BA (Hons) Animation

Building on the skills you developed in year one, you will carry out an individual investigation, using secondary research to investigate the lineage of your creative practice. You’ll apply ideas to your own discipline and development, selecting an area of investigation and communicating your argument either in written form or via a narrated slide presentation. The concepts you explore in this module, including your own positionality and identity, are themes you will encounter frequently as a creative professional.

This module will draw from your learnings from Defining Your Practice in Context, and you’ll use this knowledge to plan and create, collaboratively, a piece of work that links to your practice. Collaborating with others can help you develop new and innovative ideas and develop confidence as a creative practitioner, while practising your communication, project management, reflection, and feedback skills.

This module provides hands-on experience in animation production, replicating the workflows and challenges found in professional studios. You will work on four distinct animation projects, each based on industry-focused briefs from animation studios, competitive settings, or academic collaborations. Through these projects, you will gain a clear understanding of the full animation production process, from the initial concept to the final output. You will learn how to meet different project requirements, manage stakeholder expectations, and collaborate effectively across disciplines. This experience will help you develop the skills needed to interpret briefs and create complete animation pieces, strengthening your portfolio and preparing you for industry roles.

This module explores how performance brings animated characters to life, focusing on the subtleties of movement, emotion, and expression. You will develop an understanding of acting for animation, learning how to translate real-world performance into compelling digital character animation. Through a combination of theory and practice, you will study acting principles and apply them to your animations. You will experiment with methods of capturing and refining performance, from keyframe animation to motion capture workflows. You will also learn how rigging influences character performance and explore techniques for creating flexible, expressive rigs that allow for greater control over animation.

Learn how to animate non-human characters. By studying real animal movement and anatomy, you’ll gain insight into how skeletal and muscular structures affect a creature’s motion. You will explore specialised rigging and control setups and how the animation techniques you’ve learnt so far apply to creatures. You’ll also discover how different animation media has handled creature motion. By the end of the module, you’ll have the technical skills and creative confidence to animate both realistic and fantastical creatures for a range of digital media projects.

This module introduces the foundations of game animation, focusing on how animations are implemented within modern game engines. You will explore key animation interfaces within modern game engines and see how your understanding of 2D and 3D animation pipelines integrates into game animation. You will explore core techniques for animating characters, integrating animations into game pipelines, and building a functional character controller. Through hands-on projects, you will learn how to create, import, and blend animations in a real-time environment, ensuring smooth, responsive movement in gameplay.

Building on your previous Pre-Production for Animation work, this module guides you through the next phase: producing a final animated piece. During this process, you will address the practical and creative challenges of animation production, managing timelines and resources while maintaining high standards.

This comprehensive module covers the pre-production phase of animation, where ideas are developed and prepared for production. Students learn about the various stages of pre-production, including concept development, storyboarding, character design, environment design, and the creation of animatics. The course emphasizes the importance of planning and organization, teaching students how to manage timelines, resources, and creative vision effectively. Collaborative projects mimic real-world scenarios, giving students the experience of working in teams to bring a project from concept to pre-production readiness. By the end of the module, students will have a fully developed pre-production package, ready to move into the production phase.

This module explores the process of developing a script for animation, focusing on storytelling techniques, structure, and formatting for animated narratives. You will learn how to craft characters, dialogue, and visual storytelling cues, ensuring your script is suitable for pre-production and production. You will also explore how animation writing differs from live-action, emphasising pacing, visual storytelling, and animation-friendly action. By the end of the module, you will have a polished, industry-standard animation script, along with a deeper understanding of how writing influences animation pre-production and production.

The final step in preparing you for a career in animation. It encourages critical self-evaluation of your personal learning journey and industry engagements thus far, drawing on evidence from your entire student experience. Explore concepts and theories of personal and professional development to assess your readiness for work. You will have the opportunity to engage with specialised workshops, facilitated by industry experts and informed by our extensive industry connections, to provide valuable knowledge and help you develop the skills needed to launch your career. The culmination of this module is the creation of a portfolio or showreel that showcases your talent and effectively communicates your unique professional identity.

This module will enable you to apply the skills and knowledge that you have gained during your studies and produce an extended piece of work exploring your creative practice. You will generate a project idea then extend and develop this project through to completion.