If a movie is a massive studio blockbuster, then the Prime Focus World visual effects team have most likely had some involvement in its making. Prime Focus was responsible for creating the stunning effects for titles such as Men in Black 3, Dredd 3D, Mirror Mirror and Total Recall…to name just a few! And of course, every new VFX project comes with its own challenges. Len Wiseman’s remake of Total Recall was one such project that allowed the team to flex their creative and technical muscle.

The other night I had a quiet evening at home and decided to have a flick through the documentary section of iTunes and see what was new.

Taking the leap from Storyboard Artist to Compositor is no easy feat at the best of time. Well what if I was to tell you that recent escapee, Carlos de la Sotilla, managed it in less than 2 years.

Our visual effects and compositing students have gone on to work on some pretty awesome projects over the years. These include the many studio blockbusters that light up cinema screens around the world. Seeing escapee names in the rolling credits at the end of such films never fails to give us that warm fuzzy feeling of pride – proud to see they have achieved the goal they had when we first met them on our courses. And this was very much the case when some of the Escape team went to an exclusive screening of Snow White and The Huntsman at Framestore a few months ago.

Thinkbox Software will be in London on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September and will be working alongside Escape Studios to organise meetings and demos of their product line up.

“Big things have small beginnings”, was an idea acknowledged in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, released earlier this year. And for us, this statement couldn’t be more true. Taking the art of visual effects as a prime example, the spectacular CG you see on screens today was born from the most basic of concepts, and the people who created those effects invested significant time and energy to become the talented artists they are today. Every creative talent has to start out somewhere, and with the right levels of care and determination, it can evolve into something magnificent.

We announced back in May that the Chaos Group in association with CG Society, NVidia, MAXON and BOXX would be running the “Decisive Moment” competition. The challenge was to create a single image, using any application and V-Ray to render, that tells a decisive moment in time.

A film currently bringing an interesting element of humour to cinema screens in Ireland has been described as the heir to the “Shaun of the Dead” throne. This statement may not be far wrong. I won’t lie to you, the plot is a tad mental, but in that great tongue-in-cheek way that makes it the kind of film that will surely cheer you up at the end of a tough week. The film in question is Jon Wright’s Grabbers, and it’s one I hope you’ll all get a chance to see.

When television orignally began, there was only a handful of black and white channels, horse and carriages wandered down our cobbled streets, and people didn't need the internet because they were too busy feeding their clothes through mangles in caves, or something! The first type of TV shows were comedies, and variety shows, and over time, they evolved into dramas, then slowly into the level of award-winning quality we see today. The internet is following a similar pattern; where as video sites originally appeared so we could swap videos of people falling over and kittens kittening, the medium is steadily evolving to produce high quality dramatic web shows.

Get ready for bone crushing monsters in mind blowing HD slow motion next week, as on August 12th, the Discovery Channel (US) is set to broadcast the 25th season of ‘Shark Week’. The resounding success of this series speaking for itself as it celebrates its quarter century anniversary.