Bachelor of Motion Picture Arts

The Bachelor of Motion Picture Arts is CapU’s flagship four-year film degree, taught inside a working production facility and built around the fact that Vancouver is the third-largest screen production centre in North America.

Students rotate through every department rather than specialising immediately: screenwriting and story development, directing and working with actors, cinematography and camera systems, lighting and grip, production and location sound, production design and art direction, editing, colour grading, sound design and post workflow, and producing — budgets, schedules, permits, insurance and crew agreements. Later years narrow to a chosen department, culminating in a substantial graduating production crewed to industry structure and a practicum placement.

The admissions process is deliberately selective — a Video of Intent, a mandatory information session and an entrance questionnaire — because the program runs on cohort commitment and equipment access rather than lecture capacity. It is also CapU’s second most expensive program at $34,334 a year, which is the trade for facility time and equipment.

CapU is a fully public teaching university on Vancouver’s North Shore — a Designated Learning Institution (DLI O19280078102) with university status since 2008. Classes are small, faculty teach rather than delegate to assistants, and tuition sits well below the big Vancouver research universities while the credential carries the same public-institution standing.

Its field maps to CIP 50.0602 (Cinematography and film/video production). As a bachelor’s degree, graduates are exempt from the November 2024 PGWP field-of-study restriction and may qualify for a Post-Graduation Work Permit of up to three years. Full-time on-campus study and graduation remain the conditions, and final decisions rest with IRCC.