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Super Bowl approaches – do you have your snacks at the ready? Have you chosen your team? More importantly, have you set your DVR to record the commercials? 

This week’s mashup consists of some Super Bowl sneak peeks – we have a “Twilight”-like tailgating party for Audi courtesy of The Mill, takes 2 and 3 for VW and the “Star Wars” enterprise involving Man’s Best Friend, a couple of car spots steeped in fantasy complete with bikini-clad extras, the Coca-Cola polar bears (Giants v. Patriots) up their game and “The Avengers” trailer.

I remember when you actually had to wait for Game Day to see the spots! 

This year’s previews are kind of light on VFX  - I suspect everyone’s still rendering. 

Let us know which ones you liked – and we hope your team wins!

As Oscar fever is mounting up, there were lots of stories related to awards last week - no surprise there. But there were also lots of goodies such as a very cool video from TedTalk, an interview with the VFX Supervisor on Hugo and much more. Here's my take on last week...

We're over half way through with our first set of course offerings in VFX and Compositing and it has been an exciting ride. We'll be offering both of our 12 week daily courses again in 2012. We've set up our spring, summer and fall start dates for our Visual Effects Production and Compositing for Production courses so you can start your planning right away.

We caught up with Stu Schwartz once again to see how he’s doing and what is going on in his post CG Whiz life. He shared some interesting tidbits with us about his internship and a typical day at The Mill. Read on to see what he had to say:

Hello again!  It’s mashup time! This week’s goodies include some nice spots from our Advisory Board members over at Psyop, some behind-the-scenes with Fincher, a history of Lucas’ latest (well, it turns out, not-so-latest, just lately completed), a great “rise from the ashes” story, a Keanu Reeves documentary of analog v. digital filmmaking, a great interview with Terry Gilliam, Wes Anderson’s newest trailer, a look at the year in VFX and a reel breakdown for “Hugo”. Did we miss anything? As always, we welcome your feedback and comments.

Our first set of students just hit the mid-way mark of their courses so we decided it was high time we subjected them to a long-standing Escape Studios tradition, that consists of capturing their photos before they start pulling their hair out coming to grips with the more complicated side of the VFX pipeline.

Here is a mashup of news for this week – there’s a cry for old school technology, a list of tips for you to be better prepared for dailies, a couple of reports from CES, a fun commercial for Mini Coopers based on a fan suggestion, a great trailer from Blur, and a rendition of a Dr Seuss story as told by those who attended Burning Man last year.

What’d I miss?

Here's my take on last week's news and announcements. Among the items I picked up, there's the call for submissions for SIGGRAPH. if you are planning to submit your work, you'd better hurry, as the deadline is tomorrow.

The Academy met last night to cull the list of films in the running for a Visual Effects Oscar nomination to a mere ten. The list is below, in alphabetical order.

Escape’s animation tutor, Alex Williams takes us further into the exploration of the mechanics of bird locomotion. In the second session of this two-part tutorial, Alex further breaks down the apparently complex motion of animating a bird in flight into simple parts. He provides the pieces of the puzzle needed to: