A few weeks back, CWJobs spoke to our Recruitment Manager, Garreth Gaydon about the best way of getting a job in the VFX industry when you're first starting out. The feature which you can read in full here discusses the high demand for jobs in the VFX industry and the kinds of first jobs that will enable you to get your foot in the door and make it as a VFX artist. It’s a tricky industry to enter because it is both highly creative yet technically very demanding which requires a serious amount of skill and creative ability.
An Interesting Google Chrome Experiment With WebGL
The Ro.me site created in association with Google is doing the rounds at Escape Studios at the moment. In fact, you might even have read the story that Miles posted a few days ago.
Escapee Showcase: Roger Serrabassa Vilar
We're very proud of the work we do here at Escape Studios but we probably don't show enough of our students' work. Over the coming months we're going to be featuring much more student work on our website but in the meantime I wanted to start showing some of the reels from our most recent graduates.
Industry Coaching Diary of Compositing Escapee Clement Roland
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!
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.
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.
Motion Capture For the Masses
Here is an amazing use of Xbox Kinect or PlayStation EyeToy: desktop motion capture!
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?
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.
Our Friends at The Mill take part in Fireflies Charity Cycle Race
It's almost time for the Lions Advertising Festival in Cannes and production companies and agencies alike will soon flock to this beautiful town in the south of France to network and talk about the work they have been doing during the previous year. It's also a great excuse for three days out of the office drinking wine in the sun.
Were You Fooled by CG?
Cadbury is getting a bit of a rep for ads that really catch the eye. First there was the gorilla playing along to Phil Collins; now its dancing clothes ad has left many of us wondering how it was made.
Industry Coaching – Escapee Alexander Kubinyi Shares His Experience
A while back we told you all about our new ‘Industry Coaching’ scheme which some of our classroom students are fortunate to be part of. For those of you who don’t know, this basically means that some of the major post houses act as mentors for our students throughout the 12 or 18 weeks of classroom study that they embark on when they study with us in London. This means that they get professional feedback and expert industry advice relevant to the field they are going to work in. It’s no surprise to hear that our students are absolutely delighted with it. All of them are they working extra hard to impress but more importantly, they are getting front-line expertise. We caught up with escapee Alexander Kubinyi who told us what the experience was like in his own words.
Good God - Escapees Are Winners!
A while back we featured a blog post about our escapees working on a short film called God View for the East End Film Festival. We are delighted to say that the film picked up best short film in the UK and so massive congratulations to Billy Lumley and all of the escapees that worked on it.
Autodesk Maya 2012 Hot Fix 1
All Maya 2012 users will be pleased to hear that Autodesk have just released their Maya 2012 Hotfix 1.
The BBC Visits Escape Studios
We were absolutely delighted when Iain Mackenzie of the BBC chose to come to Escape Studios to chat to Lee Dankin and Mark Cass about the state of the UK Visual industry, which is currently booming.
