UTS Animal Logic Academy: Creating Success

The Master of Animation and Visualization program at the Academy is quite unique. By offering an accelerated master's program which is co-designed between industry (Animal Logic) and UTS and delivered by industry leads, students get a major jump on the competition with an education that mirrors production in a professional studio. By design, the program emulates a full-time job and engages and challenges students with a Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm schedule where they are tasked with developing a story idea for a studio-level 3D animated short film, and then spend most of the year making it. This large-scale collaborative project work (with up to 45 students working on the same project) is rare in higher education, and yet exactly how graduates will be expected to work when they land specialist roles in large animation and visual effects studios. “The key to offering students industry-like experience is that we place them in specialized roles, just as they would be employed by industry,” says Ian Thomson, Head of the UTS Animal Logic Academy. “Roles range from art department, modelling, surfacing, rigging, animation, previs/layout, effects, lighting, compositing, technical direction, and production coordination.

Students and industry alike love the course, because it gives students a year of practical industry experience, and the studios who are recruiting know they are hiring qualified graduates that don't need time getting up to speed.”