Animation

The curriculum revolves around practice-as-research, experimentation, and constructive critique, with a discursive approach emphasising the development of creative time-based content through collaboration, questioning, exchange, and process exploration. Our world-class programme team and state-of-the-art facilities support your journey, enabling you to explore enduring historical relations with material-based media like painting, drawing, illustration, and sculpture – the core of animation practice. Digital tools, deep learning processes, sound, display practices, and film language enhance these traditional media. We engage with various screen-based and related forms, including installations, projection mapping, VR, AR, extra-cinematic animation, theatre environments, sci-tech visualisation tools, and the spatial politics of citizen science games or apps. You will grasp opportunities from animation’s increasing pervasiveness and shape how your audiences perceive and understand the worlds and experiences you create. You'll experience a collaborative professional environment and build an equitable, encouraging, challenging community of practitioners with your peers from other programmes.

Throughout the programme, we challenge and encourage you to engage in innovative practice-oriented research, paying close attention to the nuances of cultures, ethics, diversity, identities, traditions, environments, and futures. Our students engage in diverse interdisciplinary contexts, spanning drama, literature, philosophy, fine and applied arts, film and media theory, art history, STEM disciplines, and architecture. By deepening your understanding of animation, you'll develop a critical approach to your practice, intellectually challenging yourself with fresh ideas to broaden and influence social, political, and cultural perspectives through creative engagement.

MA Animation fosters your aspirations and creative transformations as an ethically minded thinker and professionally astute creative artist, filmmaker and problem solver. As part of a vibrant community, you'll engage in dialogues exploring new perspectives on the persuasive potential of animation in the digital humanities and STEAM disciplines.

There will be several opportunities to collaborate with others, but at a minimum, your programme will include 294.5 contact hours and 1505.5 independent study hours. Contact hours can consist of lectures, seminars, tutorials, critical forums and workshops, among other types of teaching delivery.

Teaching types used in this programme can include briefings, projects, tutorials, seminars, lectures, critical forums, technical inductions, technical workshops, offsite visits and blended learning.

The programme has three terms with a combination of programme, School and College units that seek to enable you to build a clear sense of communication methods, practices and contexts for your work.

Term 1

Animation Forms, Methods & Contexts (45 credits) enhances your knowledge and disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise in key critical contexts and a range of practices, research methods, and approaches within animation moving image practices.

Term 2

Making Worlds with Others (15 credits) This School-wide unit allows you to work alongside students within and across the School. Working from the perspective of your individual practices and disciplines, you will develop a project that engages with others and creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings to create critically engaged situations and outcomes resulting in convivial knowledge exchange. Through collaborative learning and making, the unit will support you in understanding knowledge exchange and public engagement and how you are to situate your practice in these territories. The unit will also ask you to question how socially engaged practice can contribute to cultural understanding, co-researching and co-creating methods for knowing with and not knowing about.

Critical Non/Fiction and Experimental /Expanded Practices (30 credits) enables you to build on the learning and explorations from Term 1 to situate and refine your practice with appropriate professional, intellectual, technological and creative contexts. During Term 2, you will develop a Project Proposal and Production Plan articulating your ambitions for an independent research project.

In Terms 1 and 2, you'll also take the College-wide unit AcrossRCA (30 credits).

Term 3

You will apply what you have learned in your engagement in producing your Independent Research Project (60 credits), which you’ll complete as a self-determined body of work negotiated in collaboration with academic and technical staff.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.