COURSE OVERVIEW
Become an animator for film or games.
Join our collaborative and creative community to become a creative technologist in animation and create award-winning work at one of the world’s best film schools.
This practical 1-year MA explores the theory and craft of creating animations digitally for film and games, using industry standard software and technologies. You’ll bring scenes and characters to life using powerful content-creation software and real-time game engines.
Content Tabs
Animation is where imagination is transformed into movement, character, and story.
On this course, you’ll learn how to breathe life into virtual worlds, producing computer-generated character performances, crafting sequences, and gameplay moments for the big screen, the next groundbreaking game, or immersive virtual production. Alongside mastering animation and game control for your digital characters, you’ll discover how to bring digital worlds to life with cutting-edge tools, from motion capture to AI-driven techniques.
You’ll develop both the craft and the conceptual insight that make ideas move – from acting and character psychology to key-framing, rigging, weight painting, and exporting assets into game engines. You’ll discover how timing, motion, and emotion combine to turn pixels into performance.
This is your opportunity to build the skills that fuel some of the world’s most exciting studios – the kind of work you’ll recognise from Pixar, Blue Zoo, and Locksmith in film, or Supermassive Games, Amanita Design, and Ustwo Games in gaming. With the NFTS’s unrivalled industry connections, you’ll be learning alongside professionals shaping the future of animation.
You’ll study within a globally renowned creative environment, home to many award-winning animation and games. Recent successes include BAFTA wins for the game There Was a Home (2024), the animated films Crab Day (2024) and Wander to Wonder (2025), a full sweep of the CILECT Prizes in 2025, and Annie Award nominations – proof that you’ll be joining a community at the forefront of excellence.
Through mentorship, industry collaboration, and experience within real-world studio pipelines, you’ll graduate not just with a strong demo reel, but with confidence, hands-on expertise, and a professional network to launch your career.
After graduating you’ll be prepared for such roles as:
- Animator (film or games) – bringing characters, creatures, and monsters to life with digital artistry
- Real-time Animator / Engine Artist – creating interactive or live visuals for games, virtual production, or XR
- Character / Creature Animator – focusing on acting, performance, and nuanced behaviour
- Technical Animator / Rigging Artist – designing rigs, deformation systems, and weight setups
- Pre-visualisation / Story Artist – shaping motion, staging, and cinematic flow before full production
- Freelancer / Hybrid Specialist – working across short-form projects, advertising, mobile games, VR, and AR experiences
Course Facilities
As an NFTS student, you have 24/7 access to the Digital Animation Lab at the NFTS, Beaconsfield. In these dedicated studios you will have your own desk with a dual monitor setup, powered by Alienware Aurora development workstations and built around the latest AMD Ryzen and Nvidia RTX technology.
All workstations are fitted with industry standard software such as Unreal Engine, GitHub, Adobe Creative Cloud, Reality Capture, Blender, Houdini, Maya and ZBrush. Additionally, you will have access to VR headsets, drawing tablets, and game controllers and more. All production costs and use of equipment is included in your tuition fee.
The NFTS creates an environment where creativity and technical expertise come together to produce original, bold work.
You’ll learn the theory and craft of creating animations digitally for both film and games, using industry standard tools, along with technical aspects of animation such as mechanical and organic animations, rigging and weight painting, sequencing, and storytelling. You’ll develop your craft as an animation practitioner by bringing scenes and objects to life digitally through animation techniques that incorporate timing, motion, and emotion, and exporting animation to real-time tools, such as game engines.
Collaboration is the key to succeeding in the world of animation and it is also central to the ethos of the NFTS. Collaborative work with many other creative disciplines across the School will enable you to develop expertise across the whole of the production process.
By the end of this course, you’ll have the industry-valued skills and knowledge required to create professional-grade digital animations for use in gaming and film, including Virtual Production.
To join this course, all applicants must demonstrate extant creative aptitude for and interest in storytelling and its related digital mediums. Our students come from a wide range of backgrounds and prior experiences, and have all demonstrated an excitement, aptitude, creativity and willingness to learn new skills. We actively seek a diverse and interesting group of people who have something new to offer the animation landscape. While many applicants will have a degree from a British or overseas university, we will consider applicants who do not have a degree if they have an impressive portfolio, a creative track record or an equivalent life experience.
Specifically, all applicants must
- Be confident in the English language
- Be 21 years or older
- Be able to attend the NFTS in-person for the complete duration of the course
- Have at least a basic computer literacy
- Demonstrate a small portfolio of original work in any creative field
If you want to become an animator for film or games, then consider applying to our MA in Animation for Film and Games. To apply, you must include the following items with your application:
A digital portfolio of your creative work presented online (send us a link to your YouTube videos or a Google Shared Folder or a personal website). This may show sketches, illustrations, animations, sample scripts or game designs. The purpose is to showcase your creative skills with relevance to animation.
Funding Available
The NFTS awards more scholarships and bursaries to British students, relative to the size of our student body, than almost any other educational institution in the UK. There are two new Animation for Film and Games scholarships available to cover 50% of the home tuition fee for UK applicants. If you’re successful at gaining a place on the course, you will be given further information on how to apply for NFTS scholarships.
Upcoming Events
Animation Gallery
Chhaya
Directed by Debanjan Nandy
Fried
Directed by Lizzie Watts
Hedgehog
Directed by Ed Bulmer
Moth and Flame
Directed by Matti Vesanen
Tutors
Student Showcase
Ascent (behind the scenes)
2023 Master's course graduation animation film
Watch the making of short animation Ascent, which was made at the NFTS, using Unreal Engine 5.
The School has a long history of producing award-winning animations that are shown across the world at film festivals, and win awards. These include prestigious BAFTAs, where in 2024, NFTS students won the British Short Animation EE BAFTA for their graduation film Crab Day, and in 2025, the winning short animation Wander to Wonder was directed and mostly crewed by NFTS alumni.
