BA (Hons) Animation Bachelor's degree at Wrexham University

Through this starting module, you will begin to understand the language of shapes, lines, and colour alongside practicing with multiple materials. This initial experimentation assists your development in animation pre-production, as you begin to develop skills in layout and character design.

This module introduces you to academic research, where you will look to the past and find a greater understanding of your subject specialty. This research will then be combined with your initial design knowledge and demonstrate to you how information can be displayed in an appealing fashion.

With interactive technology constantly on the rise, this module will introduce you to the world and ethos of UX design. You will also begin to combine this with early animation understanding to create interactive elements/characters with a lively presence and accessible design.

Animation is an applicable tool not only in cartoons or films, but also commercial assets. This module teaches you how this application takes place, providing you with tools to read industry briefs, understand client demands, and design for a target audience and market.

Animation as a medium is a brilliant tool for telling engaging stories. In this module, you will be introduced to story structure, cinematography, and scripting. You will also learn the basics of storyboarding, a crucial step in planning and staging animated shorts and feature films.

We are all individuals from many different walks of life, and this module brings that notion front and centre. Here you will learn how to flex your artistic talent, and experiment further in character design by drawing a diverse range of forms and figures, both from inspiration and direct reference material.

This module introduces you to the synergy of graphic design and animation through the field of Motion Design. Here you will learn how to animate text and graphical works in exciting projects such as lyric videos and explainer animations.

Prop design is an integral part of film production. This can be anything from designing posters to sweet boxes to electric sci-fi billboards. In this module, you will learn how to design assets for a script and discover how your animations can be utilised in a film set.

Critical analysis of both your own work and the works of others is imperative to improving your own skills and understanding of an art form. In this module, you will learn key research methodologies, such as comparative and contextual analysis, to form well-educated arguments and evaluations. This all in turn builds your confidence in your subject area and builds you into a cultured practitioner of the arts.

Applying your gathered skills from the previous modules, you will now create your first animated short, based on a short story or concept of your own creation. You will operate in all the different stages of producing a final output, from initial scripts and storyboarding to editing and sound design.

The industry beyond your degree holds a level of expectation in both communication and demands. This module starts to make this next step more apparent, and helps you understand how you can use your talent to support yourself financially, be it through freelancing or salary occupations.

In this module, you combine academic research alongside your animation skills to create an animated short based on a refined concept. This in turn enhances your ability in discovery and storytelling within complex themes or ideas.

This module furthers your academic research skills, challenging you to dive deeper into the big questions of animation as an art and entertainment form. Much like previous research-based modules, you'll face the task again of compiling this information into a presentable format that is both professional, appealing, and complimentary to your design skills.

In the industry, there are plenty of examples of animations created to meet client demands. In this module, you will create an animation based on an externally set brief made to imitate both client and industry standards. Through this practice, you will further your skills in analysing briefs, time-management, and managing both audience and client expectations.

With the final year of the degree comes the question of "What next?". This module grants you a peek into your potential future career in the form of guest speaker events with experts from the industry. These sessions are also accompanied by weekly group design challenges, which the experts also monitor and attend, allowing them to offer you valuable insight and feedback.