Animation and Illustration

While developing a unique visual style, you’ll also focus on the core foundations: studying the world around you, refining your drawing skills, learning the fundamentals of animation skills using industry standard 2D and 3D animation software, such as TV paint and Maya and learning to create engaging stories through moving images.

You’ll go on group reportage drawing trips, with opportunities to visit museums, galleries and animation festivals in the UK and overseas. You’ll find lots of visual inspiration in Cambridge – from the Botanic Gardens to the art collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, to the city’s architectural beauty and vibrant cultural and student life.

On campus, you’ll have access to our dedicated animation production studios, which feature high-end 3D CGI, Cintiqs and Rostrum camera, lighting and sound recording equipment. These are the tools you need for the wide range of animation methods we teach from traditional hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, experimental and interactive imaging to the up-to-date industry-standards of 2D and 3D digital animation. As well as this, all our Animation and Illustration students have access to printmaking facilities, photo and film studios, and life drawing studios.

As a student at ARU you’ll receive ongoing support to find placements and work experience through the Creative Industries placement work experience module, and you can also take an optional placement year. You’ll also get the opportunity to work on live briefs set by industry; we’ve previously worked with companies including Curveball Media and Allia Future, and more recently our students have worked with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, creating a short animated ident to promote their collaboration with Chelsea Flower Show.

You'll develop a professional showreel and website, so you are ready to go out into industry, get the opportunity to present your work at festivals and fairs, as well as showcasing your talent through Present, our graduate exhibition website, and New Designers, London.

In 2021, recent graduate Hannah Lane’s short animated film A Snowy Surprise was shortlisted for the Cinemagic Film Festival Young Filmmaker Award, as well as being selected for Our Culture and the Bitesize Film Festival. Steven Goodison’s short film Wee Shadows was selected for screening at @FrightFest UK and various other festivals and Velina Garabedyan's film Wherever I Wander was selected for screening at five festivals.

Graduate Sabine Buhain received industry recognition at New Designers 21 - open to all final year visual communication students in the UK - winning the Aardman Academy Screening Award for Like It Was Yesterday. Sabine’s animation grabbed the judges’ attention with her ‘‘wonderful design and colour journey [creating] a world we immediately loved’.

As well as raising your industry profile through exhibitions and awards, you can attend guest lectures from some of the top animation studios in London, such as  Passion Pictures, The Mill, FrameStore, Blue Zoo, Nexus Studios and Studio Aka and take advantage of our relationships with animators, illustrators and production studios such as Curveball Media, Sookio and Allia Future Business Centre, to build a strong body of work ready for a professional career in the animation and illustration industry.

This degree will prepare you for work in the creative industries as an 2D/3D animator, motion graphics designer, or illustrator, and many of our graduates now work with leading animation studios and UK broadcasters such as The Mill, 12 Foot 6, Slurpy Studios, The Like Minded, Filofax, BBC and Channel 4, as well as developing freelance careers in animation and illustration.

As well as the work presented in the carousel below, you can also check out the short films our students produced for BBC Radio 4's The Listening Project,, BBC Cambridgeshire, The Globe Theatre their live brief for Curveball Media, and the New Designers Screening Award 2021.

You can see more work by graduating students on our Present exhibition site. You can follow our students’ projects, prizes and progress on our course Instagram page.

Course Leader: Jeffrey Crosby