Ellie Durkin

Two weeks after handing in her final piece of work, Ellie secured a job with Fuzzy Duck – a specialist creative animations house in Manchester serving the museums and corporate sectors. How did she manage that?

“I enjoyed my time at Futureworks,” said Ellie. “They had great facilities and it helped that they had small class sizes. The teaching was always very good. Our tutors had loads of experience working on major productions like Harry Potter and Avatar, so you knew you were learning from the best.”

“And they always seemed to be available and easy to reach, I remember once emailing a tutor in the middle of the night when I was working on something and couldn’t believe it when I got a reply straight away!”

“I’m most proud of my honours project, Comet. It’s a mixed media music video which includes a lot of traditional 2D animation.”

The way the course is structured was directly responsible for Ellie getting a job in the industry straightaway. “In our third year, we had a whole module geared around marketing ourselves and making connections in the industry. We were doing mock interviews and while we were doing all this, I saw a job advertisied and decided to go for a real interview among training ones we were doing. I ended up getting the job! In fact, I started work two weeks after handing in my final piece of work.”

“I would definitely recommend Futureworks to people looking to get in to the industry. It’s a great route in.”

See more details of our Digital Animation with Illustration degree.

You can see Ellie’s honours project here.

And see her online portfolio.