There's all sorts of goodies in this week's edition of my News Round Up: we have free sofware from DAZ3D, some cool VFX breakdowns, the usual Oscar related stories, and lots of lots of news on the state of the UK education system. Hope you enjoy it, and as usual, I welcome your feedback.

When Amy Cuthbertson finished her degree in Music Technology, she didn’t expect to find herself starting a career in CG, but that’s exactly what happened. Wandering around a careers fair, Amy spotted the Escape Studios stand, got talking about her love of animation and the rest is history, as they say.

The guys at IKinema have an awesome idea in development that is making their award winning animation technology more available to the masses. For those of you who don’t know IKinema, it is a plug-in for Maya that lets you create full-body animations quickly and easily with brilliant realistic results. It is a time saving tool that eliminates the need for characterisation or special rigs as it does the hard work for you, letting you work directly onto a rig. You can combine multiple models into a single animation, retarget from any source to any target, customise or tweak motion capture and animation as well as retarget data inside Maya in real-time.

Not sure how many of you picked up on this story, but a new report on the Global Animation Software market was released last month. The cost of the full report is a little steep at 3,983 Euro, but the press release did have some interesting snippets of information, which I thought I would share with you.

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.

As some of you may know, we recently launched a new course called "Visual Effects Animation Professional". Well, our first group of students from the courses have been handing their projects in and I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase a fantastic piece of work by Hyeon Joon Kang. His work clearly shows how the VFX pipeline works and if we retrace his steps, we can take a closer look at each part of the process. Joon's project is a great illustration of what we teach in this new course and what you can achieve in just 18 weeks with us.

It's been a while since my last News Round-Up... Hopefully, you will all be rested after this holiday season and rearing to go. So, to get you going, I have selected a whole bunch of news items which have been published over the last couple of weeks.

Arthur Christmas is a must for any child wanting to get into the Christmas spirit this year. I know this as both of my children loved it and my test was to see whether or not I actually stay awake!

It's just fun. The CG is not meant to be ground-breaking - it simply is not Tintin - but that really wasn't the point. If you just want to go see a feel good children's movie then there is nothing better. It also has a great cast and some of my personal favourites actors: Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy (who continually makes me smile whatever he appears in or talks over).

Aardman have done a great job and they should be very happy with it, it has their stamp all over it. 

Enjoy!

As Puss in Boots sets Box Office records in the US, we were very keen to watch a special preview screened by Paramount Pictures at the BFI Southbank on Sunday afternoon, to judge if the film lives up to the surrounding hype, and we weren’t disappointed.

Last week we welcomed Simon Jones from SR Partners to Escape Studios London HQ to show our students his recent collaborative work entitled - Resonance.