The curriculum revolves around practice-as-research, experimentation, and constructive critique, with a discursive approach emphasising the development of creative time-based content through collaboration, questioning, exchange, and process exploration. Our world-class programme team and state-of-the-art facilities support your journey, enabling you to explore enduring historical relations with material-based media like painting, drawing, illustration, and sculpture – the core of animation practice. Digital tools, deep learning processes, sound, display practices, and film language enhance these traditional media. We engage with various screen-based and related forms, including installations, projection mapping, VR, AR, extra-cinematic animation, theatre environments, sci-tech visualisation tools, and the spatial politics of citizen science games or apps. You will grasp opportunities from animation’s increasing pervasiveness and shape how your audiences perceive and understand the worlds and experiences you create. You will experience a collaborative professional environment and build an equitable, encouraging, challenging community of practitioners with your peers from other programmes.

Throughout the programme, we challenge and encourage you to engage in innovative practice-oriented research, paying close attention to the nuances of cultures, ethics, diversity, identities, traditions, environments, and futures. Our students engage in diverse interdisciplinary contexts, spanning drama, literature, philosophy, fine and applied arts, film and media theory, art history, STEM disciplines, and architecture. By deepening your understanding of animation, you will develop a critical approach to your practice, intellectually challenging yourself with fresh ideas to broaden and influence social, political, and cultural perspectives through creative engagement.

MA Animation fosters your aspirations and creative transformations as an ethically minded thinker and professionally astute creative artist, filmmaker and problem solver. As part of a vibrant community, you will engage in dialogues exploring new perspectives on the persuasive potential of animation in the digital humanities and STEM disciplines.

The programme has three terms with a combination of programme, School and College units that seek to enable you to build a clear sense of communication methods, practices and contexts in relation to your own work.

Term 1

In Term 1, you will undertake the unit Animation Forms, Methods and Contexts (45 credits), which starts with creative community-building activities followed by practice-as-research exploratory workshops as ‘serious play’ to develop skills refinement and knowledge development through collaborative and individual projects. Your sound and image skills are expanded on through technical inductions, workshops and meetings with technical staff. You are expected to engage in collaboration, experimentation and conceptual thinking, and to develop sensitivity to the subjects represented. In tandem with the workshops, Articulation Lectures provide encounters with aesthetic, historical, contemporary and formal contexts of interdisciplinary animation theory and practices. In the Critical Explorations Group seminars you will consider, investigate and discuss a range of approaches to image, sound and text-based materials across animation and its many related creative and intellectual fields to explore rationales, criteria and creative methodologies. You will document and evidence these in your Virtual Studio Desk.

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA (30 credits). This unit aims to support you in meeting the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

In Term 2, the Making Worlds with Others (30 credits) School-wide unit will allow you to work alongside students within and across the School. Working from the perspective of your individual practices and disciplines, you will develop a project that engages with others and/or creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings, with the intention to create critically engaged situations and/or outcomes resulting in convivial knowledge exchange. Through collaborative learning and making, the unit will support you in understanding knowledge exchange and public engagement and how you are to situate your own practice in these territories. The unit will also ask you to question how socially engaged practice can contribute to cultural understanding, co-researching and co-creating methods for knowing with, not knowing about.

You also take Critical Non/Fiction and Experimental/Expanded Practices (15 credits) over Term 2, and begin working on intellectual development and refinement for your Independent Research Project supported by academic and technical staff. The Critical Intensives is a series of interdisciplinary groups notionally named: Non/Fiction and Experimental/Expanded, in which you generate, present and share project-specific research methods for and approaches to your negotiated independent research project agreed with your tutors. This also involves selecting, evaluating and critiquing research contexts, societies, cultures, identities, traditions and human/non-human relationships as appropriate with your peers. The term is research-intensive, and includes developing a detailed production plan. Group and individual tutorials and a critique provide opportunities to receive feedback, as well as an assessed Project Proposal and Production Plan. You will further refine your skills in technical services workshops and self-arranged meetings with technical staff to develop your Technical Plan.

Term 3

Term 3 is when you create and complete your 60-credits Independent Research Project (IRP) . You are expected to work independently whilst setting your own aims, objectives, contexts and deadlines. The IRP is a programme of self-directed independent study that is supported by subject-based group and personal tutorials and technical tutorials, studio dialogue and student-led events. During the term, you are expected to realise these ambitions in a sustained and reflective process of ‘thinking through making’ and develop a body of work evidencing your rationale and priorities as a critical, creative practitioner. Your final body of work should evidence a considered process of selecting, testing and making use of appropriate materials and technical processes sound and image for screen-based and/or expanded moving image practice. This work will then be contextually curated and prepared for presentation in a public-facing event at the end of Term 3. The Unit includes Professional Practice curriculum and events to prepare and equip you for your future after graduation.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

The programme attracts individuals from a notably wide range of disciplines who wish to explore their fields through animation, including, for example, film, architecture, graphic design, literature, communication arts, performance, art history, computing, illustration, pure and applied sciences and maths or fine art, or a combination of these.

Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process considers creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your application and portfolio, your technical animation skills and your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve high MA standards overall.

Candidates are selected on the basis of a body of work that demonstrates an advanced understanding of the subject and sufficient technical animation and moving image skills to realise intentions, evidence of commitment to the subject, intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, the ability to collaborate, to engage in debate and respond to constructive criticism, and the ability to engage in sustained and consistent study. We also want enthusiasm for your practice, commitment and a strong sense of personal responsibility for your subject matter and your own learning and development.

Please upload up to three projects. These must include animation / moving image but may also include other media and material forms where relevant, such as illustration sculpture installation etc. Please avoid using portfolio templates; we want to see how you curate your works imaginatively and clearly.

To support each of the three projects, you may add up to three additional items to show the project’s research and development. Show us your conceptual research process and practices, and demonstrate a clear relation between imagination, contextual critical engagement and making. Each of these three additional items should be uploaded and not exceed a maximum of five PDF pages with images, descriptive captions and concise written comments. One of these additional items can be a maximum 1-minute showreel of excerpts of additional work not submitted in your three projects. If you include a showreel, please indicate this clearly in the captions.

We would like you to submit complete films rather than clips where possible, up to a maximum of 10 minutes in total for all three projects, including any 1-minute showreel.

It is important that you ensure all project materials and films are uploaded. Please do not include external links as we will only view what has been uploaded and will not refer to external sites.

All projects should be accompanied by a concise written description communicating a coherent project trajectory and demonstrating your skills and aptitude. Please provide explicit and clear Captions in the justification area for each project (maximum 100 words); and to each image/item, plus Title, Medium, Year, Size (images), Length (min) (films). Indicate any areas of your work you would like to develop further. Ensure you make clear your specific role in any collaboration.

Please provide a 300-word written personal statement that addresses the following points:

1. Introduce yourself, your interests and your motivations for applying to the Royal College of Art, and to this programme in particular.
2. Briefly summarise any educational background and professional experience to date that will support your application.
3. Tell us what you want to do in the future.

As part of the application process, you must submit a video of no more than 2 minutes.

We want to know why you are applying to the MA Animation and what you want to achieve. Please tell us about your artistic, social, political, and/or contextual interests.

• What are your aims and ambitions for your practice?
• What types of media and technologies do you want to explore?
• Does your work fit in a specific genre or is it interdisciplinary?

Please articulate your intellectual and research process and clearly relate this to an example or two from your portfolio. Tell us about the aesthetic, technical, conceptual and critical perspectives that underpin your work. Your video should communicate a sense of you and your creative journey and aspirations.

We want to know why you are applying to the MA Animation and what you want to achieve. Please use this opportunity to tell us what is not already in your written statement. Your video should communicate a sense of you and your creative journey and aspirations. We want to hear you talk articulately, passionately and intelligently about your motivations for your practice, your relevant personal interests that drive you and what you want or hope to achieve with your work.

• What are your aims and ambitions for your future practice?
• What is your position as an artist in contemporary contexts, and what are your values?
• Which critical, theoretical or philosophical writings or authors have influenced your work, and why?
• Referring to one item in your portfolio, please tell us about your work's main artistic, social, political, ethical and/or environmental perspectives through your intellectual and research process, and make a clear relation between this and the practice work. Tell us about any challenges and how you dealt with them
• What types of media and technologies do you want to explore, and why?
• Why do you want to study MA Animation specifically, at this point in time?

If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need the equivalent of an IELTS Academic or UKVI score of 6.5 with a 6.0 in the Test of Written English (TWE) and at least 5.5 in other skills. Students achieving a grade of at least 6.0, with a grade of 5.5 in the Test of Written English, may be eligible to take the College’s English for Academic Purposes course to enable them to reach the required standard.

You are exempt from this requirement if you have received a 2.1 degree or above from a university in a majority English-speaking nation within the last five years.

If you need a Student Visa to study at the RCA, you will also need to meet the Home Office’s minimum requirements for entry clearance.

For more information and examples of financial awards offered in 2024/25, visit the Scholarships & awards webpage.

You must hold an offer to study on an RCA programme in order to make a scholarship application in Spring 2025. A selection of RCA merit scholarships will also be awarded with programme offers.

We strongly recommend that you apply for your programme as early as possible to stand the best chance of receiving a scholarship. You do not apply directly for individual awards; instead, you will be invited to apply once you have received an offer.

In addition to your programme fees, please be aware that you may incur other additional costs associated with your study during your time at RCA. Additional costs can include purchases and services (without limitation): costs related to the purchase of books, paints, textiles, wood, metal, plastics and/or other materials in connection with your programme, services related to the use of printing and photocopying, lasercutting, 3D printing and CNC. Costs related to attending compulsory field trips, joining student and sport societies, and your Convocation (graduation) ceremony.

If you wish to find out more about what type of additional costs you may incur while studying on your programme, please contact the Head of your Programme to discuss or ask at an online or in person Open Day .

We provide the RCASHOP online, and at our Kensington and Battersea Campuses – this is open to students and staff of the Royal College of Art only to provide paid for materials to support your studies.

We also provide support to our students who require financial assistance whilst studying, including a dedicated Materials Fund.