Sometimes it’s difficult to take time out of an already busy schedule to work on something you love. You might not be able to take days off work, or have an entire evening taken up with travelling as well as learning in order to pursue your dream career.

Some of you may, or may not, know that V-ray is currently celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary. So, to mark the occasion, what could they be doing? Are they throwing a week long wild party? A massive shopping spree for all employees? Or maybe a month's extra holiday time to all...

It’s always interesting to see how different studios rank, whether it’s in regards to gaming, films or television. On Wednesday, Develop Online released its top 100 best studios, which, let’s be honest is always good to have a nose at. This time, however, what made it more interesting for us is the fact that two escapees have gone on to work for the number one voted UK game’s developer, Traveller’s Tales!

If we are watching a live action film with actors, it’s very rare that one of the main character features we concentrate on is the hair. Occasionally a judgemental comment of whether it looks good or not is thrown out there but that’s the extent of it. The average viewer will fail to notice if the colour looks wrong in one of the scenes or that it doesn’t look realistic enough.

We feel there’s just not enough webinars on compositing at the moment, so we’ve arranged for one of our compositing escapees to resolve this. Alexander Swann, currently Paint and Roto Artist at Framestore, is joining us for a webinar exclusive on August 29^th for all the comp fans among you.

Last night we fought off the threat of rain, heated up the barbies and started cooking for our Assimilate, HP and Escape Studios BBQ in the Shepherd’s Bar and we are so proud that it was a huge success! A big thank you to everyone who made the journey down to Shepherd’s Bush for this very special event.

For those of us who like to indulge in a little bit of Pixar, whether it’s to appreciate the animation or just because you love a 'feel good' film, we all tend to have our favourites. My top 5 Pixar films (in no particular order) consist of Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 (Ken is just hilarious the entire way through), Up and Wall-E.

As shown in this real time tech demo by Epic Games Unreal Engine 4, there are a host of improvements coming to the next generation of console and PC games. These are notably, real time dynamic lighting and particle effects as well as massive improvements to the UDK itself, enabling developers to leverage all these improvements much easier and faster. Then, just to show off Square-Enix, creaters of the hugely popular Final Fanstasy series, go and show what their latest real time tech is made of, and that really is impressive.

I have already aired my excitement over the new Batman film The Dark Knight Rises in yesterday's blog. However, after searching through more of the summer "must see" films on IGN I came across another film I am excited to see; Ted.

Whilst scrolling through the IGN website I stumbled across a page that I wanted to share with you all, even if it is just a check list! IGN has released their list of top summer movies for 2012 and, although many of them have been released (and you can cross them off on your check list), there are still plenty of brilliant CG films being released over the upcoming months.