Issue 98 features our list of the world's top 20 animation colleges. Here's how we compiled the rankings
Issue 98 of 3D World features our 3D Training Directory: a 40-page guide to the best educational options avilable to budding 3D artists, including details of over 400 degrees, commercial training courses and online schemes.
Our regional listings provide a comprehensive directory of training within the UK, North America and the Rest of the World, including the top schools in mainland Europe, Australasia and the Far East.
But this year, for the first time, we have compiled a global ‘Ivy League‘ table of the world‘s top animation schools. In order to obtain objective rankings, we looked at a key measure of a school‘s visibility to the 3D industry: the number of its students‘ animations that are screened at international festivals.
In order to ensure good global coverage, we drew our data from six of the key festivals worldwide: the Siggraph Computer Animation Festival, the London International Animation Festival, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Melbourne International Animation Festival, the Annecy International Animation Festival and the Animex International Festival of Animation & Computer Games.
COMPILING THE DATA
In each case, we took the shortlisted entries from the past five years, where full data was available (records for Animex date from 2003 onwards, and MIAF from 2004 onwards). So, for example, we counted only animations that actually screened at the Siggraph Animation Theater or Electronic Theater, not simply those that were submitted to the festival.
Where a college has a strong track record in producing traditional animation graduates, such as the UK‘s Royal College of Art, its total number of student screenings at the festivals will often be higher than our table shows, since the total count would also include 2D animation and stop motion. However, we have ranked the colleges purely from the point of view of aspiring 3D artists, and have therefore excluded any work that contained no element of 3D from our counts.
Clearly, the resulting top 20 tends to favour pure animation degrees over games or multimedia courses. Courses in which students are given a longer period of time to produce a degree film, such as the leading European animation schools or the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University, also inevitably place higher.
You should bear these qualifications in mind when assessing our results. Nevertheless, we believe our Ivy League is the most comprehensive and objective ranking of the world‘s 3D training institutions yet produced.
So who came top? Below, you can download an Excel spreadsheet breaking down the data for the top 20 institutions by individual animation festivals. You can read more about each college in the magazine itself.
