The cutting-edge world of animation, visual effects and game art has a large market in the UK with the highest number of games development companies and publishers in Europe. With innovation and creativity at its core, this course will allow you to express your design ideas through all areas of animation media, visual effects and game art techniques. Our extensive external and industrial links enable students to liaise with industry and gain professional experience. Learning is driven by ‘events’ where you are able to work on real projects. These provide opportunities to work in your specialism, as well as collaboratively across other subject areas in the creative industries.

Past students have risen to become directors in their own companies, whilst other art and design graduates have gone on to work for companies like the BBC, Channel 4, S4C, Disney, Molinare, McKinnon & Saunders, Passion Pictures, Asylum Models and Effects, EA Games and Travellers Tales, taking leading roles such as senior designers, VFX artist/animators, and working on titles such as A Bug’s Life, The Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie and the Harry Potter series games. Career opportunities exist in all areas of animation, visual effects and game art including: concept artists, storyboard artists, assistant animators, freelance animators, character designers, game artists, interactive developers, environment and background artists, freelance visualisers, model making, set design, digital media texture art, digital painting, compositing, lighting, rigging, special effects and post-production. Our degree also allows you to gain a range of transferable skills that can lead to a variety of employment opportunities. Linda McCarthy, BA (Hons) Design graduate, now runs her own animation studio in Chester. She said: "Bringing to life in an animation the characters which I make is just magical. It definitely makes all of the effort worth it."