Computer animation - Teesside or Hertfordshire

I'm going to be very biased (because I work at Hertfordshire :smile:

)

I will say that if you want to work in Animation, almost the entire industry in the UK is located in London. Hertfordshire is 23 minutes by train from central London. This means we get weekly visits from Animation companies and run live projects with many of them because it is very easy for them to come and visit us.

All the staff here have worked in industry on productions including The Hobbit, The Harry Potter films, The Chronicles of Narnia films, Tintin, John Carter, Man of Steel and games like Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and Lord of the Rings and TV series like Doctor Who and Casualty.

Our graduates work in over 500 companies worldwide including Industrial Light and Magic, Disney, Double Negative, Framestore, Blue Zoo, Illumination Mac Guff, Epic Games US, Nintendo Japan, Bandai Japan, Sony, Rare, Blitz, Traveller's Tales etc

Our graduates have worked on productions including Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Gravity, Inception, Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Harry Potter films, the Narnia films, Boxtrolls, Dark Knight, Godzilla etc

Our animations have been shortlisted over 140 times in animation festivals worldwide including Royal Television Society Awards, Virgin Media Shorts, Animex, Shanghai World Expo, Animamundi, KLIK!, British Animation Awards, BFI Future Film Festival, Anifest, Aniwow, Melbourne International Animation Festival, London International Animation Festival, Tricky Women etc

We score higher than any other UK university in the Rookies Awards, and for many years have been the only British university to get ranked in their awards.I hope that helps you make your mind up.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 4

OP

Original post by bobbin24

I got into teesside for the same course and they work with large companies and are some of the best for their animation courses. I fell in love with the course and the campus instantly.

Do you have any student work examples from classmates I could look at? Also, any clue what the employment rate after graduation is for the course?

Reply 5

OP

Original post by moid

I'm going to be very biased (because I work at Hertfordshire :smile:

)

I will say that if you want to work in Animation, almost the entire industry in the UK is located in London. Hertfordshire is 23 minutes by train from central London. This means we get weekly visits from Animation companies and run live projects with many of them because it is very easy for them to come and visit us.

All the staff here have worked in industry on productions including The Hobbit, The Harry Potter films, The Chronicles of Narnia films, Tintin, John Carter, Man of Steel and games like Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and Lord of the Rings and TV series like Doctor Who and Casualty.

Our graduates work in over 500 companies worldwide including Industrial Light and Magic, Disney, Double Negative, Framestore, Blue Zoo, Illumination Mac Guff, Epic Games US, Nintendo Japan, Bandai Japan, Sony, Rare, Blitz, Traveller's Tales etc

Our graduates have worked on productions including Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Gravity, Inception, Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Harry Potter films, the Narnia films, Boxtrolls, Dark Knight, Godzilla etc

Our animations have been shortlisted over 140 times in animation festivals worldwide including Royal Television Society Awards, Virgin Media Shorts, Animex, Shanghai World Expo, Animamundi, KLIK!, British Animation Awards, BFI Future Film Festival, Anifest, Aniwow, Melbourne International Animation Festival, London International Animation Festival, Tricky Women etc

We score higher than any other UK university in the Rookies Awards, and for many years have been the only British university to get ranked in their awards.I hope that helps you make your mind up.

Wow all of this sounds great (I have looked at student work and those look great too), but any idea what the employment rate after graduation is like (for international students)?

Reply 6

bobbin24

3

The teesside website should give you a showreel and uni stats should give you the employment rate and extras like how much people liked the course

Reply 7

OP

University of Hertfordshire

I was hoping there were more examples than the 2017 animation showreel

Reply 8

tusucks

7

I don't know how things are at Hertfordshire, but Teesside's an unhappy place for quite a few staff. Which isn't a positive thing.

Reply 9

Official Rep

15

Original post by throwalll

Wow all of this sounds great (I have looked at student work and those look great too), but any idea what the employment rate after graduation is like (for international students)?

The employability rate for our Animation programmes is 96.2%, so 96.2% of students are in employment or further study within 6 months and @moid mentioned some of the companies graduates work for. I'm not sure what the figure is specifically for international students.

Reply 10

OP

Original post by tusucks

I don't know how things are at Hertfordshire, but Teesside's an unhappy place for quite a few staff. Which isn't a positive thing.

Why are they unhappy?

Reply 11

Original post by throwalll

Wow all of this sounds great (I have looked at student work and those look great too), but any idea what the employment rate after graduation is like (for international students)?

I'm glad you liked the work (did the links in my signature work? It has stopped displaying to me on TSR for some reason)

Employment rate - this is where things get more complex. If you mean the UK government's own statistics (Unistats) for how many students get employed after university from our degrees it is something enormous like 96%. However the government, like all governments, lies. In terms of employment rate it includes concepts such as if a graduate is at home and writing a CV and sending that to a company - that counts as being employed, whereas anyone with half a brain can see that this is lies. If a graduate has a job where they say 'do you want fries with that?' well that counts too... So you can ignore any Unistats figure for any university; they are all lies. I keep a record of how many students get employed from Hertfordshire every year because it is part of the monitoring data I have to supply to Creative Skillset who accredit the course - this data doesn't differentiate between whether a student is international or EU or UK - it is a figure for all students. My figures only include graduates working in the animation and games, visualisation and VFX industries - if a graduate is working in a shop or a non-animation office I do not count them. I will put those figures below:

2013-2014- 58% of our graduates were hired in the animation industry (53 graduates hired)

2014-2015 – 62% of graduates were hired in the animation industry (49 graduates hired)

2015-2016 – 53% of graduates were hired in the animation industry (55 graduates hired)

2016-2017 – 49% of graduates hired in the animation industry since June 2017 (46 graduates hired) - this figure is not yet for a full calendar year.

To put these numbers into perspective; Creative Skillset animation courses (the best ones in the UK) have an average of 30% employment in the industry. We are often close to double that. Which tells you that many of the other Creative Skillset animation courses are a lot lower than 30% employment. Another factor is how small the industry in the UK is. There are around 12,000 jobs in animation in the UK (including everything; games, VFX, simulations, VR, visualisation, cartoons etc). The UK also produces around 10,500 students from animation and animation related degrees every year. I don't know how many entry level positions there are every year, but I doubt it is a large number... so a lot of them go to our graduates.

Regarding employment possibilities for international students (by which I assume you are from outside the European Union and have no dual passport with Britain or an EU country?) and you are referring to the UK as a place to work? The chances of getting hired under these restrictions is highly unlikely. The UK government have made it very hard for companies to hire international graduates by restricting the number of VISAs available to each company because they currently have some rather right wing views on immigration sadly. This means that companies are reserving the few VISAs they get for mid level / senior level artists; most will not use them on juniors (although it does happen if your artwork is astounding; I had a student from Singapore get hired by a UK games company last year). There are other options though. Just because the UK government is very confused, it doesn't mean that other EU nations are so stupid. You could get hired by a company in another country in the EU; most of these countries have a more enlightened attitude to hiring skilled international graduates (good examples being Finland, Germany, Poland, Sweden, The Netherlands - there may well be more of course). You could also get hired by a UK company that has offices outside the EU - for example a lot of British VFX companies have Canadian offices at the moment, so the interview could take place in the UK, but you would move to that other country for the work. You could also return to your home country and get hired (depending on where that is and how much of an animation industry they have). I know that many of my students from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia get hired by animation companies in Singapore. My Chinese graduates tend to get hired by Chinese companies.

I hope that helps.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 12

Original post by tusucks

I don't know how things are at Hertfordshire, but Teesside's an unhappy place for quite a few staff. Which isn't a positive thing.

I think Hertfordshire is a good place for the lecturers, although any lecturing job (if it is done well) takes way more hours than you get paid for. I don't know enough about Teesside to make any comment about working conditions, although I would've thought their salaries should go a lot further than they do in Hertfordshire! (UK universities pay lecturers the same rates no matter where you work in the country and no matter how many or how few students you have - so the national pay scale is a very good thing if you live in the far North of England where the cost of living is tiny, but if you live and work in the South East of England / London the cost of living is ridiculously high)

Reply 13

Hi Throwalll - you currently have your PM inbox set to reject incoming PMs! So I've tried to reply to your PM, but you've blocked all PMs so no one can send you a message.

Reply 14

OP

Original post by moid

Hi Throwalll - you currently have your PM inbox set to reject incoming PMs! So I've tried to reply to your PM, but you've blocked all PMs so no one can send you a message.

Looked in my account options but the private messaging option is already enabled. Maybe try sending a new PM instead of replying?

Reply 15