Animation and VFX - BA (Hons), HND, HNC

• Classic animation techniques
• Technology harnessed designs
• Skills surpassing breakthroughs

We are all about breathing life into your art. You get the opportunity to kindle your imagination or treasured storylines, to see your dreams alive on screen.

We love story. We love production design and conceptual work. We love animating. Whether 2D, stop frame, 3D - it's all-immersive in digital animation.

It's rare to have so much class contact time at University these days. Our staff live for art and animation, creating our own work. We provide the best support to make your reels stand out.

This is a course forged to help you. You find what you love - in film, conceptual design, in modelling, in anything animated, in any form - and we help to realise your dreams.

Our dedicated Computer Animation facilities include a large computer lab with hardware featuring all of the software needed to produce models and animations (e.g. MAYA, Z-Brush, Unreal, etc.).

Workshops are regularly held to help to underpin work covered in class, and on a variety of production stages, (e.g. post-production editing and camera work, often via friends on the FILM degree).

If your dreams are filled with vivid visions of gleaming broadswords, flaming demons, fantasy worlds, legendary heroes and beasts - then you have an animation home at Swansea College of Art. We will fuel your creative passion, keep it alive and thriving, to make you industry-ready.

Inside our award-winning studios lies the beating heart of an industrial animation production facility, with cutting edge tech, and radical ideas for the screen. Imagine, as a student, working on fantasy creatures and shots for a television series, whilst still at University! Networking and visiting studios and companies and clients as part of your studies.

We boast Motion Capture facilities and a Virtual Production Studio where animators can use real-time technology in a fully immersive narrative. You're able to walk around and interact with your own creations and environments, learning key animation and VFX skills. This experience is invaluable and our graduates go on to feature on some of the latest Academy Award-winning movies! 

Whether through amazing concept design work, heart-wrenching animated tales or beautifully crafted digital sculptures and animations, you will make an impact on your fans (because you will have them) and we help you get your vision to them. We help you to get your voice heard.

A lot of the briefs and coursework and submissions ask you to create something fresh, new, inspiring - and all industry leaning. You have creative input on new worlds and imaginings.

Visually enriched tutorials, lectures, presentations, overviews and exercises - always with an eye on concept; always thinking on how to extend this work for showreels. Feedback can often be illustrated and/or filled with more visual tips and guides to help with alternative designs, movements, narrative structure, etc, etc.

We ask you to engage with some amazing kit. We harness technology - we control it - via drawing, cintiqs, model-making, 2D and 3D software, production techniques and skillsets.

We provide a lot of the basics, with specific challenges to get you off the ground  - and in HE - ask you to fly high.

We are interested in creative people that demonstrate a strong commitment to art and/or design and therefore we welcome applications from individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. To assess student suitability for their chosen course we arrange interviews for all applicants at which your skills, achievements and life experience will be considered as well as your portfolio of work.

Our standard offer for a degree course is 120 UCAS tariff points. We expect applicants to have a grade C or above in English Language (or Welsh) at GCSE level, together with passes in another four subjects. Plus we accept a range of Level 3 qualifications including:

• Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, plus one GCE A-Level in a relevant academic subject
• Three GCE A-Levels or equivalent
• BTEC Extended Diploma in a relevant subject, with minimum grades of Merit
• International Baccalaureate score of 32
• Other relevant qualifications can be considered on an individual basis

Qualifications are important, however, our offers are not solely based on academic results. If you don't have the required UCAS points then please contact the courses admissions tutor or email [email protected] as we can consider offers to applicants based on individual merit, exceptional work, and/or practical experience.

Stepping stones to industry!

An animation degree under your belt allows you to think about a lot of different industries - and you will have transferable skills to make these moves. Some of our graduates have their own games, visualisation or production companies. Some work as entrepreneurs on their own animation brands. A lot find work on some outstanding projects, feature films and in production houses.

Graduates have gone on to work in Oscar-winning teams and on the feature films

• Boxtrolls
• Captain America
• Chronicles of Narnia
• Fantastic Beasts
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Hotel Transylvania
• Iron Man 2
• Jungle Book
• Kubo and The Two Strings
• Man of Steel
• Prometheus
• Skyfall
• Thor
• World War Z

and many, many more.

Applying directly to the University

To apply please fill in the online application and return it with requested documents.

Any questions please email: [email protected]