to contemporary contexts; understand creative and technical methods and their applied contexts; develop a critical awareness of the techniques and methods underpinning modern animation; and, gain foundational knowledge that will inform student’s individual animation practice.
KNB105 Core Concepts in Animation Practice
This unit provides you with a comprehensive understanding of the core concepts and principles of animation through 2D processes. Drawing on key animation texts, you will explore theories and processes that underpin the craft of animation, enabling you to produce original artefacts that create believable motion for diverse animated outcomes. Building an understanding of how motion is constructed frame by frame ahead of using computer systems to handle the in-betweens is key grounding to animation practice which can be applied to any medium or method of animation.
KNB110 Virtual Art Department: 3D Assets and Virtual Worlds
Like a traditional art department, the virtual art department (VAD) is focused on shot design, layout, visual development, and creating production-ready digital assets and worlds to be used in a range of production approaches and fields such as Film, Animation, Virtual Production, Games, visualisation, and immersive experiences to name a few. This unit explores the methods, applications, and theories of 3D and real-time asset production and virtual environment creation (world-building). You will learn about the fundamental components of 3D asset production, including textures, mesh, materials, and other aspects, and build abilities to create 3D assets using current production processes. This unit will also delve into approaches to environment creation and how assets can be adapted and adjusted to suit specific needs. You will learn about environmental narrative and how locations can be used to tell stories, as well as the impact of environments on narrative.
KNB127 CGI Foundations
This unit introduces the foundations of 3D computer graphics theory, the history of computer-generated animation and 3D production methods. It provides a solid theoretical understanding of 3D space; the technical skills to create 3D computer-generated imagery and the ability to resolve issues that arise during 3D production. In the evolving fields of animation, games and graphical visualisation, you will acquire new literacies and skills to participate fully in the 3D computer graphics production process.
KNB135 Animation Aesthetics
This unit introduces basic to medium level techniques of 3D character animation by investigating the fundamental principles, concepts and approaches to body mechanics and character performance. The focus is on developing an understanding of methodology, planning and execution in order to achieve a sense of physicality and believability. When creating animated content for production, it is important to develop a solid methodology that allows an animator to work quickly and creatively while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. Being able to take direction and creatively respond to a brief while finding the best way to communicate an idea to an audience is a core skill that takes time to develop. The core communication skills of illustration, motion, blocking and layout follow industry standards in pre-production and are required for the generation and presentation of ideas, as well as the exploration of form and character.
KNB136 Visual Storytelling: Production Design
Animation is the art of impossible worlds, requiring a broad base of skills that address the nexus of theory and practice. Core animation skills such as observation, meaning-making, description, interpretation, representation and recording synthesise the foundations laid through critical thinking and affiliated practice. This unit explores the theoretical context for the use of techniques and processes involved in the development of concepts for production. It also introduces some of the drawing skills and processes employed in the visual development phase for animated, live-action production, motion media and games. It addresses design thinking, concept art, character design and modelling, in anticipation of production work. This unit provides a solid foundation for subsequent visual storytelling units, such as KNB216 Visual Storytelling: Cinematic Pre-Visualisation and KNB226 Visual Storytelling: Pre-Production, which inform final year capstone project.
KPB101 Introduction to Screen Production
This unit introduces the principles and technologies of video production for both cinema and television, such as the roles and responsibilities of production teams, production management, design and practice. Lectures by experts in the areas of producing, directing, and cinematography, editing and sound will inform your practice. As the contemporary mediascape simultaneously converges and diversifies technologically and in market applications, there is a growing demand for new content with correlating skill sets in media production. Drawing on production processes and methodologies established in film, video and television, this unit will introduce you to content production both generated and outputted through new media technologies. Skills, knowledge and approaches will be drawn from the fields of scriptwriting, pre-production, production management, direction, producing, camera, sound, editing and post-production.
KPB116 Introduction to Screenwriting
This unit introduces various principles, elements and stages that make up the scriptwriting process for narrative production. Skills needed to generate and select ideas, write synopses, and draft scripts will be developed through studying and applying the key creative components of writing for the screen. The unit addresses principles of storytelling, industry standards and practical skills involved in developing projects for narrative productions within film, television and other media. The focus is on how to develop ideas, create engaging characters, and construct scenes for visual mediums. Writing scripts for a range of screen media formats is a learned craft and requires discipline, perseverance, and an understanding of industry practice. Possessing this key knowledge provides capabilities to develop concepts through to script stage.
KPB119 Introduction to Screen Production: Single Camera
This unit introduces single camera production techniques and the skills and knowledge required to work in small, independent screen production contexts. Students will develop an understanding of single camera production workflow from pre-production, production and post-production with a focus on creating short form content in independent and collaborative contexts.
KPB120 Contemporary Screen Histories
This unit engages with contemporary screen productions and the ways in which they look and sound. It assists you to develop an appreciation of the artistic and cinematic production practices of key individuals and studios. The styles of recent screen productions (how they look and sound) are the result of past and contemporary creative innovations associated with key individuals, production houses, and studios over an extended period of time. This unit considers the styles of screen productions such as motion pictures as being the result of evolving production practices, technological developments, individual and collaborative creative endeavours, and audience expectations.
KPB121 Screen Business
This unit provides an introduction to producing, writing and the theoretical aspects of the movie, television and new media businesses. The production and distribution of screen-based audiovisual material is a significant global industry. In order to properly understand the cultural impact of this content it is important to understand how it functions as an industry. This is important both for those who intend to work in these businesses, and for those who are interested in understanding how cultural and creative business works. Apart from introducing media business, the unit provides an understanding of the importance of researching the expectations and desires of audiences in order to create commercial products designed to entertain, inform or educate.
KPB220 Factual Screens
This unit introduces the traditions of documentary film and television production, stylistic practices in documentary and documentary scripts, and methodologies for producing ethnographic, indigenous and cross cultural documentaries. Understanding the role documentary performs in our media age provides a crucial literacy to this film forms. You will be exposed to the history and theory behind documentary, enabling you to conceptualise and plan your own documentary productions and critique the place of them alongside factual and fictional forms of filmmaking in the contemporary media landscape. The documentary filmmaking tradition has involved many crucial aesthetic, technical and ethical concerns throughout history. For film, screen and animation students, this unit aids you to integrate its contents into documentary scripts and productions, while for other disciplines' students, the unit provides the theoretical underpinnings and processes of documentary production.
Interaction design
DXB111 Introduction to Web Design
This unit introduces concepts and skills underpinning the user-centred design of web sites using the web technologies such as HTML and CSS. It enables you to understand web technologies as a medium to explore design concepts and to build responsive, high-fidelity, mobile-first web sites. This includes translating conceptual designs into responsive websites while taking into account principles of interface and user experience design, layout, style and navigation. The unit enables you to formulate solutions to design problems, to produce high quality technical and aesthetic outcomes, and to understand the basic skills needed by web design professionals.
DXB205 Interactive Narrative Design
This unit serves as an introduction to creating immersive environments and building interactive worlds for player performance and dramatic agency. The role of the narrative designer is central to the success of any significant professional project in interactive media and game design. The unit addresses theoretical issues associated with immersive / non-linear story structures and interactive narrative forms through the analysis of game / play systems, the creation of original game concepts and the application of techniques of narrative design. It extends this understanding into practice through the application of relevant skills, which will scaffold you into the production of a portfolio work (suitable for interaction designers, visual communication designers, game designers, media designers, creative writers and performance studies).
Journalism
CJB105 Shortform News Production
Journalists must be able to produce content that engages audiences across a range of formats and platforms. In this unit, you will develop the ability to successfully perform a range of newsgathering activities, including interviewing and live blogging. Drawing on this newsgathering activity, you will produce under ‘real world’ deadlines professional quality audio and video content that is suitable for TV, radio, or digital platforms. You will also apply multimedia skills to produce transmedia content that supports contemporary journalism practices, and create digital communication content that engages and/or persuades audiences. In addition to producing content, you will undertake editorial roles that support successful short form news production, and understand the value of community and collaboration in the multifaceted practice of contemporary journalism.
CJB205 Data-Driven Storytelling and Verification
Communication professionals now operate in a world in which data is plentiful, and often relatively easy to access. This situation also throws up a number of challenges, though, with these practitioners needing to know where to find such data, how to make sense of it and, more importantly, how to present that data to an audience in a meaningful and engaging way. This unit therefore equips students with some of these foundational skills, and provides them with a strong understanding of how data can be used to enhance news stories, and help to uncover stories which have not been told yet.
CJB304 Critical Issues in News and Factual Media
This advanced unit engages with critical and contemporary issues that are upending news media business practices, values, and trends. It builds upon core knowledge and skills, and is designed to increase confidence in your analytical capacity and problem solving ability as a future reporters and factual storytellers in a rapidly changing industry. Drawing on the latest from our world-leading researchers, this unit will enable you will apply historical, economic, political, technological, and cultural perspectives to understand and master the real world issues facing the factual media landscape.
Music
KMB117 Introduction to Composition and Songwriting
This unit introduces students to the fundamental principles and techniques of composing and songwriting. Through a combination of theoretical learning, practical exercises, and analysis of a diverse range of musical works, students will develop their creative skills and gain a deeper understanding of the art of composing and songwriting. The unit will cover topics such as melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics, form, and arrangement.
KMB119 Music Production 1
This unit introduces you to the fundamental principles of music and sound production through a mix of theory and practice. You will gain an understanding of sound recording, sound production and live sound reinforcement while developing listening skills essential for music and sound production. The unit prepares you for later music production and creation units. Understanding how to capture and manipulate sound in live and recorded domains are core skills for anyone involved in making music or in any associated creative practice that involves the use of audio. You will develop a critical and practical understanding of the physical properties of sound, how it is perceived, and how it is recorded and processed to produce a final musical outcome.
KMB127 Music Studies
The unit will look at music through a number of scholarly lenses, introducing how music can be understood from social, historical, cultural, and musicological perspectives. Students will critically explore concepts of style and genre in music, Western and non-Western musical contexts (including Australian First Peoples music and culture), globalisation, race, gender and sustainability in music, combining theoretical perspectives with creative practice. The unit challenges students to look at music critically and develop their understanding of how the uses and meanings of music are dependent on context. This unit helps students to understand the different roles that music plays in our lives, and how local and global forces shape music production and consumption.
KMB129 Music Production 2
This unit builds on Music Production 1. It introduces you to sequencing, sound synthesis, and signal processing as approaches to contemporary music composition and production. You will gain an understanding of the approaches and aesthetics that underpin music production and performance in the digital domain. The unit prepares you for later music creation units.
Professional communication
CCB307 Digital Advertising and Public Relations Capstone
This capstone unit prepares work-ready graduates by developing students’ adaptive capabilities to thrive in the ever-changing professions of advertising and public relations. It integrates prior knowledge of advertising and/or public relations theories, research, industry trends, and skills of contemporary professional practices required in a convergent digital media and communication world. Through classwork, independent study, and engagement with real-world projects, students develop an understanding of the local and international relevance of their chosen studies, with opportunities to produce a range of communication outcomes as applied and engagement projects that works to advance employability. This unit offers an opportunity for students to attempt the kind of work they admire in industry, in the process creating a communication portfolio and an issue-based strategy plan that reflects the cumulative learning from their degree and mastery of their chosen discipline/major.
CWB111 Scientific and Technical Writing
This unit introduces you to the principles of writing clearly in a science-based context and to the discursive frameworks that inform scientific and technical writing. It aims to provide you with an understanding of the conventions of writing and publishing scientific and technical information and to develop skills in communicating this information for a general audience. Graduates in the fields of engineering, science and information technology are required to assess high volumes of information and to communicate key scientific and technical ideas to a general audience. As such, there are growing industry and research demands for graduates with professional writing skills that deliver clear and well-structured written information about complex material.
CWB200 Interpersonal and Intercultural Negotiation
This unit introduces the wider context of cultural practices that inform communication at the individual and social levels. The unit explores how communication in the workplace and other professional contexts is influenced by factors such as power dynamics, gender, nationality, cultural norms, and ethnicity. It develops your engagement with the theories of and skills for successful intercultural and interpersonal exchange in business and professional relationships in a global context. Your career will be shaped by global forces, events, and contexts. Therefore, to be a global effective communication practitioner, you will need to see communication in the context of social and cultural norms and assumptions.
Visual arts
KAB110 Open Studio: Experiment
This unit provides the foundations of the Open Studio, introducing experimental art practice through the creative processes and critical concepts of modern and contemporary art. The ability to iteratively experiment across diverse art media is a crucial skill in the development of a creative practice. This unit explores a range of digital and material approaches to creative experimentation and process art, developing skills in art thinking and collaboration, and introducing key principles such as the art manifesto, the artist journal, and the art studio.
KAB120 Open Studio: Image
This unit introduces experimental approaches to 2D art with a focus on image-making, representation and identity. Contemporary artists explore creative and critical interpretations of images in an expanded field of 2D art media – working across photography, printmaking, drawing, collage and painting. This unit is focused on introducing conceptual and practical skills in relation to these distinctive media and understanding diverse artistic practices and cultural perspectives.
KAB130 Open Studio: Object/Space
This unit introduces experimental approaches and expanded 3D art practice in the open studio including sculpture, objects, assemblage, environments and installation. These investigations are grounded in understanding 20th and 21st century art practices and key theoretical frameworks in relation to object-making, spatial art, context and site. The expanded field of contemporary sculpture encompasses a broad range of conceptual approaches and material processes including social sculpture, environmental and public art. This unit provides practical activities to develop independent 3D artworks, framed by the theory and practice of site-responsive art and by contemporary Indigenous and ecological perspectives.
KAB140 Open Studio: Time
This unit introduces experimental approaches to 4D media in relation to the open studio and the expanded field of contemporary art. Art practices that creatively explore the interplay between video, sound, performance, installation and digital art invite audiences to critically engage with embodied, interactive, participatory and immersive modes of techno-cultural experience. This unit considers conceptual frameworks and contextual practices in relation to time, the body, duration, and experience. You will engage in a diverse range of practical activities to produce and present independent artworks that investigate time.
KVB102 Modernism in Art
This unit addresses concepts and movements that comprise early twentieth-century modernism in art and culture. It provides a coherent theoretical-historical knowledge of the period, 1900-1945, while fostering written, and oral communication skills, as well as building capabilities for visual analysis of art works across different media. Modernism is a crucial area of study for understanding twentieth century and contemporary art and visual culture. A proper comprehension of this period will assist you to become an informed practitioner in contemporary art, design, architecture and art writing.
KVB104 Photo Media and Art Practice
This unit develops an appreciation of the conceptual, cultural and historical contexts of photo media, addressing visual literacy, critical artistic enquiry, and the protocols related to ethical photo media practice. Photo media, which involves the use of diverse photographic processes, plays an important role in contemporary creative practices because of its pervasiveness and its application across a broad range of cultural and conceptual contexts. Photo imaging may also be the predominant mode of specific artists within a broader multidisciplinary approach to practice. This unit introduces a diverse range of contemporary artistic photo imaging concepts and methods as part of a trajectory of photographic history. It provides the opportunity to experiment with a variety of approaches to understand and create engaging and informed photo image portfolios.
KVB222 Spatial Art: Object and Site
This intermediate visual art unit aims to develop your visual and spatial literacy by exploring the theory and creation of site-specific installations. Through both directed and self-directed practical activities, you will develop an engaged, spatial art practice that is grounded in the theory and practice of site-specific art and is framed by contemporary Indigenous and environmental perspectives. You will learn how to produce meaningful public artworks that are actively responsive to their site, and that can successfully engage in contemporary contexts and debates. The knowledge and skills you gain will have a rich array of applications for your subsequent creative arts practice.
KVB223 Post 1989 Art
This unit introduces key ideas and styles of art practice that have emerged since 1989 in a global economy. It develops knowledge and skills that are relevant to cultural literature and visual analysis. It furthers your expertise in problem solving, creative thinking and effective communication of knowledge in a variety of contexts and modes. As a creative industries student, it is important to possess an informed knowledge of art and culture since 1989, including the rise of the experience economy and the centrality of entertainment and post-avant-garde art in global creative industries. The concepts and knowledge gained will aid you to organise and evaluate information, synthesise research material into a coherent form, and write and verbally articulate ideas. This unit is intended to provide a foundation skill-base for you in Creative Industries and is applicable to all disciplines including art criticism, arts practice, architecture and fashion.
Visual communication
DVB101 Visual Communication Design
This unit introduces the principles and conventions associated with the interpretation and production of meaning through visual representation. Visual Communication is based on the creation of meaning through image and text and this plays a critical role in our contemporary world which is visually and media driven. Visual communicators require a deep understanding of conceptual development, design process, typography and image making, and how image-based communication occurs. You will learn how to think and operate as a visual designer through studio-based learning and a series of industry-focused experiences.
DVB305 Design for Health Innovation
The contribution of design-led approaches and methods to innovations in eHealth and healthcare services and technologies is increasing. Challenges impacting Australian and international health sectors require skills and knowledge of consumer- and user-centric approaches. You will become familiar with theoretical frameworks for health and wellbeing and develop knowledge of contemporary design-led approaches to the development of health and wellbeing services, products and experiences. This unit addresses theories, approaches, methods and applications of design to the context of health and wellbeing. It takes into account multiple stakeholder perspectives: health professionals, patients and carers. You will deepen you design skills and knowledge of methods used in Design Thinking to conceptualise, develop and produce a design prototype.
Units you need background knowledge to study
These units have requirements for previous study or background knowledge. Check the unit’s previous study requirements for details. If you have any questions, contact the unit coordinator for the semester you want to study.
If your previous studies were not in English, or were completed in a country where English is not the first language, you will also need to demonstrate that you meet our English proficiency requirements when you apply.
Creative industries
Communication
CCN111 Social Media Data Analytics
Knowing how to analyse social media data sets to answer questions and make decisions that improve content and engagement is a fundamental skill for contemporary communication professionals. It is also essential that future focused communication professionals have both an understanding of how computational technologies transform the world of communication, and the hands-on skills to collect and analyse data. It is included in the early part of the program to develop your foundational data analytics knowledge and computational thinking.
CCN113 Social Media Strategy Project
This Work Integrated Learning unit synthesises the knowledge and skills developed in earlier foundational units associated with effective social media management. It applies them to a professional media and communication industries context. The unit supports the development of collaborative teamwork skills to respond to a real client brief. This reflects the kinds of work that professional communicators undertake.
CCN201 The Digital Creative Economy and the Future of Work
This unit explores how digital transformation impacts on media and communication industries and the working lives of communication professionals. To develop effective communication strategies and pursue work opportunities, communication professionals need to have an understanding of emerging trends in media industries, and how to thrive in this environment as a digital communication professional. As such, the unit provides an advanced and critical understanding of digital transformation, how it disrupts the communication and media industries, and the specific implications for the future of digital communication professionals.
CCN204 Audience Analytics
Digital technologies have transformed the way communicators engage with and understand diverse media audiences. This unit will explore the fundamental theoretical frameworks, methods and metrics for identifying and understanding audiences. An applied and critical understanding of audience analytics is crucial for communication professionals. This unit builds upon and deepens the ideas and methods for audience analysis introduced in earlier units in this course.
CCN205 Data-Driven Storytelling
This unit examines visual communication for information and the application of principles for effective information design. Understanding and engaging with the ever-growing quantities of data is a challenge for both organisations and individuals. Increasingly, experts are required to not only evaluate and prepare this data, but also to identify and communicate it within organisations, or to stakeholders, clients, users, community groups, etc. The effective visual communication of those stories in the data is a design process informed by advanced principles of information design and is critical for audience engagement. Data-driven storytelling is an advanced visual information design unit.
Creative practice
KKB285 Creative Enterprise Studio 2
This unit furthers your theoretical and practical knowledge and skills to develop enterprise focused creative projects. It links with work previously undertaken in KKB185 Creative Enterprise Studio 1 and prepares you for the final semester capstone unit KKB385 Creative Enterprise Studio 3. You will build upon your foundational understanding of project development gained in KKB185 and develop skills in project delivery and management through to prototyping your creative idea. The concept of iterative design is introduced through reflection on the success of the prototype and recommendations for future iterations and creative experimentation. This unit allows you to extend your project development skills including field analysis, creative experimentation, communication, problem solving and project evaluation.
KKB385 Creative Enterprise Studio 3
During this capstone unit you will demonstrate creative leadership by initiating an industry linked creative project. It brings together the skills and knowledge acquired throughout your course, drawing specifically from KKB185 Creative Enterprise Studio 1 and KKB285 Creative Enterprise Studio 2. The unit provides you with a framework to develop a project proposal that addresses an identified opportunity. You will then initiate your project proposal, launching your career as a creative industries professional.
Creative writing
KWB326 Creative Writing Project 2
This unit provides a unique learning opportunity to complete a sustained body of creative work in a genre or form of your choice and identify market and publication strategies for your work. Building on the project commenced in KWB306 Creative Writing Project 1, it offers you the opportunity to continue work on an extended piece of creative writing with the assistance of critiques and peer feedback. The unit aids you to identify markets for creative practice, develop skills and strategies to submit work to publishers for professional consideration, and identify and create pathways for publication.
Dance
KDB118 Iconic Dances, Movements and Makers
In this unit you will examine iconic dances as movement trends in art and society, the role dance plays in cultures, and how dance knowledge is shared across generations, emerges over time, and intersects within our current community, explored through the key theme of hybridity in dance. The lectures are designed to offer non-linear explorations of themes and concepts. Within tutorials you will develop your skills in appraising dances, discussing and writing about dance for different contexts. This unit acknowledges that, as a member of the twenty-first century global citizens, you need to be agile in the understandings and skills necessary to negotiate cultural difference, and the hybridizing effects of globalization, if you are to contribute to creating peaceful communities with culturally competent citizens.
KDB122 Popular Dance Styles
The unit focuses on different dance styles and their application in different contexts, supported by complementary studies. You will continue to explore and develop your emergent understanding of your dance practice and your future as a dance practitioner. This unit builds upon the knowledges you have developed in KDB112 Dance Technique Fundamentals by offering you an introduction to a broader spectrum of popular dance styles. You will undertake a series of practical classes throughout the semester that may include a combination of: Jazz, Hip-hop, Ballet, Contemporary, Latin Dance or Swing.
KDB206 Dance in Contemporary Culture
This unit builds upon embodied knowledge and dance practice developed in KDB122 Popular Dance Styles. Through a series of seminars and practical workshops you will explore different trends in the role and place of dance in contemporary culture. You will explore dance's place in society and the development of trends such as Dance in Museums, Hip-hop culture, Dance as a Political Intervention, and Dance for Well-being.
KDB223 Screen Dance
This unit introduces you to the field of screen dance through a critical and practical engagement with the genre. As such, it addresses the key concerns of screen dance practice from a critical perspective, as well as developing your skills in producing and documenting dance across a range of digital platforms. Through mixed delivery and online learning you will develop skills associated with the conceptualisation, composition, filming and editing of movement for the camera. This unit is designed for those with an interest in the merging fields of dance, choreography, film and video production, shared creative practice, collaboration and the screen based presentation of dance works. The skills learned will be transferable across a range of different platforms and can be applied to the creation of new screen dance works as well as to documentation of performance and creative process.
KDB320 Independent Dance Project
This unit enables you to adapt and transform your dance skills for artistic expression and is the culmination of your previous two Performance in Context units. This guided experience supports you to develop your skills to work independently and to establish your practice as a teaching artist through the key processual stages including conception, development and realisation of your ideas. You will apply your integrated knowledge of technical skills and artistic practice to effectively initiate and realise an independent dance project. This self-contained, discrete project will enable you to develop your skills, professional identity and aptitude for engagement within a variety of industry contexts.
Design
DYB102 Impact Lab: Society and Systems
This unit addresses methods of social impact design and the ways in which these approaches can contribute to transformational social and community focused change. In it, you experience how design approaches and tools can be applied to complex social and community-based challenges. In a context where design can foster inclusion and act as a disruptor and driver for positive change you as a designer, alongside your design peers, have the collective potential to lead or make a better future. Framed around real world challenges; and in partnership with community, government and/or industry partners; you will engage with transdisciplinary design-led participatory entrepreneurial strategies to address key issues within one or more communities. This will develop skills valuable in designing for social impact. This impact lab focuses on people, to foreground the importance of keeping the human condition at the heart of design practice which enables solutions aimed at social change.
Drama
KRB121 Scenography 2: Creating Worlds for Theatre
This unit introduces you to the practical concepts and processes associated with the creation of scenography – the world of the theatrical performance. It explores the practical application of the core elements of scenography including set, costume, light, sound and vision, while considering other key performance elements including space, time, narrative, character, performers and audience. The unit facilitates practical application and experience in solving the challenges faced by the scenographer. This includes the demands of crafting and communicating a theatre design, using relevant industry software to model set designs, and the ongoing challenge of documenting the creative process and product. It combines practical investigations with in-depth lectures on the application of design, including the role of the contemporary production designers, the design process and techniques.
KRB221 Scenography 4: Intermedial Theatre
This unit introduces scenographic techniques and approaches for intermedial theatre such as conceptualisation through to realisation, while offering an appreciation of the overall production process. It explores the practical realisation of the principles of intermedial theatre - the use of space and technology; the design and composition of visual and aural environments; the demands and effect of the digitally mediated upon the narrative, production, performers and audience. The unit is structured to incorporate a degree of practical application and experience in solving the challenges faced by the designer working in theatre, including 'hands-on' experience of the processes and demands of realising an intermedial performance. As the final unit in the Scenography minor, this studio-based unit comprises predominantly ongoing practical work that you complete under the close guidance and instruction of QUT academic staff.
KSB110 The Actor's Instrument: Impact and Presence
This introductory unit addresses the fundamentals of dynamic movement and voice production for actors, exploring foundational skills that focus on embodied impact and presence. Highly developed technical proficiency in vocal and physical expressiveness is a fundamental requirement for professional actors. This unit introduces core techniques and concepts associated with safe movement and vocal production for actors working in screen and stage contexts, including foundational ensemble development for collaborative practice informed and strengthened by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practices. These skills will inform every acting exercise or collaborative project undertaken through the three years of your course and beyond.
KSB115 Acting Realism, Theories and Practices
This foundational unit introduces you to the core theories of acting in the genre of realism and explores how they can be applied to the development of professional acting methods and practice, and to an understanding of the actor’s creative role in traditional and contemporary theatre-making, and to the collaborative protocols that underpin it. It also introduces you to contemporary approaches to dramaturgical and textual analysis, that enable you to identify and apply the elements of a dramatic text that stimulate the imaginative procedures specific to the art form of acting. The aim of this unit is to help you build a foundation of cognitive, imaginative, and embodied learning skills centring on acting practice, to enable you to continue developing your craft autonomously and in a systematic, informed way.
KSB120 The Actor's Instrument: Communication and Composition
This introductory unit focuses on the continuing acquisition of instrumental skills associated with developing impact and presence in physical and vocal expressiveness, and now applies them to the communication and shaping of dramatic meaning. Highly developed technical proficiency in vocal and physical expressiveness is a fundamental requirement for professional actors. This unit builds on core techniques and concepts introduced in KSB110 associated with theoretical notions of vocal and physical transformation for actors working in screen and stage contexts.
KSB125 Theatricality and the Contemporary Audience
This introductory unit develops your understanding and skills in creating acting performances that dynamically engage with live audiences, requiring you to investigate ways of combining physical and vocal embodiment with genre-appropriate, audience-focused staging conventions. Your enquiry includes exploring how realism and theatricality can be combined to intensify the impact on the audience of dramatic meaning, social commentary and visual storytelling. This enquiry will be informed by engagement with a range of play texts and theoretical perspectives relating to acting issues associated with this form of theatre and its political, social and cultural contexts. The unit challenges you to apply your developing acting, voice, imaginative and embodiment skills and techniques, to the demands associated with performing dynamic roles from complex source material of different genres and cultural contexts.
KTB114 Interpreting Dramatic Text
Through critical engagement with theories of dramatic interpretation, this foundational unit provides introductory learning experiences to help you effectively perform dramatic text. The notion of “text” is understood as potentially covering a broad range of artefacts and creative stimulus, from classical scripts to inter-disciplinary creative artefacts and even inanimate chosen objects. This unit enables you to develop and apply skills of theatrical interpretation and performance through practice-led process methodologies grounded in theories of dramatic interpretation, rehearsal, and performance. You will work with your peers to critically engage with the interpretation of a source text, before being provided the opportunity to develop a performance of the text and implement the core performing skills needed for this.
KTB115 Devising Drama
This unit introduces models of devising to create a new performance work under the guidance of a tutor/director. The work will be devised in groups and performed at the end of semester. Past and present practitioners have proven that key creatives of many kinds can lead the creation of dramatic works through collaborative models of performance making, which often aspire to include a range of voices, innovating in both form and content.
KTB126 Drama Practice: Collaboration
This introductory unit addresses practical and theoretical understandings of processual, improvised and devised dramatic form. It introduces collaborative practice and play building that is at the heart of the BFA Drama coursework. The unit presents different techniques and processes of content generation and form exploration and develop a language around creative inquiry, taking concepts to action and applying form and genre to original ideas. It offers a descriptive and analytical vocabulary to underpin the application of performance making in preparation for 2nd and 3rd year practical units. Ultimately, this unit will provide a solid foundation for the academic and professional skills of observation and analysis, teamwork, creative leadership and collaboration to explore ideas or generate content.
KTB226 Drama Practice: Transformation
This practice-led, intermediate unit enables you to build and apply skills in collaboratively devising and performing a show. Under the guidance of a director you interpret and transform key formal features of selected iconic practitioners or performances as the starting point for an original show to be performed at the end of semester. Indeed, transformation can be a process of adaptation, repurposing or one of profound re-imagining of content and/or form through research of form and genre, and the development and application of skills in devising, workshop and dramaturgical interrogation.
KTB326 Drama Practice: Realisation
This advanced unit enables you to independently realise a new work on the page, stage or in between, responding to real world opportunities you may pursue after graduation. Interpretation, transformation and generation all have a role to play in realising a new creative work. This unit activates the foundations of prior drama practice units in a capstone experience which enables you to further develop your creative practice. Successful creative practice is measured by degrees of expertise, diligence and awareness that are acknowledged by audiences, peers and industry. Talent aside, much is dependent on working with others to converge drama theory, skills and practice into proposals, presentations or performances that possess viability and integrity. It is also reliant on the capacity of individuals and groups to formulate and respond to critique and successfully navigate dynamic uncertainties of creative realisation to fashion a viable outcome.
Fashion
DFB111 Fashion Design Studio 2
This unit provides introductory knowledge and skills for the theory and practice of fashion design, focusing on flat patternmaking and classic western design forms. This foundational unit provides knowledge and skills for the theory and practice of structured fashion design. It addresses fashion design principles, processes and contexts, including the development of effective skills to communicate digitally and realise design ideas in an integrated studio environment. The suite of six Fashion Design Studio units form the foundation of learning for understanding fashion design in the Bachelor of Design (Fashion) program. Embedded in this program is a focus on ethical and sustainable practices.
DFB211 Fashion Design Studio 4
This unit provides knowledge of fashion design for public consumption. In this unit, you will develop and expand skills to conceptualise, communicate and realise design ideas for mass manufacture in an integrated studio environment. You will build on your previously acquired research, conceptual and fabrication skills as well as develop and apply sustainable fashion practice knowledge. You will synthesise your understanding of product development and retail readiness and will learn about the logistical and practical considerations of fashion design and production. The suite of Fashion Design Studio units form the foundation of learning for understanding fashion design in the Bachelor of Design (Fashion) program.
DFB305 Critical Fashion Studies
This advanced level unit deepens your critical fashion engagement and consolidates your skills in fashion communication. It prepares you to play a leadership role in shaping the dialogues that are transforming fashion practices. The aim of this unit is to develop your critical, analytical and communication skills in the context of the global fashion industry and wider cultural debates. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach characteristic of current fashion scholarship, this final unit builds on the theoretical and practical knowledge developed in DFB206 Global Fashion Cultures and DFB209 Global Fashion History and provides you with the opportunity to develop sophisticated research and written communication skills, preparing you to contribute to shaping the dialogues and debates that are changing the contemporary fashion industry.
DFB311 Fashion Design Studio 6
This 24 credit point unit is the capstone Fashion Design Studio experience and aims to provide you with the opportunity to synthesise your prior learning, within university and the workplace, through the production of a final year project that will be outward looking. Within this unit you will develop your confidence and ability to work with minimal supervision in preparation for graduation exploring your individual style and target audience. During this unit you will complete your final year project and will have the opportunity to apply to present your work in a graduate show or other external event. This unit may form part of the Honours component for continuing DE42 Bachelor of Design (Honours) students.
DFH801 Fashion Design Studio 8
This unit aims to provide you with advanced knowledge of fashion design as well as professional decision making, planning and organisational skills in order to execute and complete an extended independently-led research fashion project. It is the final in a series of eight Fashion Design Studio units in the Bachelor of Design (Honours) program and forms the capstone experience for an extended independently-led research fashion project.
Film, screen & animation
KNB115 Crafting Motion in 3D
Enhancing your core animation skill set, you will focus on expressing qualities of character within animated outcomes. With reference to historical and contemporary precedents, you will gain a thorough grounding that will foster the knowledge required to advance in digital character animation. Incorporating a critique and analysis of body mechanics, expression and body language, students will explore and experiment with the nuances of real-world physics within a character animation context. This unit provides students with a comprehensive understanding of 3D animation, while reflecting upon present day technological methods involving aspects such as machine learning, performance capture and optimization with algorithms and the impact on animating characters. A final animated outcome will challenge you through a practice-led investigation of body mechanics and the subtle relationship with character behaviour, applying complex locomotion to an original bipedal character.
KNB137 Digital Worlds
This unit provides a strong foundation in the practices and concepts associated with the creation of CGI assets for use within real-time graphics production. Applications of real-time 3D graphics now extend beyond the commonplace use in games into fields such as virtual production, virtual reality, augmented reality film and TV production offering new methods of production, storytelling and interactive experiences. The creation of these experiences requires a firm grounding in the practices, concepts and skills associated with real-time production and asset creation for use in a real-time 3D engine. This unit allows you to take advantage of 3D skills and knowledge developed during KNB127 CGI Fundamentals while laying the critical foundational knowledge and skills needed for more advanced practices undertaken in KNB217. It is a starting point to incorporating real-time technologies into your capstone projects.
KNB225 Advanced Animation Performance
This unit advances your knowledge in character animation theory and practices in a project-based learning environment. In order to create an engaging animated character performance the audience can empathise with, it is important to have a good understanding of acting methods as well as animation principles and techniques. The theory and practice in this unit will introduce you to production management while focusing on developing further insights into planning, staging, cinematography, body language and facial expressions animation for character acting in a narrative context.
KNB226 Visual Storytelling: Animation Pre-Production
This unit expands on story development, design and pre-visualisation techniques for productions. As such, it consolidates your exposure to concept development, production design and pre-production knowledge, and the skills introduced in KNB136 Visual Storytelling: Production Design and KNB216 Visual Storytelling: Cinematic Pre-Visualisation. The unit focuses on equipping students with the design and planning skills necessary for cinematic preproduction. These range from concept development through to design and storyboarding to production-ready documentation. As part of this unit you will develop, design, direct, pitch, produce a production bible and an animatic for an animated short. You will be required to draw and therefore be expected to build on illustration skills.
KNB227 CGI Technologies
This unit offers you an opportunity to experiment with emerging forms of production, such as Virtual Production, and explores the theoretical context and the techniques of these new filmmaking methods. It also introduces some of the key technologies such as Motion Capture, Photogrammetry and In-Camera Virtual Production commonly employed in real-time production processes for animated, live-action film, games and live performance events. This unit builds upon the introduction of real-time technologies in KNB137 Digital Worlds and provides a solid foundation in advanced production techniques applicable to final year capstone projects.
KNB320 Advanced Animation Production 2
To prepare for life outside of the academic institution, it is important to be able to showcase your work with knowledge of the requirements of your field. This unit builds on previous studies of animation techniques and production processes to complete a final advanced project and to create a professional showreel and portfolio. It continues to develop animation production skills, concentrating on final output and post-production.
KPB122 Screen Crafts: Narratives
This unit develops your creative, technical and organisational abilities in the areas of screen storytelling and communication. Screen content specialisation requires you to develop an effective, industry-related range of skills. It builds on and advances basic understandings, skills and principles developed in KPB101 or KPB117. An introduction to the skills of sound and lighting complements the earlier core skills of camera, editing, directing and producing and the unit concentrates on the basics of telling a coherent fictional narrative story for the screen.
KPB123 Multi-Camera Studio Production Practice
This unit addresses creative, technical and organisational skills and knowledge required to work in a multi-camera television studio production context. You will develop an understanding of the formats suitable for live production and the practical production skills as a crew member on multiple modes of production which will form the basis of an effective industry-related repertoire. This unit builds on skills developed in previous units to make studio-based multi-camera productions and live broadcast content.
KPB221 Screen Project Development
This unit equips you as a developing screen content creator with the concepts and skills for project development and pre-production. It addresses the roles played by producers, directors, writers, script editors and other craft practitioners in the creative process. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. This tried and tested adage applies to every crew member and department involved in screen productions. Hard-to-come-by financing, tight budgets and schedules, and the expectation for high quality, innovative content mean that the planning phase of project development and pre-production is essential. Indeed, it is important for you who wish to work in contemporary screen industries to understand the nature and importance of these critical phases.
KPB222 Screen Crafts: Multi-Camera and Single-Camera Production
This unit addresses creative, technical and organisational abilities in the areas of screen story-telling and communication. It will also provide you with an understanding of the workings of multi-camera television studio production and how this mode of production differs from single-camera modes. You will develop practical production skills as a crew member on both modes of production which will form the basis of an effective industry-related repertoire. This unit builds on skills developed in previous units to make productions such as studio-based multi-camera productions, commercials, community service announcements, short form narratives and client-based productions.
KPB325 Screen Issues
This unit develops historical, critical and analytical skills in reading and writing about issues in the screen industries and contemporary culture. It fosters both critical research skills and practical, professional development skills and approaches for emerging practitioners. It looks at contemporary screen production contexts and consumption practices, and how these issues relate to the industries. The unit considers the effect of screen forms on the experience of visual culture and investigates the relationship between evolving digital technologies and existing media. Understanding the contemporary contexts for screen production is essential for screen professionals. This unit brings you up-to-date with the issues and topics most relevant for emerging practitioners who would like to make the most of the opportunities, be aware of risks and become dynamic and adaptive in the process.
Industrial design
DNB111 ID Studio 2: Aesthetics and Visualisation
This introductory unit advances knowledge and skills with analogue and digital visualisation techniques to explore, elaborate and communicate your design ideas effectively. The most common and complex aspect of industrial design deals with creating aesthetically pleasing products imbued with meaning and value through form and function. Continuing the development of design process knowledge and skills established in DNB110 ID Studio 1: User Centred Design, this unit delves deeper into ideas of aesthetics and meaning in order to advance the quality of everyday products.
DNB212 ID Studio 5: Applied Technology
This unit provides the skills and knowledge required to design products for manufacture. It advances knowledge on commonly used materials allowing you to gain an understanding of how manufacturing constraints and opportunities affect the design process. Industrial Designers need to be able to design products that are viable for production. They also need to possess skills in translating these constraints and opportunities into viable product designs and to be able to efficiently communicate their design intent to allow that product to be manufactured according to industry standards and capabilities. The unit focuses on 3D parametric Computer Aided Design (CAD) and on how this is incorporated into the design process. Additionally, it provides skills in creating 3D CAD models and using them to communicate design intent. The unit builds on the DNB211 ID Studio 4: Manufacturing Technology unit as well as developing CAD and digital presentation skills.
DNB311 ID Studio 7: Capstone
This is the capstone unit for Industrial Design. It is built upon the earlier Industrial Design units and extends the application of research to the designing products and systems. This is an independent project reinforcing leadership and project management as well as strengthening your expertise. You will focus on research done through design, application of research findings for early and developmental design stages, and will learn to integrate research and design to support novel design ideas. The unit provides you with an opportunity to learn how to manage and lead large authentic projects.
DNB312 Advanced Manufacturing
The aim of this unit is to elevate your knowledge of manufacturing to a level where you can confidently produce products able to be manufactured. It further develops your knowledge of the relationship between manufacturing and design. In this you will gain a greater understanding of manufacturing materials and processes that are commonly used by designers. You will also gain experience applying that knowledge to a design project. For a design to progress from just an idea to becoming a real thing it needs to be able to be manufactured. For this, designers need an in-depth understanding of the ways that products are manufactured and what they can be manufactured from. This forms part of the core technical skills that designers require. This unit builds on previous manufacturing skills and allows for this knowledge to be incorporated into the final capstone unit.
DNH803 Applied Design Research 2
This unit focuses on the design of a product or system to a professional level. It builds upon DNH703 Applied Design Research 1 and extends the application of research to the design of a product. You will learn how to integrate research and design knowledge to support novel design ideas. The unit contains seminar discourse. This is a capstone unit and it provides you with the foundation for higher research degrees.
DNH804 Professional Practice in Industrial Design
This unit focuses on the role of professional practice management and its significance to industrial design. It covers: professional practice and management, career paths in Industrial Design, management of design projects, Design documentation and the role of design administration, intellectual property, and designer-client relationships. The unit provides an overview of the relationship between product design and professional practice. It addresses professional practice management and how you can use this knowledge to manage your own projects. This unit also provides an overview of both current and potential future trends in the Industrial Design profession.
Interaction design
DXB212 Tangible Media
This unit provides in-depth knowledge of tangible media through the production of an advanced tangible media design project. The design and production of computational and interactive media forms requires theoretical knowledge and an understanding of the processes that underpin the tangible as well as the embodied ways in which people interact with such systems. This unit builds upon previous interaction design studies and extends these studies into the field of tangible media.
DXB311 Advanced Interaction Design Project
This capstone unit further develops your interaction design skills through the production of a signature project. It focuses on developing your own specialist Interaction Design work which will serve to assist you in defining your professional portfolio and future career pathways. The outcome will also become your major design work to be presented in the final year exhibition. Design for interaction continues to be a transformative and pivotal field of design for contemporary society, encompassing a range of practice from sustainability, usability, and collaboration to the evocative, playful and expressive. New design opportunities and career options continue to emerge and an understanding of future industry practices and an ability to actively engage in these is essential for career success. This subject provides you with the opportunity to explore emerging areas of interaction design through practice-based research, creative focus and a supportive community of learning.
Journalism
CJB203 Newsroom
The aim of this unit is to advance knowledge of the journalism professional approaches needed to produce quality news material for diverse and changing news audiences. It equips you with concepts and skills needed to plan reports; conduct interviews; write news stories; and present and edit material for radio, television and multi-media outputs. This second-year unit is the first of the newsroom suite of units that are a hallmark of the digital-journalism focus of the QUT journalism degree. With a collaborative newsroom approach, it combines the skills and learning of students from different year levels in a team environment with input from peers, staff and industry practitioners. Therefore, you learn the production principles of quality news production in real time while identifying and pursuing innovative news approaches. In keeping with a commercial newsroom, the QUT newsroom experience aims to create a dynamic and diverse news product.
CJB204 Social Justice and Journalism Ethics
Journalism has a significant influence on the way people see the world, and how they think about their place within it. Journalism therefore has the ability to both address, as well as exacerbate, existing power imbalances that exist in our culture. This unit provides students with a better understanding of these dynamics, and how they can shape their future professional practice in ways that might better account for the structural advantages and disadvantages that different groups (based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and physical ability) face. The unit will introduce students to the professional codes of conduct under which journalists often operate, and how they apply in the Australian context. The unit also provides opportunities for students to explore real-world ethical dilemmas in the media industry, and to work through examples of applied ethical decision-making. In doing so, the unit aims to produce more socially-conscious, ethical journalism practitioners.
CJB302 Newsdesk
This capstone unit models day-to-day operations of a fully-converged, multimedia newsroom (online/audio/video). It aids you in reporting, storytelling and professional training as part of a team publishing material for real audiences. Today’s journalism requires skills to operate in a converged media environment and to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and fragmented audience. Graduates need to deal with both the instantaneous demands of the 24-hour news and social media landscape, as well as being able to produce far more considered pieces that analyse, educate, inform and entertain. Choosing the right medium for the task, and working to deadlines, is essential. This authentic learning experience in an industry-standard newsroom demands practical, legal, ethical, creative and social issues to be addressed in real time.
CJB305 Longform News Production
Longform journalism continues to evolve on a range of platforms, with digital media tools providing exciting storytelling possibilities, including podcasts and multimedia features. This unit provides an opportunity for students to apply their advanced journalistic skills in producing longform non-fiction content, using a combination of text, visuals, audio and video. You will learn how to generate story ideas and news angles, and select the most appropriate format for telling stories. You will then use research, interviewing and production skills to produce engaging content, including multimedia feature articles, audio and video, and podcasts. This unit also provides opportunities for reflection and constructive critique of your work. The unit aids you in producing credible non-fiction content in a dynamic and appealing style, applying skills that are transferable to areas outside journalism. It also provides awareness of the market for longform non-fiction content.
Music
KMB109 Creative Practice in Music
This unit establishes a community of practice with an emphasis on collaborative music-making that you can draw on to inform your own work. It introduces you to a range of music contexts, concepts and techniques to help you better understand your practice and that of your peers, and to be better positioned and equipped to respond as appropriate. Successful musicians need to form and negotiate their creative practice within a complex professional environment. They need critical, technical, conceptual and communication skills to understand their music in context and how it can be connected to an audience. This unit introduces you to the fundamental concepts and approaches to develop your practical skills in the creation and presentation of new music. It provides an opportunity for you to explore and present creative ideas collaboratively with peers in a professionally engaged environment.
KMB128 Musicianship 2
This unit builds on the foundational aural and analytical skills introduced in Musicianship 1 to develop understanding of music and sound. These skills will be applied to a range of musical styles, settings and practices. The development of critical listening, analytical skills combined with representational and demonstrational skills across a broad range of music and sound is critical to the developing modern musician. The unit will foster a deeper understanding of music and sound to help inform and situate your creative practice. This unit develops your awareness, critical analytical and synthesis skills across a broad range of music and sound contexts and concepts. It complements other creative, practical and analytical units by fostering a deeper understanding of music and sound.
KMB222 Music and Culture
This unit explores the way that music operates as a form of social, cultural and political communication. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, you will investigate and discuss the various contexts in which music circulates and is made meaningful. The unit explores traditional and contemporary music from a range of cultural contexts (including Australian First Peoples music and culture), providing opportunities to listen critically to music, while using key concepts from sociology, musicology, and cultural studies to discuss identity, culture, and the production and consumption of music. This unit is offered in the developmental stage of your course, and lays the groundwork for understanding why music exists in our lives and how it is placed in the cultural spectrum of music making and the perceived effects of globalisation and localism on music.
KMB227 Music Creation 2
Building on Music Creation 1, this unit develops skills and understanding to create new music across a range of musical practices in performance, production and composition. Successful musicians need to form and negotiate their creative practice within a complex professional environment. They need to develop critical skills to understand their music in context and how it can be connected to an audience. As the second of four units in Music Creation, it builds deeper engagement and knowledge used to present creative ideas with peers and industry professionals.
KMB228 Musicianship 4
This unit assists you to develop an awareness of your own musicianship and where this is situated within the diversity of contemporary practices and contexts. It develops your awareness of analytical and synthesis skills across a broad range of music and sound contexts and concepts. It complements other creative, practical and analytical units by fostering a deeper understanding of music and sound. This advanced musicianship unit provides you with critical listening, analysis, representational and demonstrational skills across a broad range of music and sound. The unit will foster a deeper understanding of music and sound to help inform and situate your creative practice. You will build on these skills towards your final year capstone Music Creation units.
KMB327 Music Creation 4
This unit consolidates your music creative skills in an individually defined area of practice within the broader field of music professions. It develops and refines works and performances in an authentic and professional context and fosters greater entrepreneurial awareness through activation of professional networks and consideration of a sustainable career. This is the capstone unit for the BFA (Music) degree. It draws on your experience from all previous Music Creation units. You will lead and participate in individual or collaborative projects to produce the most fully realised portfolio of work in your degree. The portfolio will demonstrate that you have developed a sophisticated and professional voice over the years of your study. It will also demonstrate a high level of professional activity and engagement. It will be launched to a public audience and demonstrate the highest professional values and an awareness of global potentials in your area of specialisation.
Professional communication
CWB201 Corporate Writing and Editing
Professional communication specialists must have a command of an extensive range of corporate writing genres to create and edit corporate documents. This unit allows you to develop the ability to write in at least two corporate writing genres and be proficient in three other genres. It deals with both the fundamentals of language (grammar, punctuation, style) and common corporate writing genres (manuals, reports, speeches, brochures). As a corporate writing specialist, you must also be able to respond authoritatively to technical and stylistic writing questions when such matters arise in the workplace. You will develop your knowledge about how language works and be able to use that knowledge in practical writing applications. As a result, you will become a more confident writer and communicator in corporate and professional situations.
Visual arts
KVB127 Visual Arts Open Studio 2
This unit advances your independent, self-directed art practice. By exploring a range of processual strategies for the practice of contemporary art and identifying its active and emergent conceptual dimensions, you will develop ways of engaging with the possibilities and challenges arising from the practice of contemporary art. The open-ended conditions of current creative practices, their processes, reception, and contribution to society, are diverse, increasingly complex, and inherently multi-layered. The Open Studio model of contemporary visual art practice provides a platform to build a robust and flexible creative skillset. Building on learning completed in Visual Arts Open Studio 1, you will expand your individual visual art practice through the exploration of creative processes, the application of 'art thinking'; and the development of a conceptual/contextual framework to support your studio activities.
KVB227 Visual Arts Open Studio 4
This unit focuses on the elaboration and sustained development of an individualised artistic practice within a creative community of practitioners. It foregrounds art thinking, speculative inquiry and combinatory play with the material, conceptual and contextual dimensions of creative practice in order to nurture an expanded and nuanced level of creative literacy and intelligence. The open-ended conditions of current creative practices, their processes, reception, and contribution to society, are extremely diverse, increasingly complex, and inherently multi-layered. The Open Studio model provides a unique and ideally suited position from which to understand these factors and develop a relevant creative skillset. This unit furthers a sense of creative inquiry, self-motivation, self-reliance, and an openness to new ideas and aesthetic experiences. .
KVB327 Visual Arts Open Studio 6
This unit provides conceptual frameworks and practical experience in the Open Studio, in order to synthesise critical, creative and analytical thinking, in an independent, professionally ready, creative practice. It addresses effective communication, presentation and advocacy skills for the variety of contexts and modes you will engage with in the professional industry. The conditions of contemporary art practices, their production, reception and contribution to society are extremely diverse, increasingly complex and multi-layered. Your sustained critical involvement and increasing commitment to conceptual and creative pursuits will be supported by intensive research into artists' practices and contemporary theory. The Open Studio is a creative community, which foregrounds art thinking, speculative inquiry and combinatory play with the material, conceptual and contextual dimensions of creative practice.
Visual communication
DVB102 Image Design and Production
This unit provides skills and knowledge for image creation and production across different contexts, styles and media. It also deals with issues of originality, creativity and suitability of images used in professional visual design, while increasing your skills and creative approaches to areas of illustration, information design, photography, and photo media design. It advances knowledge on aesthetic and formal qualities of new areas of image design and a growing technical skill set which will be built upon in further Visual Communication Design specialisation subjects. In a world of easily reproduced digital imagery, the ability to create your own original illustrations, photos, textures and patterns can be highly competitive. Along with developing practical skills to generate original imagery for your design work, the unit further develops your capacity to critique and reflect upon practice.
DVB203 Theories and Methods of Visual Communication
This unit builds on your understanding of the principles of visual communication and its role in determining the values of our contemporary cultures and societies. Through exploring theoretical perspectives, discussions and class exercises you will critique and analyse images and visual communication designs occurring in multiple contexts. In doing so, you will develop further expertise in the production of contemporary communication design and the ethical, social and professional responsibilities of a designer. This unit directly builds upon the Visual Communication and Image Production units while providing opportunities to engage with critical analysis of images and experiences and evidence this through written expression and report writing.