Digital Media Arts PhD

On our vibrant and expanding Digital Media Arts PhD programme, we embrace subjects that include:

• Film, animation
• Visual effects, computational arts
• Video games
• Immersive media
• Digital acting
• Mediatised theatre
• Motion graphics
• Movement interfaces
• Performance capture
• Machine vision
• Interactive cinema.

This provides you with an opportunity to undertake profound and meaningful practice-based and theoretical postgraduate research in these fields, where creativity and technology collide. Your skills and talents as a media practitioner, alongside intellectual curiosity, collaborative spirit, technical proficiency and sense of adventure, all come into play as you make use of the state-of-the-art facilities, great workspaces and dedicated multi-disciplinary supervision. You will also benefit from our extensive connections to the creative industries through our wide range of partners within film production companies, animation houses, VFX facilities and studios.

Our Guildford location is a short train journey from central London, and a town which is home to some of the most well-regarded games developers, immersive media producers and web design agencies, including:

• Supermassive
• MediaMolecule
• Electronic Arts
• Figment Productions
• BlueGFX
• Criterion.

We regularly enjoy visits and engagements with the London production and VFX community, which include:

• Framestore
• Moving Picture Company
• Blue Zoo
• Nexus
• Milk VFX
• KeyFrame Studios.

We also maintain close links with the British Film Institute, BAFTA, Animation UK, Visual Effects Society, London ACM SIGGRAPH, Ukie and plenty of other industry networks crucial for you to connect with.

On campus, we share a building and collaborate on a daily basis with the prestigious Guildford School of Acting. We also work closely with colleagues from Surrey’s Engineering programmes and have found touchpoints in nearly every other department Surrey has to offer. In addition to this, we are actively building relationships with other institutions close at hand and around the world: collaboration and sharing is the only way forward for our precious arts, culture and technology communities.

We belong to TECHNE, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded doctoral training partnership, which provides access to comprehensive academic and professional training programmes, as well as the possibility of funding for your studies.

Surrey’s multi-disciplinary Doctoral College will cater to your academic and institutional needs and is a great way of linking you with fellow postgraduate researchers from Surrey’s wide variety of other disciplines.

This is a programme which will take you beyond the bounds of mere study. You will develop your own ground-breaking artistic practice into exciting and emerging fields such as virtual production, digital performance, pervasive filmmaking, contemporary animation, immersive audio-visual, experiential installation, digital art, creative computing and AI-based media production.

We will also help you deepen your contextual and theoretical knowledge in these and related fields. As a contemporary media practitioner and theorist, you will be fully encouraged to engage with topical research on current artistic and media practices, diversity, accessibility and cultural impacts.

We will also facilitate training in the latest tools and technologies to assist your creative development and enable you to create profound outputs that have impact.

If you have a proposal which you feel may match our supervision capabilities and expertise, or you are interested in the general areas we cover, please get in touch with us for an informal discussion by contacting j.weinbren@surrey.ac.uk in the first instance.

Your final assessment will be based on the presentation of your research in a written thesis, which will be discussed in a viva examination with at least two examiners. You have the option of preparing your thesis as a monograph (one large volume in chapter form) or in publication format (including chapters written for publication), subject to the approval of your supervisors.

The professional development of postgraduate researchers is supported by the Doctoral College, which provides training in essential skills through its Researcher Development Programme of workshops, mentoring and coaching. A dedicated postgraduate careers and employability team will help you prepare for a successful career after the completion of your PhD.