Aardman - Industry Research

Aardman Studios is somewhere that I would love to see myself in the future whether it be employment or just work experience, so I decided to look into the opportunities that surround Aardman. 

First, I found that they team up with NFTS and run a couple of courses for mainly graduates. 

The first one being the Character Animation course, which is 3 month intensive course that guarantees a 2 week paid placement after finishing the course at a selected studio.

 

This course does cost money, so I'm thinking that it would be hard for me to pay for this as a graduate, even though it would be a great opportunity. I feel that doing this course would develop my skills in becoming a stop-motion animator and it would really help my showreel as I would be able to use the aardman models to practice with, as it's based at their studios in Bristol.

The next course is brand new in 2017, and its a course teamed up with Mackinnon and Saunders! This is a 12 month course based at NFTS.

This is another great course that would be really beneficial to do after graduating University and I couldn't find out if this one required a fee, although it most likely is. This course would be better if I was more interested in specialising in model making, which I'm not sure about yet. I feel that the 3 month course at Bristol would be more beneficial to me right now as I don't have a large amount of animations for my showreel and this would get me more in the door than a course run at NFTS and not even at the Mackinnon and Saunders studio.

Finally, I just had a look on Aardman's website about jobs and how to apply for them and found that they allow speculative applications, meaning that even if they don't have a job going at the time you can still send them work and possibly be asked down to their studios.

This is something major to consider when finishing University as it's going to be very important to try and get work out there to as many people as possible.

To conclude, looking at all of this I feel that the first step would be just to send out my work and CV to Aardman before getting myself involved in a full-time course. After speaking to someone from Aardman myself, they explained that the way that they got into the industry was just simply sending letters, theur CV and work to different heads of department and being patient after that.