Acting courses
HE Certificate
Length: 1 Year
Start: mid-September 2023 (TBD)
Applications open in November -sign up to our newsletter to receive an alert
View our course fees
Stretch. Give your artistic mind and body a crash course in acting for screen by appearing in as many film projects as humanly possible. An intensive year designed to rapidly increase your experience and elevate your showreel in a very short amount of time.
BA (Hons) Bachelor Degree
Length: 3 Years
Start: mid-September 2023 (TBD)
Applications open in November -sign up to our newsletter to receive an alert
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Over three intensive years, hone the specific skills required to become truly captivating on screen. Research and think critically about the work you want to make. Make the work, then reflect on it. Connect to the industry by finding work placement to launch your career.
Screen Acting Crash Course
Level: Beginners
Course length: 4 weeks
Start: 19 June - 14 July 2023
Applications open in November -sign up to our newsletter to receive an alert
View our course fees
This high-energy 4-week acting course for beginners is designed for budding actors eager to learn the fundamentals of performing for camera. Discover, play, and hone your acting skills with confidence through hands-on learning facilitated by expert tutors and industry professionals.
Access to Higher Education - Primer Workshop
For those wishing to join our main programmes, but lacking either practical experience in film making or the formal education requirements to apply through standard entry, we offer an additional primer workshop to run alongside the 4-week Screen Acting course. It covers writing skills, reading, structuring arguments, debate and understanding context. The course utilises task and project based learning methodology to ensure that you’re prepared and ready for our longer HE Certificate or Bachelor Degree level programmes. Our Admissions team can provide further details.
No ordinary drama school
This is not your traditional drama conservatory. This is the future of performing arts.
Catalyst Acting is part of the Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts & Technology in Berlin, based in the extraordinary Funkhaus facility alongside the river Spree.
Leave your history books and written essays behind - and get in front of the camera. Our contemporary acting courses are made for the increasingly ubiquitous screen.
Star in multiple film productions and work in tandem with our filmmaking students. When you are not rehearsing or on the set, you will join workshops with professional tutors to train your body and voice.
All of our screen acting courses are practice-based and designed to get you on camera as much as humanly possible. We have 1 and 3 year higher education courses starting every September and a selection of 4 week short courses running at different times throughout the year.
Building success
One of the questions on the lips of any budding actor is how do I build a successful career in today's acting industry? There are many skills required to develop the dream of a career into a real and practical future but it definitely requires as many professional and personal development skills as it does performative ones.
If you really want to go for it we provide an optional low cost course in self-development and leadership. The course provides you with the frameworks, the focus and the drive to help realise your future.
Self development to better understand how to take decisive action, to communicate powerfully with others and take an honest look at how you limit yourself. Leadership to help complete your projects and to bring your work as an actor into the external world.
To get your profile out there you will receive a space on our public facing Catalyst Actors Database
Our space, your home
Our historic waterside Funkhaus campus is the perfect home base to write, rehearse, scheme and dream. You’ll share this cozy retro space with the state-of-the-art filmmaking and music production facilities of our sister schools and an international cohort of fellow creatives. It would be tempting to spend all of your time there but we actively encourage our film makers and actors to get out into the glorious city of Berlin and the infinite atmospheric spaces it provides as potential backdrops for the productions you will star in.
Our team
Our courses are delivered by currently practicing industry professionals through workshops designed to give you constant real-world acting experience through ongoing participation in performances and film productions.
They'll ask the difficult questions you've been avoiding, set impossible tasks that stretch you in ways you didn’t know you were capable of, provide insights into new ways of thinking and heap fulsome praise where it's due.
Above all, they'll be there for you when you pick yourself up out of the dirt after a spectacular failure with an encouragement to be even more audacious next time.
Building for success
Our learning mimics real life. Collaborate with creatives from our film and music schools.
Whatever your definition of success, there are a range of tools, skills, attributes and habits which significantly increase your chances of achieving that success. These skills and attributes are the building blocks that help turn a talented, hardworking human being into a genuinely successful one. When we talk about success at Catalyst we are talking about it in the widest possible sense. It may or may not include a financial or a fame element depending on your own personal goals. It must include the importance of also feeling content or happy.
Here are some examples of the qualities we help you develop:-
- A well developed creative muscle
- Comfort with failure and vulnerability
- Building tenacity, grit and resilience
- Personal leadership
- Growing and developing an entrepreneurial approach
- Learning to lead people and projects
- Understanding the benefits of taking risk
- Enhancing your communication and collaborative skills
- Embedding innovation techniques in your daily practice
- Understanding the importance of developing the 'whole' person
Much of this learning is deeply embedded in the projects you complete for your course. Much of the time you may not even be consciously aware you are in the process of developing these skills.
Collaborate
As part of our specialist acting school you'll benefit from a range of collaboration opportunities not only with your fellow acting students but also with our film production, visual effects and music production school students.
You'll get challenges with demanding deadlines and engage in working methodologies that resemble the normal everyday, rough and tumble of industry life. At the same time, this 'real world' experience comes with an essential safety net - a chance to fail gloriously with no impact on your reputation, your income or your pride!
Learn in English
All of our acting courses are taught in English, the language of the international film and television industry. Study your passion in a community of like minded international learners.
Behind the scenes
Take a look at the latest stories from the daily lives of Catalyst Acting students. Rehearsals, performances, shootings, tips, tricks and more!