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With the broad range of core skills we teach, we believe you’ll have the confidence and self-assurance to express your own vision in an outstanding way.

In the first year, you’ll explore drawing and printmaking techniques and learn the fundamentals of animated movement, with the help of life drawing classes, to make your animations full of life. You’ll put all this together to create a single showcase animation.

In year two, you’ll start developing your professional practice by responding as a team to a client brief, and you’ll develop your independence with an experimental project – maybe an art film or music video.

Your final-year major project will be your choice, using your methods. It could be, say, your own animated short or a film with accompanying illustrated book. It will be your calling card, telling the world who you are and what you do.

So you’ll follow a professional workflow as animator/writer/director with your tutors acting as your producer to ensure your film has a professional finish and is as individual as you are.

Our course is a practical one, located in the visual language of graphic arts practice. You’ll learn to mix animators’ traditional skills such as 2D drawn, stop motion, paint-on-glass, cut-out and sand with digital techniques in Photoshop, After Effects, Flash and Maya.

The academic team who’ll teach you these skills are approachable, knowledgeable leaders in their field. As industry professionals, they know what works in practice. With an excellent staff-to-student ratio and a personal tutor, you’ll receive the attention your efforts deserve.

 
Our teaching team is led by Will Bishop-Stephens. His lovingly hand-crafted film, ‘Two Films About Loneliness’, was one of just 60, from a pool of more than 8,000, chosen to be screened at the prestigious Robert Redford-founded Sundance Festival in Utah in early 2015.

Our visiting lecturers this academic year include BAFTA-winning Mikey Please and the animation legend, Aardman’s Richard 'Golly' Starzak.

You’ll study in a dynamic creative environment, using an impressive range of equipment and software including rostrum cameras, shoot studios and animation rostrums.

Our professional practice modules will give you the confidence to present your blossoming work in showcases, screenings and exhibitions beyond UEL. We’re confident it will be worth seeing.

“We’ve set up a course at UEL that can respond to students’ interests,” says Will Bishop-Stephens. “It equips them with the tools to express their character so they stand out as unique, skilled professionals in a crowded field. The work we’re seeing from students validates the trust we place in them.”

Animation and Illustration is a rapidly growing, ever-expanding field. The skills we teach at the University of East London mean you’ll be able to adapt to any of the creative opportunities it offers

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In recent years, the role of the illustrator and the animator has converged with the development of digital books and online networks. So the abilities and techniques that you’ll develop on this course are increasingly valued and sought after in the professional world.

Our course is very new but already its reputation has soared, with our students enjoying work placements at major studios such as Framestore and Lionsgate.

Graduates who have studied our animation and illustration modules have gone on to enjoy success in various fields.

Some of our students set up a university society that grew into a business, Backwards Burd, and which now showcases the work of new illustrators and artists. Others work in animation and motion graphics studios while some run animation workshops.

Opportunities abound. It’s a course that would suit anyone considering a career in independent filmmaking. Or it could be ideal for a start in the graphics industry, producing animated content for advertising, web applications, games design, animated storybooks, apps and music videos.