Creative Industries: Associate Degree of Creative Industries

What You Will Learn

The Associate Degree of Creative Industries allows you to combine your skills across various media and creative technologies, preparing you for a diverse career pathway. The program brings together a variety of units across SAE's academic departments in film, music, audio, animation, design, virtual reality, augmented reality, or games development.

Alongside specialist creative skills in multiple disciplines, you will craft your communication, project management, and entrepreneurial abilities. You will investigate audio-visual content creation and manipulation, and craft immersive audience experiences, learning to think innovatively, creatively, and technically within a complex industry ecosystem.

With an Associate Degree of Creative Industries, you'll be ready for cutting-edge industry roles using modern creative business concepts and strategies. Career options include a multidisciplinary content producer, event producer, arts administrator, or creative project manager. In this course, students have the opportunity to cross-collaborate with students from all disciplines.

Complete your course faster by studying the 14 units in as little as 15 months. (4 trimesters).

• Core Units
  • Stage 1: Foundations
    • Develop the essential technical skills and the knowledge required to collaborate with other creative media students and professionals.
    • Credit points: 10 The skills and knowledge that you will acquire in this unit will assist you in understanding and developing the core communication skills used by entrepreneurs and practitioners across the creative industries.
    • Credit points: 10 This unit builds on project design elements introduced in the first trimester and focuses on core principles in project management. In this unit, you will act as project manager for your work or collaborate with others to develop robust systems and processes for projects. Through these practical projects, you will understand basic project management concepts allowing you to plan, initiate and execute ideas effectively. To complement these concepts you will be introduced to core principles of ownership, copyright, and Intellectual Property (IP) as related to the Creative Industries, and how you can use marketing concepts involving storytelling & branding to connect ideas with audiences.
    • Credit points: 10 This unit explores the concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation and project design. You will develop approaches to identify promising opportunities and actionable strategies to transform them into tangible successes. Through exposure to developing new ideas, processes and ways of working - both individually and in entrepreneurial teams - you will hone skills to put creative ideas into practice and achieve real-world impact. As Alan Kay explained, "The best way to predict the future is to create it", so let's get at it!
• Stage 2: Refine & Expand
  • Broaden your scope to work on complex multidisciplinary projects in accordance with industry standard practices.
  • Credits points: 10 In this unit, you will collaborate on interdisciplinary projects that blend creativity and technology across fields such as film, audio, music, gaming, design, and computer science. Through project-based learning, you'll explore how different disciplines contribute to innovative outcomes-like immersive installations or interactive experiences. The unit focuses on strengthening communication, problem-solving, and teamwork across creative and technical areas. You'll be challenged to apply your existing skills while embracing new perspectives and ways of working, developing a holistic understanding of contemporary media production and preparing you to deliver complex, boundary-pushing creative solutions.
  • Credit points: 10 Throughout this unit, you will investigate relevant emerging technology such as NoCode, Augmented and Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning as they relate to your creative practice. You will have an opportunity to explore topics such as digital literacy, AR/VR, mobile delivery, digital folios, e-commerce, social media, and digital teams. You will also experience discipline-relevant emerging technologies, including audio and video based applications, locative media, visual and open-source programming principles, and AI-driven multimedia - depending on your interests and chosen creative media specialism.
  • Credit points: 10 Creatives have always contributed to real-world problem solving, whether through innovative inventions, creative calls for action, public awareness building, or art and science collaborations. In this unit you will use your interdisciplinary collaboration skills to address a real-world problem. Using different theoretical frameworks within a 'hackathon' style studio environment you will produce a prototype that can be presented within SAE, as well as to external stakeholders.