Animation with Illustration

Our Animation with Illustration degree is a practical skills-based course tailored directly to the needs of the animation and illustration industries. All our staff are active within the industry and teach you the skills that you’ll need to gain employment after graduating. The course utilises a mix of lectures, hands-on workshops, tutorial classes, and practical exercises such as life drawing, to give you a rounded education in the animated and illustrative arts.

We fuse cutting-edge industry-standard software skills with lessons learned from over a hundred years of animated tradition: lessons summed up in the core 12 principles. The course is designed to take you from a solid grounding in fundamentals through to developing your own personal specialism and getting you ready for the industry.

Course Modules

YEAR 1

Fundamentals of 2D Animation (20 credits)

Year 1 Animation Project (20 credits)

Pre-Production (20 credits)

History of Animation and Illustration (20 credits)

Fundamentals of Illustration (40 credits)

YEAR 2

Fundamentals of 3D Animation (20 credits)

Year 2 Animation Project (20 credits)

3D Modelling (20 credits)

Motion Graphics (20 credits)

Rigging Fundamentals (20 credits)

Applied Illustration (20 credits)

YEAR 3

Major Project (40 credits)

Year 3 Animation Project (40 credits)

Research Project (20 credits)

Professional Development (20 credits)

WHAT ARE CREDITS?
As a guide, 20 credits typically represents around 52 hours of tutor contact time (e.g. lectures/workshops/feedback) and 148 hours of self-study time (usually over the course of a semester). These numbers may increase or decrease depending on the nature, length and level of the module, especially towards the end of the course.

TEACHING STAFF

Everyone who teaches on this degree is active in the industry. Whether that’s animating, storyboarding, illustrating, designing, or writing for animation or illustration; when your tutors aren’t busy teaching you, they’re busy honing their craft. As a result, we are always working and teaching the most current industry workflows. We practice what we teach. We also have an extensive network of industry contacts that we can draw on for guest lectures and workshops, industry-set briefs, and as guests for our degree shows.

We don’t believe in exams. All assessment takes the form of coursework, portfolios, presentations, and essays. If you are being taught animation, you will submit a portfolio of completed animations. If you are being taught how to pitch a show, you will do a presentation pitching a show. If you are studying the history of animation, you will synthesise that research into an essay on the history of animation. In other words, all assessment is directly related to the skills being taught. You will often have the opportunity to receive feedback along the way, via formative submission points, with official summative submissions falling at the ends of first and second semesters.