Lagos-based SMIDS Animation Studios has opened registration for the 10th edition of its Animation Summer Camp, a milestone that arrives less than a year after the studio itself celebrated 15 years of building African animation content for children and families.
Running from 27 July to 7 August 2026, the two-week programme will host children aged 8 to 13 for daily sessions between 10am and 1pm, Monday to Friday. Campers will move through five core disciplines: art and digital illustration, character design, 2D animation, stop motion animation, and visual storytelling, each delivered by working industry professionals rather than generalist camp instructors.
The camp will run across two venues this year. The mainland edition will be held at SMIDS’ production base at 4A Adesoye Street, Mende, Maryland, while an Island venue is yet to be announced. Fees have been set at ₦400,000 per child, with a 10th anniversary discount bringing the mainland fee down to ₦200,000 and the Island fee to ₦300,000, a gesture that positions the anniversary as a moment to widen access rather than simply mark time.
For a studio that has spent the past decade and a half fusing traditional storytelling with contemporary animation technique, the camp functions as something closer to a pipeline than a holiday activity. SMIDS, founded in 2010 by Damilola Solesi, has grown from a small Lagos outfit into one of the continent’s most decorated animation houses, distinguished by Ernst & Young’s 2019 industry report as one of the top two animation studios in Nigeria and the first Nigerian studio selected as a finalist at Annecy’s Animation du Monde, the largest animation festival in the world. Its short film HADU has since collected eight Best Animation awards across festivals including FESPACO, AFRIFF, and LIFANIMA.
Industry training pipelines of this kind remain scarce on the continent, where most young people encounter animation as finished content rather than as a set of learnable crafts. A camp that puts children directly in front of character designers and 2D animators, inside a working studio, does more than fill a school holiday; it plants the earliest seed of a pathway that Nigeria’s creative economy still struggles to formalise at scale.
Registration is open via SMIDS’ official form, with the studio noting that spaces are limited.
TheACE will continue to track training and capacity-building initiatives across Africa’s animation and comics ecosystem as part of its ongoing coverage of the continent’s creative infrastructure.
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