The legend that created the lab process of travelling mattes, (that’s blue/green screens to the rest of us) sadly passed away last week, at the grand age of 96.

Something different for your viewing pleasure – ingenious Polish artist Marta Klonowska  creates these amazing sculptures from glass, ever seen anything like it? I want one!

We’re fans of art all across the spectrum here at Escape, and these sculptures, created by Chinese artist Li Hongbo are rather mind boggling.

What appears upon first viewing, to be a set or porcelain sculpted heads, are actually a set of heads that are crafted out of thousands of layers of soft white paper,

A form that was originally used to make Chinese toys and decorations – book editor and designer Li Hongbo, became intrigued by their form and took the medium to another level. Check out this site for videos and snaps!

Bored of drawing with pencils? Try using them for sculptures, as Montana born artist, Jessica Drenk does.

Just when you thought Hollywood couldn’t create VFX on a larger scale than Cloverfield or Transformers, this trailer is released, for ‘Pacific Rim’, and it really takes the biscuit!

Directed by the world renowned Guillermo del Toro, this is a tale of wait for it, giant robots made by humans, fighting giant monsters that have arrived through a time portal at the bottom of the sea - Sounds crazy right? Check out this trailer and if you plan to go to see this at the cinema, be sure to prepare yourself for some bone crushingly epic VFX sequences.  

Forget microscopic hyper intelligent computer chips. modern technology? I laugh in the face of modern technology (for a moment anyway) - you will too after watching some of these mechanical toys from yesteryear, they are simply amazing

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory have introduced a new beast into the world of supercomputing. And as this new release is ten times more powerful than their previous world-leading system, this beast has been aptly named, Titan!

Very recently I came across a really cool web based app to create media applications for online. And it’s the kind of thing I felt needed to be shared with you all.

High end graphics company ISOTROPIX released a new product last month called Clarisse iFX, a piece of software which it claims, bridges the gap between 2D and 3D in production.

Disney have just released the first images of a novel 3D printing technology that they are developing.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the 'K' of DreamWorks Animation SKG, is to be given an honorary Oscar at the Governors awards ceremony this November.

Welcome back to part two of our series on effects that you thought were CG.

Special effects with computer graphics are all the rage recently. There are very few films produced these days without jaw dropping stunts courtesy of the digital department. But a lot of directors still prefer to shoot the real thing if they can as it nearly always looks better than the CG equivalent.

Yesterday Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of the children’s classic book Where The Wild Things Are, died. Famous through his writing and illustrating, Sendak published a number of children’s books, wrote and designed three animated stories and his final book “Bumble Ardy” was an adaption of a collaboration between Sendak and Jim Henson from kid’s TV favourite Sesame Street.

Have you ever wondered what would’ve happened if the script for Jaws was developed by Disney execs rather than Universal Pictures? Well, wonder no longer. For your entertainment on this rather gloomy Monday afternoon, I wanted to share this hilarious concept with you all. Found on YouTube earlier, take a look at a Disney’fied trailer of the 1975 classic. Spielberg possibly missed out on a golden opportunity here for a PG remake.

This is a very interesting installation commissioned by the luxury Swiss watch manufacturer Audemars Piguet for their 40th anniversary, created by the British based artist, Quayola.

Thanks to everyone who tuned onto our Houdini webinar today, what a great turnout! Seems that everyone found it really helpful especially as Houdini is such a hot topic at the moment. We didn’t have time to get around to all of your questions, so if there’s still something that you’d like to ask, don’t hesitate, just reply to this post and I’ll get back to you with as much information as possible. We’re also going to be posting a recording of the webinar on our website soon so make sure you keep your eyes peeled for that. This is exactly the kind of stuff that we announce in our monthly newsletters so make sure you’re signed up to it.

I promised to keep you posted on how we're changing our curriculum to include Houdini in some of our courses, and that’s the subject of this post.

Have I got a treat in store for you today!... It has caused a real stir among us tutors at Escape Studios, and we could talk of nothing else yesterday morning.

I have been developing a new course here at Escape called VFX Animation Professional.

I stumbled upon a really good site the other day which sent me on a trip down memory lane. The site is called "Scanimate Central" and is basically a resource for anyone to read about how animations used to be made.

If you want to replicate the complexity of real world objects, you need to create materials that mimic them and this month's free tutorial will show you exactly how to do that. A car body is made up of lots of materials or layers, like metal and paint. If you want to create a rusty car you'll need more materials to create the common signs of deterioration. Many Maya users will be familiar with the 'layered shader' and 'layered texture' nodes. This tutorial asks what happens if you are using the MIA material and rendering in Mental Ray.

How would you go about having fun making electronic circuits? How about by combining it with play dough?...

Redgiant - makers of the famous Magic Bullet software - are giving away a free plugin called Colorista. The plugin is a simple and elegant colour correcting plugin for AfterEffects, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.

Great news in from Pinewood: they are opening a new facility in the Dominican Republic.

EditShare has released the free public beta of the Lightworks non-linear video-editing software.

One of the biggest challenges facing TD's is moving data from one system to another. For example, getting the nice particle animation that you have done in Houdini into Maya for rendering.