Or wanted to be able to say, ‘I did that’, when watching a film and seeing a huge, breath taking explosion? Then maybe you should start to think about pursuing a career in Visual Effects. At Escape Studios, we want to make those first steps into the industry as easy as possible whilst providing you with the tools to succeed. Our Visual Effects Production course will not only give you the skills to progress in the exciting world of Film Visual Effects, but will also show you how to make an impressive show reel (which results in many of our students securing jobs once they have finished.)

For the past three years, we have held a ‘CG Whiz’ competition, and one of the winners from last year just recently claimed part of his award by beginning a 12 week VFX course here at Escape Studios. We wanted to offer a little insight into what this opportunity means for Daniel, but, before we jump in, here’s a low down on the competition itself.

With just one more week to go we thought we'd give you another reminder about the webinar taking place next week with our wise Head of 3D, Mark Spevick.

There is a lot of nonsense out there on the internet, and often the line between fact and fiction is a blurred one. For the VFX industry however, the net provides a sturdy back catalogue of fact based webinars, tutorials and breakdowns, with many of the key players in the business regularly exhibiting online what they do. The internet is truly a tool that when utilised, can inspire and educate.

It’s fair to say that the world of VFX is a bit like a tardis, a tardis that escapee Allyn Lawson knows all about.

Mark Spevick, Visual Effects extraordinaire and current Head of 3D at Escape Studios will be hosting a webinar on 25^th July from 5.30pm to 6.30pm online.

On Tuesday, a lucky few of us got to go on a trip that ventured outside of the confines of the Shepherds West building. Drinking more coffee than one body ever needs, we went to do some film and games grade motion capture at the impressive facility at E.Motion.

Some of you may already know, but once a month we like to post a free tutorial on our website. We started creating these so that you could pick up new tips & tricks, tighten up the skills you already have or add a new technique to your toolkit.

I recently went to see the Lucian Freud Portraits exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Wow! Intense, raw paintings that reflected his relationship to his sitters. I actually quite liked his early portraits that were very flat in dimension and lacking perspective in a stylised way. He painted the eyes of the faces quite large and dominant in the frame.  But in most cases looking away, or 'blankly' towards the painter. This created for me a disturbing yet intriguing relationship between the viewer of the painting, me, and the personality of the person he is trying to portray. When we look at portraits or a picture of a person, we tend to look at the eyes first to connect in some way. Not being able to do that created a whole new approach of portraiture that I do not see often. Their eyes were wide, but not allowing a connection. The faces were rarely smiling and this one is a great example.

There are a lot of people in the CG industry who have an interest in the "wizardry" of coding: from automating repetitive tasks via scripts, to pushing the boundaries of the software packages through the API layer, to smoothing out company pipelines by hooking up software that did not originally understand the other software's lingo.