Animation MA
Subject and course type
- Creative arts
- Postgraduate
This Kingston School of Art MA in Animation will give you interdisciplinary skills and knowledge to thrive in rapidly changing cultural, technological and professional environments. On this Kingston University course, you’ll explore and experiment with a range of interlinked and adaptable technologies, methods and media.
You are reading:
Create moving images that move people
Get to grips with a wide range of media, from 2D and 3D animation to virtual reality and augmented reality.
Studying our Animation MA will open exciting doors to opportunities in the global animation industry. Graduates have gone on to direct films, start their own studios and work in high-profile VFX houses across the world.
During the course, you’ll use animation to turn knowledge, stories, ideas and data into visual or experiential outputs, communicating complexity with empathy. Our expert teachers will support you to develop an individual practice informed by a culture of research and collaboration.
Guided by a multidisciplinary approach, you’ll have the creative freedom to develop your own critical approach to advanced animation practice. There will also be the opportunity to complete an extended research project, usually a film.
Through a blend of tutorials, lectures, seminars, workshops and research projects, you’ll gain the critical tools, knowledge and confidence needed to stand out in the job market.
Why choose this course
While you study, you’ll benefit from top quality teaching at Kingston University. We are ranked Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework, and our facilities are second to none.
Here’s what you’ll have access to as an MA Animation student:
A dedicated animation and motion graphics studio for hand-drawn, stop-frame, 2D and 3D animation. Facilities include:
- Two post-production studios with 14 edit suites and four edit stations
- Disc production and streaming facilities
- A large studio for broadcast-quality filming
- A range of film recording equipment
- Flexible lighting rigs and controls
- A cyclorama facility
- Specialist sound recording facilities
A wide range of current design-related software, including:
- 128 iMac workstations for 2D and 3D design
- Two teaching rooms for software tutorials
- Locally installed Adobe Suite CC 2017, Vectorworks and Microsoft Office, with Avid Media Composer and Cinema 4D
- Extensive digital printing facilities
Extensive equipment across a diverse range of printing technologies, including intaglios, relief and screen printing. The workshop is also equipped with:
- An A2 risograph
- A darkroom for UV photographic applications
- Epson large format inkjet printers
- A laser engraver
- Letterpress and bookbinding equipment
- Tools and presses from the 19th century to the 1960s
Fully-equipped 3D workshops, including a hackSpace with 3D printers, 3D scanners, CAD and Arduino stations. There are also specialist spaces for:
- Ceramics
- Metal work
- Model making
- Plaster
- Forge and foundry
- Welding
- Woodworking
- Digital
Two photographic studios for small and large photographic works, post-production plus black-and-white and colour darkrooms.
An immersive lab for virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies
The Art School Experience
As part of Kingston School of Art, students benefit from joining a creative community where we encourage collaborative working and critical practice.
Our workshops and labs are open to all disciplines, enabling students and staff to work together, share ideas and explore multi-disciplinary making.
Course content
Through tutorials, field trips, lectures, seminars, workshops and research projects, you will gain the technical skills, critical tools, knowledge and confidence to contribute to the development of the subject and its practice. You will examine your own practice and identify existing practice-based research methods. These will then be developed by introducing discipline-specific notions of rigour, originality, ethics, positioning and inclusivity.
Modules have been designed and aligned to ensure you can make intellectual links between practice, critical theory and real-world scenarios. The programme prioritises the development of an individual practitioner and their creative work.
There is an emphasis on independent and self-directed learning. You will be given autonomy to develop a practice that supports your aspirations and ambitions. Skills in critical reflection and analysis give you the tools to make decisions about your practice and learning trajectory. You will have the opportunity to initiate, propose, and realise an Extended Research Project (Capstone Project), typically a film, that is ambitious in scale and scope.
Studio modules include development of animation skills, concepts and practice through project work and use the studio as a site for making.
Reading modules focus on critical and contextual theory or issues and positioning practice critically.
Presentation modules orientate you within a professional landscape and include preparation for employment through development of Future Skills and career planning.
The three Studio modules are specific to MA Animation and the Reading and Presenting modules are shared with MA Illustration and MA Graphic Design programmes.
Please note that this is an indicative list of modules and is not intended as a definitive list. Those listed here may also be a mixture of core and optional modules.
Year 1
Core modules
30 credits
This module introduces critical making for animators. We explore how image, time and sound can be orchestrated to research, interpret, communicate, and evoke audience response. You will be introduced to new material-based media and digital approaches to animation practice that will enable to you critically challenge your existing animation practice.
Throughout this module you will be encouraged to play, interrogate, and make connections, through a process of un-learning to build confidence and develop individual and innovative approaches to practice-based research, animation direction and animated film making. You will gain necessary critical awareness and practical understanding of animation processes, film languages, and approaches to image making as well as considering how your moving images are experienced culturally, temporally and spatially.
As part of personal and professional development, collaboration is integrated into the curriculum alongside a supportive studio culture where knowledge is shared and risk taking encouraged. Critical reflection is presented as key to the development of a robust research practice and necessary to inform practical decision making.
30 credits
This module introduces ways of theorising contemporary and historical design to enable you to locate your practice within wider professional, social and political contexts and an interdisciplinary framework. You will investigate key current issues within design and participate in urgent critical debates, developing a theoretical and conceptual vocabulary with which to position what you do as a practitioner.
You will not only develop your understanding of design theory and histories but critically examine different ways of knowing about, and through, design. You are encouraged to question established norms and challenge Eurocentric models of knowledge production, engaging with discourses of decolonisation, design pedagogy, sustainability, participation, accessibility, speculation and design for social change. Exploring a range of different research methods will support you to reflect on your own position, values and ethics as a researcher, and to articulate how that underpins your practice.
30 credits
As screen access increases globally, so too does animation and moving image's ability to pervade all aspects of our lives. Animators are uniquely positioned to utilise these growing opportunities to engage with diverse audiences and create meaningful works that communicate with empathy, offer alternative realities, and tell compelling stories. This module asks you to consider audience: who they are, what you have to say, how to communicate and where to find appropriate and relevant platforms in which to have these dialogues.
You will deepen your understanding of animation practice by exploring different approaches to interpreting content, storytelling, and world building. You will identify personal strengths and areas of interest in the development of an individual creative practice. In doing so you will be encouraged to consider where your practice sits within the fields of fiction, non-fiction or experimental moving image and their unique and distinct approaches to film language, critical theory, and research methodologies. This will enable you to (in negotiation with your tutors) produce a production plan for your Extended Research Project, a sustained and independent project that is realised in module Studio: Extended Research Project for Animation.
30 credits
This module asks you to think about the role of the designer now and what it might be in the future. It takes the position that many of the jobs you may have in the future do not yet exist – it is you that will create them.
You will work on projects individually and collectively that ask you to communicate across disciplinary boundaries in diverse environments with hybrid ways of making and thinking drawn from different contexts, methods and philosophies. Real-world scenarios set by external partners will be examined through elective collaborative projects that situate your creative practice within the contemporary paradigms of precarity and uncertainty, providing a space to address issues such as climate literacy, design education and the future of work, and in doing so anticipate contexts for your practice within the cultural and creative industries and beyond.
60 credits
This module establishes an individual and situated animation practice through moving image production, direction and practice-based research. By assimilating the learning established so far you will have an individual critical position to animation production and establish a real-world context for your practice. You will be given creative agency to initiate and complete your self-directed and research project either individually or through collaboration with others. The Extended Research Project (capstone project) requires you to recognise, act on and engage in a range of transferable skills e.g., management of production schedules or the direction of collaborative partners.
You will consolidate your animation practice by taking part in the necessary aspects of professional animation production. This will include collaborative working whilst gaining confidence in storytelling, directing and animation skills, presenting and communicating ideas and the leadership and management of a film production.
Optional placement year
Many postgraduate courses at Kingston University allow students to do a 12-month work placement as part of their course. The responsibility for finding the work placement is with the student; we cannot guarantee the work placement, just the opportunity to undertake it. As the work placement is an assessed part of the course, it is covered by a student's Student Route visa.
Find out more about the postgraduate work placement scheme.
Module
120 credits
The Professional Placement module is a core module for those students following a masters programme that incorporates professional placement learning, following completion of 120 credits. It provides you with the opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills to an appropriate working environment, and to develop and enhance key employability skills and subject-specific professional skills in your chosen subject. You may wish to use the placement experience as a platform for your subsequent major project module, and would be expected to use it to help inform your decisions about future careers.
Career opportunities
You’ll complete this course with a refined set of animation knowledge and skills – ready to achieve big things in the global animation industry.
Our graduates have gone on to direct animation, motion graphics, adverts, pop promos and instructional educational films. Some have even become directors and showrunners on shows for Netflix and Cartoon Network, Aardman, Nexus, Buck in New York and LA.
Others graduates have started their own collectives and animation studios, such as Moth and Blink/BlinkInk, Catfish Collective or Arc, or gone on to work in VFX houses like Framestore and Moving Picture Company.
This course also gives you the interrelated skills you need to work as an art director, designer or storyboard artist for the live-action film industry. You could even go on to teach and lead higher education initiatives that harness the power of moving image to create global and societal change across the world.
Teaching and assessment
You'll benefit from a variety of different learning and teaching approaches, including brief-led project work, workshops and individual critical reflection. We take a dialogic and discursive approach to learning and teaching, through peer-led learning, collaborative approach to animation production and discussion groups and seminars. There are also opportunities to co-construct the curriculum. An elective range of assessment strategies and methods allows students to take responsibility for their own learning.
Kingston School of Art has an established an ethos of Thinking Through Making, underpinned by a policy that supports equal access for all students to the 2D and 3D workshops. Students are encouraged to explore new and unfamiliar processes and techniques, and use these to experiment and innovate within their own disciplines and individual creative practices
When not attending timetabled sessions you will be expected to continue learning independently through self-study. This typically will involve working on individual and group projects, undertaking preparing coursework assignments and presentations, reading journal articles and books, and preparing for assessments. Your independent learning is supported by a range of excellent facilities including online resources, the library and CANVAS, the online virtual learning platform.
A course is made up of modules, and each module is worth a number of credits. You must pass a given number of credits in order to achieve the award you registered on, for example 360 credits for a typical undergraduate course or 180 credits for a typical postgraduate course. The number of credits you need for your award is detailed in the programme specification which you can access from the link at the bottom of this page.
One credit equates to 10 hours of study. Therefore 180 credits across a year (typical for a postgraduate course) would equate to 1,800 notional hours. These hours are split into scheduled and guided. On this course, the percentage of that time that will be scheduled learning and teaching activities is shown below. The remainder is made up of guided independent study.
- 16% scheduled learning and teaching
The exact balance between scheduled learning and teaching and guided independent study will be informed by the modules you take.
Your course will primarily be delivered in person. It may include delivery of some activities online, either in real time or recorded.
Assessment typically comprises exams (e.g. test or exam), practical (e.g. presentations, performance) and coursework (e.g. essays, reports, self-assessment, portfolios, dissertation). The approximate percentage for how you will be assessed on this course is as follows, though depends to some extent on the optional modules you choose:
Type of assessment
- Year 1: Coursework 100%
We aim to provide feedback on assessments within 20 working days.
Fees and funding
| Fee category | Annual Fee |
|---|---|
| Home (UK students) | |
| Full Time | £13,400 |
| Part Time | £7,370 |
| International | |
| Full Time | £24,600 |
| Part Time | £13,530 |
| Fee category | Annual Fee |
|---|---|
| Home (UK students) | |
| Full Time | £12,900 |
| Part Time | £7,095 |
| International | |
| Full Time | £23,700 |
| Part Time | £13,035 |
Fees for future course years
Part time
If you start your second year straight after Year 1, you will pay the same fee for both years.
If you take a break before starting your second year, or if you repeat modules from Year 1 in Year 2, the fee for your second year may increase.
Additional course costs
Some courses may require additional costs beyond tuition fees. When planning your studies, you’ll want to consider tuition fees, living costs, and any extra costs that might relate to your area of study.
Your tuition fees include costs for teaching, assessment and university facilities. So your access to libraries, shared IT resources and various student support services are all covered. Accommodation and general living expenses are not covered by these fees.
Where applicable, additional expenses for your course may include:
Our libraries have an extensive collection of books and journals, as well as open-access computers and laptops available to rent. However, you may want to buy your own computer or personal copies of key textbooks. Textbooks may range from £50 to £250 per year. And a personal computer can range from £100 to £3,000 depending on your course requirements.
While most coursework is submitted online, some modules may require printed copies. You may want to allocate up to £100 per year for hard-copies of your coursework. It’s worth noting that 3D printing is never compulsory. So if you choose to use our 3D printers, you’ll need to pay for the material. This ranges from 3p per gram to 40p per gram.
Your tuition fees don’t cover travel costs. To save on travel costs, you can use our intersite bus service. This route links the campuses and halls of residence with local train stations: Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames and Norbiton.
Funding support for postgraduate students
If you are a UK student living in England and under 60, you can apply for a loan to study for a postgraduate degree. Find out more through the government's website.
Scholarships and bursaries
Interested in studying an MA in Animation at Kingston? The following funding support is available:
Get a 40% reduction in fees for taught masters or postgraduate diploma courses with September start dates. Find out more about the Inspire the Future Scholarship.
Receive up to £5,000 towards tuition in your first year of study. Find out more about international scholarships.
Get a 15% reduction in tuition fees. Find out more about the Progression Scholarship.
Kingston University offers a 10% discount on full- and part-time postgraduate degree course tuition fees to our alumni. Visit our postgraduate finance page to find out more.
How to apply
Before you apply
Please read the entry criteria carefully to make sure you meet all requirements before applying.
How to apply online
Use the course selector drop-down at the top of this page to choose your preferred course, start date and mode, then click 'Apply now'. You will be taken to our Online Student Information System (OSIS) where you will complete your application.
If you’re starting a new application, you’ll need to select ‘new user’ and set up a username and password. This will allow you to save and return to your application.
Application deadlines
We encourage you to apply as soon as possible. Applications will close when the course is full.
After you apply
If the admission tutor wants to see your portfolio, we will email asking you to upload your zipped portfolio to the OSIS portal within three weeks. If we need more information or want to invite you for an interview, we will be in touch directly. After that you will then hear whether your application has been successful.
Course changes and regulations
The information on this page reflects the currently intended course structure and module details. To improve your student experience and the quality of your degree, we may review and change the material information of this course. Find out more about course changes
Programme Specifications for the course are published ahead of each academic year.
Regulations governing this course can be found on our website.
