Mohawk College

Mohawk College delivers its digital arts and interactive media education primarily from the Fennell Campus in Hamilton, Ontario. Situated within the Hamilton-Burlington corridor near regional studios such as Pipeline Studios, the college provides training adjacent to the wider southern Ontario production sector. Creative programs operate out of specialized facilities that include the Digital Creativity Centre—housed in the zero-carbon Joyce Centre for Partnership & Innovation—as well as dedicated game design labs and The Agency, an on-campus student-run creative studio.

Animation (Advanced Diploma)

The three-year Animation program integrates traditional drawing fundamentals with digital 2D and 3D computer animation pipelines. Designed to develop strong draftsmanship alongside digital technical fluency, the curriculum requires life drawing with nude models across all three years to build core competencies in anatomy, gesture, weight, and posing.

Coursework begins with pre-production fundamentals, including narrative generation, concept design, and storyboarding, before moving into digital character construction, performance animation, rigging, texturing, lighting, and rendering. The curriculum, shaped with input from veteran animator Charlie Bonifacio and an advisory committee featuring leads from studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks, and House of Cool, emphasizes collaborative studio production. Students complete a collaborative group film during their second year and develop an individual capstone project and professional demo reel in their final year.

Game - Design (Advanced Diploma)

The three-year Game - Design curriculum prepares students to design, prototype, and build interactive games. Instruction covers systems design, level creation, world-building, and game mechanics across both physical and digital formats. Technical coursework introduces C# programming from the ground up, making programming accessible without prior coding experience. Practical engine development begins in Unity during the first semester and progresses into Unreal Engine 5 in the second semester.

In addition to technical mechanics and visual artistry, the program incorporates Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion principles into its design modules, challenging students to analyze character representation, gameplay tropes, and team workplace dynamics.

Applied Studio Production

Both programs align technical training with studio production standards. Students must provide dedicated high-performance Windows laptops equipped with discrete GPUs and digital drawing displays to support intensive workflows in software such as Autodesk Maya, Toon Boom Harmony, and real-time game engines. Through The Agency, students also have opportunities to collaborate across disciplines on applied projects for external clients, mirroring commercial production and agency environments.