Animation (online)

Why choose this course? This award enables you to develop creative practical skills for directing animation. You will acquire experience using a range of digital processes, used in Animation and related fields, as means for communicating through visual narrative. Within this course you can choose to focus in a particular area of animation such as 2D animation, 3D animation or combine the areas to create new forms and ideas from the fusion of techniques and styles.

Within 2D animation you can look at traditional animation techniques and blend these skills and approaches with new digital media to form new content and formats. You will explore the rich heritage of 2D animation and the possibilities of experimentation, both in form and content, that traditional animation has actively encouraged.

3D digital animation has become the most popular form of animated imagery over the past decade, used by more experimental practitioners who question the appearance, form and uses it has in present-day media. In this form, you will challenge your preconceptions of what 2D or 3D animation can do, which helps you become an innovator in the field. You will have the opportunity to explore the range of possibilities available to the practitioner, mixing technical knowledge of the subject with the creative freedom that an understanding of the theory and context of new media practices brings.

On this online MA Animation programme teaching and learning emphasises enquiry led project work, developing the kind of independence and autonomy that is appropriate for postgraduate education. Lectures, seminars and other discussions bring students together in multi-disciplinary groups where ideas are shared, challenged, developed. Workshops and other activities develop specific discipline centred skills and understandings while tutorials develop individual study trajectories and responses to assignment tasks and briefs. Much of the time students are engaged in self-managed independent study, undertaking enquiries and research, developing skills, inventing and developing ideas, realizing project outcomes, exploring the cultural resonance of their work.

Online students are integrated with the on-campus cohort for class teaching and seminars (which are scheduled within normal UK working hours). Individual teaching will be arranged flexibly so as to try and accommodate online students’ needs.

All students on the postgraduate media programme engage in an interdisciplinary project as a part of their MA study, giving them an opportunity to work with students from other disciplines in an experimental and creative way.

In keeping with contemporary professional practice, students will also have the opportunity to work in distributed groups where some members may be on campus and others online.