Graduate Certificate in Visual Development for Entertainment Algonquin College - Ottawa Campus, Canada

In this one-year Visual Development for Entertainment Ontario College Graduate Certificate, you refine your artistic skills for a specialized career in the entertainment industry. As a visual development or concept artist, you take creative ideas and generate visual designs for a wide range of media products. This includes, but is not limited to, creating characters, prop designs, and environments that help tell the story of a film, show or video game. Building on your existing artistic knowledge, skills, and experience, you integrate current and emerging technologies and tools to enhance 2D and 3D entertainment industry outcomes. You develop project management, teamwork, visual research, and rapid visualization skills to refine and move concepts through industry-specific pre-production pipelines.

You apply your knowledge of cinematography to treat your art like a movie set creating believable concepts to augment the viewer experience. You enhance your artistic skills to evoke emotion through visual storytelling.

Develop problem-solving skills through art and design. You build leadership skills to produce, guide and manage studio-ready artwork for the film and entertainment industry. Working with industry experts through the conceptual process in a studio environment, you apply industry-standard technologies and techniques such as:

• visual development
• concept art
• digital drawing, painting and 3D modelling
• texture work
• matte painting
• motion capture art
• traditional and digital sculpting
• mixed media
• storyboarding

Throughout the program, you practise presenting, defending, validating, and adjusting your creative pitch to communicate solutions and sell your ideas. Each course contributes to the development of an industry portfolio that showcases your abilities to augment, refine, and deliver evidence-informed visual concepts and visual storytelling.

Graduates may find employment in a wide range of sectors of entertainment including:

• animation
• film and video production
• video game development
• digital entertainment