Sabrina Gardiner is applying for an animation course because she has had a lifelong passion for character design and bringing those characters to life on screen. She has been studying digital media design for the past two years and created an animated short film for children about geography as part of her studies. For over 13 years, she has maintained an extensive portfolio of her creative work, including character designs, and now promotes her work through a website. She is interested in personifying locations to teach about geography and culture in an engaging way for audiences. Her goal after graduating is to migrate to Canada to pursue her animation career and connect more directly with potential Canadian audiences for her works.

1. Sabrina Gardiner UCAS Personal Statement Page 1 of1
I am applying for this course because since early childhood, I have held a passionate interest in designing
my own characters, which can then be used for writing and illustrating stories. Since I first began drawing,
I have always dreamed of seeing my characters come to life on the television or cinema screen for
audiences of all ages to enjoy and learn from. By watching many animated television shows and films, it
has made me endeavour to achieve my ambitions every time.
Over the past two years, I have been studying the Foundation Degree in Digital Media Design at City &
Islington College, in partnership with London Metropolitan University. While I have experimented with
different media platforms during my studies for this degree, the Specialist Practice module granted me
more freedom to pursue animation as my intended career area. For this module, I scripted, animated and
composited a short cartoon aimed at school-age children which teaches them about the geography and
cultures of places around the world. Using Flash to animate the cartoon, I learnt about motion-tweening,
where I positioned a symbol in one frame and re-positioned it in another, then letting Flash calculate the
motion path in between the two frames. As this was the first animation I had scripted (I have created
several unscripted animations using Flash before), I could use motion-tweening to make the characters’
mouths move according to their lines in the script.
For over 13 years, I have built up an extensive portfolio of all my creative work to be archived for the
attention and appreciation of family, friends, potential employers and hirers. Since my physical portfolio
contains many folders filled with piles of drawings and would be very heavy to carry, in December 2014 I
began to design a website to promote me, my professional skills and my artwork. To help my audience to
track the evolution of my art style, I sort my drawings by the year I first created them, creating a
chronological timeline of my creative career. I constantly keep my portfolio up to date with new artworks
and any skills I have acquired by embarking onto new work placements or educational courses.
I am very interested in personifying concepts for educational purposes, with the most prominent area
being in geography, especially countries and cities. By naming my characters after places and giving
them the characteristics of their homelands, I intend to evoke civic pride in my audience, help them to
think of their national identities by relating their travels and experiences to my characters, and celebrate
diversity and inclusivity by creating characters of different ethnic backgrounds, disabilities, religions and
sexualities. A few existing creations similar to those I design are be the web-comic Scandinavia & The
World or the Japanese anime series Hetalia: Axis Powers, which share the same concept of representing
nations as humans whose personalities are inspired by certain aspects of their homelands. However, I
take the idea of humanised locations one step further by personifying cities in addition to countries.
When I graduate, I am looking to migrate to Canada, which has been a personal goal of mine for the past
five years. At the moment, I concentrate my creations firmly on that country, but the fact that I live in
England causes alienation to those who I explain the concept to. Producing this series in Canada would
open a new market for my animation and illustration career, and help the Canadian audience identify
more with the characters in the series as it is set geographically near to them.