Escape Blog

Games tutor Simon Fenton has made his media debut for Escape Studios on the Guardian’s Career Talk podcast. You can hear Simon talk about getting into the industry, his role as a tutor at Escape, his background and much more, alongside Tom Baskaya of Framestore, an Escapee and most recently a compositor on Avatar. Tom also talks about his time at Escape, as well as what it was like working on James Cameron’s masterpiece.

You can have a listen on the Guardian’s site here. Simon and Tom are on from around 06 minutes 55 seconds into the podcast.

We’ve got some exciting news: we’ve hired games industry veteran Tim Flett. Tim will be our new Business Development Manager for Games and Interactive, in charge of growing our professional services, which include training, technical consulting as well as hardware and software solutions.

Tim has spent more than 15 years in games developer and publisher relations. Previously he worked for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, managing third party relations. He was in charge of the development tools and communication team, responsible for the ongoing guidance and support for major developers, publishers and licensees looking to use the PlayStation® platforms. He was also the mastermind behind the hugely successful DevStation™, the PlayStation development conferences.

Tim said “I’m thrilled to be part of such an exciting company. Escape Studios is doing some fantastic things across all parts of its business, and I’m hoping my expertise can help it grow even further.”

Mark Cass, Commercial Director of Escape Studios, said “Tim has a huge amount of knowledge and experience in the games industry, and is a strong addition to the Escape team. Just as we are growing our games courses, so we are looking to improve our reach into the games industry via our burgeoning software and hardware sales division.”

Prior to joining Escape Studios, Tim was Developer Relations Manager for Emergent Game Technologies, managing the EMEA territory sales. We’re really looking forward to seeing all the great work Tim will be doing for us, and hopefully he’ll be blogging about the games industry soon, so keep an eye out.

A few weeks ago we ran a customer satisfaction survey. As part of the survey, we had a prize draw, with the winners bagging a masterclass with our VFX tutor Lee Danskin and the runners up all receiving Amazon vouchers.

We’re pleased to announce that the following three respondents have been drawn as the winners of the masterclass: Ben Nuttall-Smith, Keiron Campbell and Mark Robin. Congratulations to you all!

We’ve also got 20 runners-up, who all receive an Amazon voucher worth £25 (or $40, if you’re into that sort of thing): Kevin Rittenhouse, Jaime Rivera, Dan Nastasa, Marcus Williams, Surapen Yosravikul, Curtis Cooper III, David Godefroy, Carla Gomes, James Pruszkowski, Hugo Guerra, Amanda Carrington, Joe Williamsen, Satoko Kojima, Jason Mullin, Mi Li, Artur Leao, Tom Crate, Luke Caulfield, Jeff Chen and Denise Ebanks.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey – we’ll be posting next week about the results and the insights we’ve drawn from them.

We’ve just made another free tutorial available to you all: Camera Projection in Nuke is a great opportunity for those of you who want a better understanding of Nuke’s 3D environment.

The step by step video tutorial is taken from our online compositing course, Nuke for 3D artists. It explains how pre-built geometry and textures are used to visualise your final project and bring it to life – a necessary skill for anyone who wants to produce convincing 3D work.

To access the tutorial all you need to do is register or login on our website to access our online learning centre. Once inside, select the ‘FREE AREA’ from the drop down menu in the ‘My Courses’ tab.

Would be great to get feedback from you on what you thought of this tutorial, so please post your comments here.

Regular readers of the blog will know that last week we had the awards ceremony of the CG Whiz competition. We managed to grab the three winners and some of the judges, including Steve Venning from The Mill, to film their views on the competition. We think everyone had a great time, and over the next few months we’re hoping to have blog posts from Adam Droy, the overall winner, and runners up Ronan McMeel and Marco Barrato, to see how the competition prizes have helped them break into the CG industry.

Well done to all who entered – we were astounded by the standard of the entries. For all those of you inspired by the entries keep an eye out for next year’s competition, and the chance to win another potentially career transforming prize.

Over the last few months we’ve spent a lot of time meeting various people from the CG world on Twitter, and have been discussing everything from the latest Autodesk upgrades or Softimage updates, to Nick’s doodles and even elephant clocks (this conversation really did happen). After all of this interaction, we thought it was about time that we got to meet some of you face to face, so on Friday we invited three of the more vocal Twitterers to a beer and CG evening at Escape Studios.

Armed with their latest pieces of work, Kevin Richter (@KevinRichter), Alex Amelines (@onehugeeye) and Charlotte Wills (@TimelordTotty) arrived at the studios for a quick tour followed by some one on one time with our tutors.  A bit of face time with a Pixar veteran is always a bonus, so we sat the guys down to show their work off to Jeff Pratt, followed by some quality advice from Nick Savy (Batman Begins), and finished with advice from Maya Master Lee Danskin.

We’ll feature some of the work shown later on this week, but it was great to see the level of quality being produced. Once we’d finished with the question time section, we all headed off to the bar for some food, beer and CG banter. A great way to finish the evening.

A big thanks to Alex, Kevin and Charlotte for coming to see us, and we hope they had as much fun as we did.  Take a look at their sites:

www.onehugeeye.com Alex’s superb character animation news and review site. Drop over and see what you think

www.kevinrichter.com Kevin’s personal portfolio. Kevin’s new book looks impressive

www.charlottes-animated-web.co.uk Charlottes personal portfolio. Some good work here, so take your time and browse around

We’d love to run another event like this sometime soon, so let us know if you’d be interested in coming along.

Nick Savy, our character tutor, has done us another fantastic sketch.

Think you can do better? Show us, and we might even put your sketch on the blog.

Congratulations to all the finalists of our CG Whiz competition. We had a great time at the Reveal Event last night, meeting the future stars of the CG industry. As we’ve said before, we were overwhelmed by the sheer number and quality of the entries we’ve received.

It’s clear that there’s a lot of talent out there, but there could only be one winner – Adam Droy (spikeycactus)!

Adam excelled across the board. His showreel highlighted his creative flair whilst demonstrating a sound understanding of the techniques involved. We’re very much looking forward to Adam studying with us at Escape next year, and wish him the best of luck during his work placement at The Mill.

The two runners up should also be commended, having fought off stiff competition from over 130 entrants.

Ronan McMeel’s (MrMeel) showreel earned him the runners up position, impressing the judges with his creativity and incorporating a storyline throughout his work.

Marco Baratto (smileandwave1987) also wowed the judges with a technically sound showreel – inspired by the “HP Hand” commercial.

Ronan and Marco – we hope you enjoy Escape Studios’ online courses and exclusive tour of The Mill.

For those of you that missed out this year, or didn’t get around to entering, don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for information on next year’s competition. You’ll hear about it here first.

Here at Escape Studios, we pride ourselves on our close links with the industry. One of the ways we maintain these links is by having tutors who have done the jobs they teach. This means that our tutors are some of the best CGers in the business, and they’re an incredibly creative bunch.

One of these creative geniuses is Nick Savy, our Characters Course and Creatures Course tutor. Nick’s turned his hand to almost every part of the industry, from video games (working for the likes of Sega) to tv and film, where his work includes time spent on Batman Begins, Doom and the first Harry Potter. With this repertoire it’s no surprise that Nick is always creating, whether it’s in the classrooms with students or doodling in meetings. We think his sketches are pretty impressive, so we thought we’d share them with you (when he lets us). Who knows, maybe they’ll inspire some of you to share with us some of your sketches?

Let us know what you think, and if you’re inspired, show us what you’ve done.