Some of you may have seen a series posts from students' 'coaching diaries' on our blog recently. For those of you who don't know, some of our students studying our classroom courses are being coached by the industry's biggest post houses; The Mill, Double Negative and Framestore. This week, compositing student Clement Roland shares his experience with us.
Free Tutorial - Demolish a Brick Wall With nCloth In Maya
If you're reading this blog, then chances are you're like most of us here at Escape Studios and love blowing things up and putting them back together again. So this month's free tutorial should be right up your street because we're going to teach you how to demolish a brick wall using nCloth.
Shoot! New footage For Our VFX Course
A few weeks back I took my class to the Natural History Museum so that we could generate some new footage which they could camera track with. It was lots of fun as they not only got to film live-action footage, they knew exactly what they would have to work with when getting back to the classroom. For me, keeping things fresh is important - and so filming new footage for the students to work with is a must. As you can see from the video, we're all pretty excited to be out of the classroom!
Why Are Young People Made to Choose Between Math Or Art?
When I was picking my GCSE's and A levels I had to pick between two routes, Maths or Art. This I believe, is still the case, but I'd like to ask why?!
Games Course Escapee Holly Pickering Gets Job At Travellers Tales
We have got some good news to share today about one of our Games Course escapees. Holly Pickering - who finished our Games Art Course a little while back - will be joining Adam Esat (another escapee) at Travellers Tales working on AAA titles as a Character Modeller.
Do Universities Need To Teach Basic Job Skills?
An announcement by Edge, the education charity, caught my eye this week. It said that universities should now be required to teach employment skills as part of degree courses. According to its latest study, employers now believe too many graduates are unfit for the workplace.
Are You Satisfied with Your Job?
It’s such a great feeling when you attend a packed out event and the people pouring in turn out to be our former students. And that’s exactly what happened a couple nights ago. I attended a PFTrack event organised by our Technology Team, and it was a storming success. The room was packed with over 50 people – all craning their necks to get a better view of the speaker.
Lots of the attendees at the event were escapees who we didn’t just train but placed in their current jobs. It was great to catch up with Jacob Flint who studied our VFX Course last year and so refreshing to hear that he’s just as excited about working at The Mill today, as he was when we first placed him there. That’s a pretty rare thing these days.
Job satisfaction is massively important, and if you are not entirely happy with what you are doing, then I would encourage you to ‘shop around’ and find out what’s out there. Doing so doesn’t have to be that taxing either. If you follow us on twitter or use our RSS feed you’ll be first to hear about new jobs, daily. Because we work with nearly all of the major names in the industry, most of the jobs that are out there come through us.
So, if you’re stuck in a rut, or just fancy a change, we might just have the right thing for you.
New 18-Week Visual Effects Animation Course Launched Today!
The new course announcements are coming thick and fast at the moment, having recently launched our new Compositing Professional course I'm really pleased to announce the launch of our new 18-week Visual Effect Animation Professional course.
New HP Laptop—Worth a Look
We have a new addition to our range of hardware products. It's the HP laptop Envy17, and it is really is worth a look. This laptop offers an expansive canvas that should make most all technology enthusiasts excited.
Motion Capture For the Masses
Here is an amazing use of Xbox Kinect or PlayStation EyeToy: desktop motion capture!
Entry Level Compositing Webinar - Now Live On Our Website
Most of you will remember that I ran a webinar last month called "Entry Level and Junior Roles for Compositors", which focused on what you can expect as a junior compositor in the industry.
Industry Coaching Diary - Compositing Course Escapee Mary Lapena
A few weeks back we told you about our classroom courses being coached by the Industry. One of our students, Alexander Kubinyi, told us about his experience at Double Negative and what it was like to have your reel critiqued by Alex ‘The baron’ Wuttke. This week, we catch up with another escapee who is studying our Compositing Professional Course and is being coached by The Mill. Here’s a snippet from Mary Lapena’s coaching diary.
Is 3D Always The Best Approach?
Here is a question for you: just because we can make somthing in 3D, is it always the best approach?
Lee Danskin Reviews MARI 1.3
Just by being on Linux, MARI has rocked the post industry. All those guys tired of dual-booting, of trying to get Photoshop to work in Wine or some other “in-elegant Linux solution”. Or for those trying to use a laptop hooked up to the network or two machines with a KVM switcher (you know who you are) MARI is like a breath of fresh air! No nasty print type things getting in the way of painting at high bit depths and HDR floating points. Everything works. No nasty greying out of pull downs as it only works in 8 bit situations; geometry size is not an issue either, texture size is 32k square. It’s eats massive data sets elegantly. It’s a Godsend.
Escape Studios Online Mentored Student Spotlight - Ricardo Viana
Current Escape Studios’ VFX Online Mentored student, Ricardo Viana is approaching the end of his course and looking forward to developing his showreel and meeting with our recruitment team. In addition to his coursework, he has a very busy schedule to maintain, but that has not stopped him from pursuing his dream.
Have Some Fun With Squishy Circuits
How would you go about having fun making electronic circuits? How about by combining it with play dough?...
The Core Skills of VFX
Hold Me Clothes
Evgenia Golubeva recently finished our Character Animation course with us and has very quickly landed a commercials job at Partizan Lab in Soho on the strength of her excellent demo reel. She has also recently put together a short film titled "Hold Me Clothes", a stop-motion film written by her and animated in just one day at a recent film festival in Italy.
Mocha Pro Event In London Was A Huge Success
Thanks to everyone that attended out mocha Pro Event in Soho last Tuesday evening.
MARI 1.3 Released
Version 1.3 of MARI, The Foundry's High Texture painting tool, used on award winning films like Avatar has just been released.