BA (Hons) Modelmaking

BA (Hons) Modelmaking is your stepping stone to an exciting career in making.

With hands-on experience and access to the latest technology and traditional resources, you'll learn to make things using an extensive array of materials, tools, and techniques. You'll develop the making skills needed for rewarding careers in film, architecture, exhibition, and design. You'll develop as an independent thinker, capable of solving problems and taking imaginative leaps in creative design and making.

You'll work on live collaborative projects with students from other courses and with industry professionals. Using our strong links with the creative industries, you'll have opportunities to undertake work experience with leading companies in the UK and abroad.

This course has been the first step in the journeys of many successful graduates, leaders, and innovators who continue to excel in a broad spectrum of the creative industries and beyond.

All undergraduate courses at AUB offer an optional placement year, to be taken between your second and third years of study.

If you’re unsure about this optional placement, you don’t need to decide now. Once you’re here and studying with us, the course team will discuss the placement options with you, so when the time comes, you can make a decision that’s right for you.

Students on BA (Hons) Modelmaking have the chance to broaden their horizons through exciting exchange and international summer programmes. These opportunities allow you to study abroad at one of our brilliant partner institutions, experience different cultures, and enhance your academic journey.

You're introduced at Level 4 to all the core skills of a professional modelmaker: making processes and techniques, design thinking, and the essential function of the model as a form of communication.

Previous assumptions about skills, methods, thought processes, and representation are challenged, reframed, and developed to build the necessary foundations for professional practice.

During Levels 4 and 5, a lecture programme, reinforced by studio discussion and debate, will introduce you to theoretical concepts and a wide range of issues including audience, communication, sustainability, and ethics, which will underpin your development as a modelmaker.

In the second year, you'll continue to develop your understanding of modelmaking as a form of communication. Interpretation and representation are studied and practised in a variety of different professional contexts.

Attention is turned outwards to clients, to industry and to society. Engagement and interaction with industry, audiences and consumers are integrated into the curriculum, as is research, reflection and the use of writing to develop understanding.

You're encouraged to develop interests and lines of enquiry that'll inform your choice of creative and career directions in the third year.

The course seeks to facilitate your self-discovery and to build confidence in pursuing independent paths in skill development, reflection and enquiry, and in choosing career directions.

In the final year, the direction of the course and of your decision-making is firmly towards the outside world as characterised by clients, the industry and audiences. As part of this, however, there's a continuous process in which you're expected, through research and work experience, to 'benchmark' standards of performance, and to define, manage and meet your own personal standards of excellence.

Expectations are set that you'll demonstrate high levels of ambition as well as achievement and demonstrate the flexibility and resourcefulness appropriate to a professional in achieving those goals.

The course supports you to engage staff in dialogue over decision-making, from an independent position. You're encouraged to identify yourselves as members of your chosen professional field, to make connections through personal contact and research and to 'prepare for success' by seeing yourselves as professionals already in practice.

2024 New Blades

• Winner | Best in Show, Most Ingenious, Outside the Box award, Best Product Model – Ed Allen
• Winner | Best Use of Creative Materials, Leviathan Workshop Award, Fixie's Best Use of 3D Printing – Katrina Linderoth
• Winner | Best Architectural Model – Joan Serra Bofill
• Winner | The Richard Gregory SFX Award – Charlotte Couch
• Winner | Sustainability Award – Sally Feast
• Winner | M.A.D. Models Award – Sam Carroll
• Winner | Pretty Cool Award – Anthony Edgar
• Runner-up | Best in Show, Best Model Making – Immy Hughes

2023 New Blades

• Winner | Best in Show, Best Product Model, Best Finish, Best Use of 3D Printing – Maddie Fuggle
• Winner | Model Maker Group Fine Scale Model Award, Asylum Best Modelmaking – Holly Bignell
• Winner | Leviation Workshop Award – Christianna Altani
• Winner | Sustainability Award – Anna Rumary
• Winner | Howells Award – Sam Teanby
• Winner | Outside the Box Award – Jack Wase
• Runner-up | Best in Show, Best Use of Creative Materials – Jamie Lord

2020 APMM Art Hedlund Student Model Making Competition

• First place | Chris Bradbury
• Third place | Yudit Lee
• Honourable Mentions | Reba Bawden, Jonny Cavaciuti, James Picot, Shannon Sykes

Our graduates enjoy successful careers in a range of industries that include film, architecture, animation, advertising, display, design, Formula 1, museum and heritage, medical, education and more. Many of our graduates have progressed to run departments and successful businesses.

Our graduates design and make handheld props, sets and costumes in the film industry. In world-renowned architectural practices, they lead teams and run departments making a range of architectural models; in the world of animation, our graduates work for companies such as Aardman, making sets, props and puppets. From prototypes to wind tunnel test models, from prosthetic limbs to robotics and from science fiction to science research, our graduates excel in making models and artefacts that entertain, educate and communicate to global audiences.

AUB's Careers and Enterprise team is dedicated to supporting you in turning your creativity into a great career.