Master of Arts [M.A] [Animation] From Royal College of Art

The RCA Animation Programme is world-renowned for artistic, director-led creative practice and innovative risk-taking, and the works of our award-winning alumni span the shift from analog materials to digital technologies. Our students find their meaningful fit or stance within a continuum from mimetic narrative to the playful abstraction of techniques, concepts, and canons to contribute to a greater collective intellectual and creative capital.

The Programme philosophy has at its core that animation is central to contemporary debates in visual culture and communication. It is a moving image form that extends across a global landscape of technologies, screen platforms, and human/nonhuman relationships. This is impacting and influencing intellectual, artistic, political, and cultural agendas that, in turn, affect people in their daily lives. Whether films, installations, projection mapping, theatre environments, sci-tech visualization tools, the spatial politics of citizen science games or apps, we engage with animations increasing pervasiveness and influence of our understanding of how we see the world.

Structured around practice, experimentation and constructive critique, the curriculum has a particular emphasis on developing creative content informed by collaboration, contextual research and verbal and textual articulation. Enduring historical relations with the material-based media of painting, drawing, illustration, and sculpture the stuff of animation practice are enhanced by contemporary innovation and the paradigm shifts of digital and information revolutions. We support outstanding aspiring practitioners to gain the critical tools, specialist knowledge and the confidence to take the authorial lead and be game changers and innovators in their respective fields.