BA (Hons) CGI and Visual Effects with foundation year

During the foundation year, you’ll cover key subject areas such as game art, game design, animation, CGI, VFX and code, and work on exciting practical projects designed to help you learn key digital design skills. You’ll also be supported to develop key transferable skills in preparation for your degree level studies.

The CGI and Visual Effects degree helps to develop artists for a competitive, high-tech industry that offers challenging and creative careers. The degree brings the latest cutting-edge techniques and industry standard software into the curriculum as well as offering you the flexibility to apply your learning in almost any field.

Building upon industry-relevant digital skills, classical art training, creative problem solving and ideas generation, the course offers an industry-oriented exploration of all the core 2D and 3D disciplines embodied across a range of exciting careers. You may come to us with no 3D or compositing experience, or you may have been producing your own models or animations before, either way we will work with you individually to develop your CGI and visual effects skills to meet industry expectations in your chosen direction.

Being aware of industry practices and in contact with industry artists is vital for developing your future career. We support you to build an industry network during your degree to help you find that first entry-level position through good social media practice, guest speakers at our weekly forums, annual events such as CGFX, Viz. Arch Viz, and our Graduate Show, as well as a range of trips. Alongside this you will have access to Solent’s many incredible facilities and will attend regular weekly feedback sessions using our industry Rushes pipeline in a recognised course ranked as one of the top schools in the world by The Rookies.

Our annual guest speaker event, CGFX, draws in some of the industry's top experts, allowing students to network and ask questions during the Q&A. Previous companies that have attended the event include Rockstar, Aardman, Glowmade, Outpost VFX, Funko Animation, and Framestore.

Our course is designed to help you evolve from being a learner to a practitioner with strong creative and technical awareness. You will explore many different areas of CGI and visual effects to help you build a wide skill base before focusing on a more specialist area with exactly the skills your chosen industry requires.

This course is part of the South Coast Institute of Technology (IoT), a partnership of colleges, universities and industry-leading employers to create new career opportunities in the technology sector. IoT courses like this one are precisely tailored to the needs of employers in the maritime, engineering and digital industries – industries which are hungry for talented new engineers, technologists, technicians and creatives like you.


4 years with foundation year

48 UCAS tariff points from A-levels, a BTEC Extended Diploma at PPP or BTEC Diploma at MP, T-level Pass (D or E) or equivalent. An `optional’ online portfolio submission may be required as part of the selection process. IELTS 6.0 overall with a minimum of 5.5 in each individual component TOEFL IBT minimum - 80 with a minimum of 20 in each individual component