A+C Community Report 2026

At A+C Studios, we make films for brands all over the world, but we make them in Margate, and that matters to us. Our home by the sea has given us a building, a crew and a lot of good neighbours, so every so often it’s worth stopping to take stock of what we’re giving back.

This is our first community report: a round-up of what the studio has been up to in 2026 beyond the day job, from coffee and cake for Macmillan to helping shape a brand-new animation qualification for young people in Thanet, plus what we’d like to do next year.

Coffee, cake and £262 for Macmillan

Macmillan Coffee Morning is Macmillan Cancer Support’s biggest fundraiser of the year. It started in 1990 with a simple idea, that people would meet for a coffee and donate the price of their drink, and it now takes place on the last Friday of September in offices, schools, village halls and front rooms right across the country. The money raised goes towards practical, emotional and financial support for the millions of people in the UK living with cancer.

This year we joined in on the day itself, Friday 25 September, and opened up the studio for coffee, cake and a catch-up. We set ourselves a target of £250 and, thanks to everyone who came along, baked, bought a slice or simply dropped some coins in the tin, we raised £262, beating our goal. It’s a modest number next to some of the big corporate totals, but it was raised one cup of coffee at a time by people who know each other, which is exactly the point of a coffee morning.

Our display at Margate station

For a lot of people, the station is their first glimpse of Margate. Day-trippers off the train from London, families heading for the beach and Dreamland, and plenty of locals on their daily commute all pass through it, and the booking hall has a long tradition of showing off the town’s creative side, from local artists’ exhibitions to models and murals.

A+C joined that tradition with our own display box in the station. Inside, passengers can get a close look at puppets, sets, and props from recent films, the kind of handmade detail that usually only our crew get to see up close.

We love the idea that the first thing some visitors see of Margate is a little bit of handmade animation, and that people who live here can see that films watched around the world are being built a few streets away. Plenty of people don’t realise there’s a stop-motion studio in town, and we hope the display sparks a few conversations, and maybe the odd career, along the way.

Building a talent pipeline with EKC Group

The thing we’re proudest of this year is our partnership with East Kent Colleges Group (EKC Group). A+C started life in 2007 in Dan’s dad’s shed, and we’ve always believed you shouldn’t have to leave the coast to build a career in animation. This partnership is our chance to help make that true for the next generation.

A new course, written with the industry

We’ve worked closely with EKC on the new EKC Broadstairs College Margate Digital Campus, which has taken over the old M&S building on Margate High Street. The campus was officially launched in June, with industry-standard facilities including Kent’s second-largest motion capture suite. It already has 92 students with plans to grow to around 200 by its third year.

As part of that, Dan Richards, founder of A+C Studios, co-wrote the campus’s new Animation and Illustration qualification, helping shape a curriculum that covers everything from character and logo design to many different kinds of animation. As Dan put it when the course was announced, it’s the course he would have loved to jump on at 16. For our Senior Producer Ollie Perrin, the real win is local: it means students can build a creative career while staying in Kent, close to their friends and family.

Into the studio

The partnership goes beyond the classroom. Seeing how a real studio works is one of the most valuable things a student can do, so we open our doors to EKC students at our two Margate sites, The Old Laundry and Postgate Stage, and offer work placements alongside the course. 

We hire locally too. Jay, a digital artist on our team, studied at what was then East Kent College before joining A+C with a portfolio of his own animation. We’d love the Margate Digital Campus to produce many more stories like his.

Sharing what we know: Crash Festival, UK Creative Festival, and CMC

Part of being a good neighbour in the industry is turning up and talking honestly about how the work gets made. This year we took the studio on the road to three very different events: two on our doorstep, aimed at the next generation, and one for the whole children’s media industry.

Crash Festival, Canterbury

In August, Beth and Dan spoke together at Crash Festival at the Malthouse in Canterbury, talking about A+C and the stop-motion work coming out of the studio. Now in its second year, Crash runs two days of talks, panels and masterclasses across animation, VFX, games, comics and design, and it’s built for people aged 14 to 25 who are starting out in the creative industries. After a sold-out first year in Ashford, this year we shared a line-up with the likes of Framestore, ILM and Golden Wolf.

What stayed with us most was the audience. It was a genuinely lovely crowd, and the questions were brilliant. Kent holds far more animation talent than most people realise, and Crash does the rare thing of getting it all into one room to celebrate it. For a studio that hires locally, that matters: some of the people in that room could be on our crew in a few years’ time.

Bethany Abbott, Executive Producer at A+C Studios: “Crash Festival was a wonderful event to be a part of. Kent is full of amazing creative talent and we don’t get enough opportunity to speak to our local community, network with other local creatives and celebrate everyone’s achievements.”  

UK Creative Festival, Margate

In July the UK creative industry came to our hometown for the sixth UK Creative Festival, two days of talks, workshops and networking at Dreamland and around Margate under the theme “Don’t get comfortable… the future belongs to the creatively fearless”. The festival also hosts the Creative Circle Awards and runs the Creative Careers Fair, a free event for young people that welcomed more than 800 aspiring creatives this year.

Dan joined Emma Jones, Lorraine Cox, Rory Sutherland and Louise Brooks for a lively panel on how creativity can transform places, communities and industries. It’s a subject close to our hearts. Margate is proof of what creative businesses can do for a town, and we’re proud to be one of them, from the films we make here to the people we train and hire locally.

Dan has been part of the festival since the very beginning, appearing on the speaker line-up for its first edition in 2021, and it’s been brilliant to watch it grow into one of the biggest dates in the UK creative calendar. Thank you to founder Dina Green and the UKCF team for having us again.

Dan, Founder of A+C Studios: “The UK Creative Festival took over Margate, and it reminded me exactly why we built the studio here. The festival brought the very best of the UK creative industry right down to the coast.”

The Children’s Media Conference, Sheffield

CMC is the UK’s leading event for the children’s media industry, bringing more than 1,200 people together in Sheffield each July. This year’s edition ran from 7 to 9 July under the theme “Find the Funding, Find the Audience”.

On 9 July, our Executive Producer Beth Abbott spoke on the panel Translating Characters into Playworlds and Toys, alongside Ed Barton of Moonbug and Lea Magnano of Peppy Agency, hosted by Sev Marcel of We Are Family. The session looked at how characters from hit shows find new audiences in games and on the toy aisle: how a catchphrase becomes a play pattern, and how the spark of a real-world presenter carries into an avatar or a toy. Beth brought the stop-motion view, drawing on A+C’s work adapting established IP into toymation, YouTube series and social-first content. Thank you to producer Julie Sondergaard and executive producer Tessa Moore for putting the session together.

It’s a conversation that matters to us, because we believe children across the UK deserve quality, handmade content made with them in mind, and finding new ways for characters to reach them is a big part of making that content sustainable.

Next year CMC moves to London, running alongside The London Book Fair at ExCeL in March 2027, and we hope to be part of it.

Beth, EP at A+C Studios: “It was great to speak at CMC this year and an honour to bring the opinions and expertise from our Margate studio to a global network of Kids & Family industry experts”

Looking ahead to 2027

We’d like to do more next year, and a few plans are already taking shape:

• A beach clean. Margate’s beach is one of the reasons we love being here, so we’d like to get the team out with bin bags and litter pickers to look after it.
• A teacher training day. Stop-motion is a brilliant way into storytelling, maths, science and teamwork, and you don’t need much kit to get started. We’d like to host a day for local teachers to learn the basics and take them back to the classroom.
• Another Macmillan event. After this year’s coffee morning beat its target, we’d love to go bigger.

We’ll share dates as they’re confirmed.

Get involved

If you’re a local school, college, charity or community group and you think we could help, or you’d like to join us on the beach next year, we’d love to hear from you. The same goes for any Thanet businesses who’d like to team up on the next Macmillan event.