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 will 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 will 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 will engage in dialogues exploring new perspectives on the persuasive potential of animation in the digital humanities and STEM disciplines.

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 in relation to your own work.

Term 1

In Term 1, you will undertake the unit Animation Forms, Methods and Contexts (45 credits), which starts with creative community-building activities followed by practice-as-research exploratory workshops as ‘serious play’ to develop skills refinement and knowledge development through collaborative and individual projects. Your sound and image skills are expanded on through technical inductions, workshops and meetings with technical staff. You are expected to engage in collaboration, experimentation and conceptual thinking, and to develop sensitivity to the subjects represented. In tandem with the workshops, Articulation Lectures provide encounters with aesthetic, historical, contemporary and formal contexts of interdisciplinary animation theory and practices. In the Critical Explorations Group seminars you will consider, investigate and discuss a range of approaches to image, sound and text-based materials across animation and its many related creative and intellectual fields to explore rationales, criteria and creative methodologies. You will document and evidence these in your Virtual Studio Desk.

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA (30 credits). This unit aims to support you in meeting the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

In Term 2, the Making Worlds with Others (30 credits) School-wide unit will allow 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/or creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings, with the intention to create critically engaged situations and/or 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 own 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, not knowing about.

You also take Critical Non/Fiction and Experimental/Expanded Practices (15 credits) over Term 2, and begin working on intellectual development and refinement for your Independent Research Project supported by academic and technical staff. The Critical Intensives is a series of interdisciplinary groups notionally named: Non/Fiction and Experimental/Expanded, in which you generate, present and share project-specific research methods for and approaches to your negotiated independent research project agreed with your tutors. This also involves selecting, evaluating and critiquing research contexts, societies, cultures, identities, traditions and human/non-human relationships as appropriate with your peers. The term is research-intensive, and includes developing a detailed production plan. Group and individual tutorials and a critique provide opportunities to receive feedback, as well as an assessed Project Proposal and Production Plan. You will further refine your skills in technical services workshops and self-arranged meetings with technical staff to develop your Technical Plan.

Term 3

Term 3 is when you create and complete your 60-credits Independent Research Project (IRP). You are expected to work independently whilst setting your own aims, objectives, contexts and deadlines. The IRP is a programme of self-directed independent study that is supported by subject-based group and personal tutorials and technical tutorials, studio dialogue and student-led events. During the term, you are expected to realise these ambitions in a sustained and reflective process of ‘thinking through making’ and develop a body of work evidencing your rationale and priorities as a critical, creative practitioner. Your final body of work should evidence a considered process of selecting, testing and making use of appropriate materials and technical processes sound and image for screen-based and/or expanded moving image practice. This work will then be contextually curated and prepared for presentation in a public-facing event at the end of Term 3. The Unit includes Professional Practice curriculum and events to prepare and equip you for your future after graduation.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

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.