AUB, BA(Hons), Visual Effects Design and Production

Britain is a leading country in the production of high quality visual effects for film. The British film industry is hungry for new talent and our Visual Effects course is designed to feed it with highly skilled graduates of the required professional standard.

Since the Harry Potter boom in the early 2000s, alongside a recent influx of new releases from studios such as Disney and Marvel, the Film and VFX industry has expanded at an exponential rate. This has firmly established the UK as a leading country for high quality Visual Effects work and created an unprecedented demand for fresh, highly trained graduate talent from the UK education system.

This course has been designed from the ground up by industry professionals specifically to address this demand, and its primary ethos is to create the quality required for employability within the industry. Underpinned by training in traditional artistic techniques such as drawing, colour theory, perspective, photography and composition, you will learn what it takes to create your own feature film quality visual effects.

This course shoots original material on a range of professional acquisition formats, ranging from Kodak celluloid film stock to the Arri Alexa digital cinematography camera, which is accepted as the industry standard for motion picture production.

Our 2D workflow uses Nuke for all compositing, and Maya / Zbrush and Arnold for 3D. Our colour pipeline is based on an industry model with custom LUTs to ensure accurate monitoring of colour in our fully calibrated VFX lab. Our dedicated industry level workstations are top of the range and are supported by our render farm, fibre network, and clustered storage.

Since the conception of this course in 2015, we have successfully placed students at both Framestore and Industrial Light and Magic in fully paid positions, as part of the teams creating VFX for movies such as “Dr Strange” and “Transformers”. The course prides itself on the currency of its staff and its links to the industry. You will be taught by industry professionals who are currently working on high profile feature films.

With an emphasis on photorealism, believability and integration, you will be taken through the process of designing and producing visual effects sequences to the highest possible level of professional scrutiny. We are lucky to have one of Europe’s leading special effects companies, Framestore, on our campus. From working on huge blockbusters like “Guardians of the Galaxy” to winning Oscars for their work on “Gravity”, Framestore are pushing British VFX to new heights – and they’re right next door!