Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Kevin Scott 

BA [Hons] Film + Television Production

In 2017, I returned to education as a mature student, pursuing a lifelong interest in film and film-making. Over the past four years, I have developed my abilities as a storyteller and creative thinker, and gained organisational and technical skills across all areas of film production. My 2019 short film Please Be Seated won the 2020 Clones Film Festival 'Best Short Documentary' award and was selected by several major festivals, including the Cork International Film Festival and Entr'2 Marches Film Festival in Cannes, France. I am currently in post-production on my first fiction short, A Good Deed, made in conjunction with the VIEWFINDER Cinematography MA course.

A Good Deed

Despite the severe limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, I undertook an ambitious short film project in conjunction with VIEWFINDER, the IADT-affiliated Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Cinematography. Developed from my own script, A Good Deed is based on a personal experience with a con-artist in my teenage years and deals with moral confusion in a young mind and the ripple effects of casual cruelty. A Good Deed was produced to a challengingly tight time-frame, and is currently completing post-production and beginning its festival campaign.


Responsibility - from theme to technique - in the work of Ruben Östlund

The aim of my thesis is two-fold; firstly, to investigate how the issue of responsibility, as a basic element of personal moral self-conception and as a critical facet of social mediation, is addressed by director Ruben Östlund in his films, and secondly, to assess how Östlund’s own attitude towards ideas of responsibility informs both his choice of subject matter and the technical and aesthetic aspects of his film-making. Over the course of my work, I examine foundational, and competing, philosophical theories on which modern ideas of responsibility are based. Beginning with individual responsibility, I delineate the differences in Kantian and Humean approaches to moral agency, encompassing issues of reason, determinism and the utility of praise and blame. This evaluation forms the basis of an interrogation of Östlund’s Involuntary and Force Majeure, in which I assert that the director eschews narrative conventions and expectations in order to controvert prevailing moral presumptions regarding personal responsibility. I move then to a consideration of responsibility’s place in the fabric of social interactions, focusing primarily on social contract theory. Here, again, Östlund provokes debate by questioning the social rules and regulations and our ability to live by them, informed by his own political and sociological beliefs and inclinations. I go on to explore his attitudes to social responsibility in my appraisal of his art-world satire The Square.