You undertake intensive development in drawing, animation skills, and basic art direction through life drawing, composition and perspective courses. Your drawing skills are refined using live models, and you begin to study proportion, line-of-action, structure, and basic anatomy. Animation study focuses on basic animation, animation assisting, clean-up, and an introduction to doping. You also study character design, foundation film theory, story concept, layout, and the history of animation.

In this term, you continue developing your drawing skills through life drawing, and expand your study of art direction to include storyboard and background design. You also continue the study of character design and layout, and begin to interpret storyboards, create character model sheets and layout scenes in preparation for a broader animation context. Intermediate animation and effects animation commence along with advanced properties of character animation such as walks, reactions, and rotations.

Continuing to study life drawing, animation, effects animation, and animation assisting, your focus shifts to more subtle and sophisticated techniques of animating a character's thoughts and emotions through acting principles. You are introduced to doping & slugging and colour theory, along with the process of creating production storyboards.

The class moves into the production component of the program as you begin to apply your skills to the production of your graduate animated film project. You develop original concepts through storyboarding, character model sheets, layouts, and final animation artwork for rendering. Your script, production design work, and voice track for lip-synch are completed, as life drawing and advanced animation continue. Each student is assigned a Final Film Project mentor. Regularly scheduled production meetings as well as theatre presentations provide feedback from instructors as well as the department head.

As you make progress on your animated short film, you move from animation to the digital ink and paint phase of production. A focus on art direction and final look development is incorporated with digital training. Computer applications that provide you with rendering, camera moves, effects, and compositing are used as you digitize and finish the films. Regularly scheduled production meetings as well as theatre presentations continue to provide feedback from instructors as well as the department head.

Completing post-production on your short film, you assemble a traditional animation portfolio in preparation for graduation. In the last four weeks, you are introduced to Flash, an animation software package currently being used by many animation studios worldwide. You get the opportunity to work either in a crew setting or independently on a Flash production. Both your final film and Flash projects are shown at graduation, which is often attended by industry. Many students' films are sent to international festivals where they are viewed by numerous industry professionals and win significant awards.