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.

If you haven't been able to make it out to SIGGRAPH this week, I will be keeping you up to date with all the news and information that you need. And if that isn’t enough our friends at NVidia will be streaming most of their booth presentations live from booth #634 & #735.

The art of filmmaking has come a long way over the last 100 years. The technology we use today to create breath-taking scenes continues to push the boundaries of high-definition and realism, but we should never forget the genius of film crews who didn’t have the opportunity to ‘fix it in post’ or rely on computer graphics to set the scene. As lots of you know, some of the best moments in film history were created by filmmakers having to think on their feet, making the best of an impossible situation. And of course there are certain skills that were essential to the filmmaking process back then that will start to be forgotten due to the rise in post-production capabilities and accessibility.

It has been announced this week that MAXON will be releasing CINEMA 4D R14 in September this year. MAXON have almost 20 years of programming innovation under their belts and CINEMA 4D is one of the best known and most successful 3D motion graphics, painting and rendering software applications around.

Peter Jackson, reknowned director for the massively popular Lord of the Rings trilogy took to Facebook earlier this week to announce that his latest creation The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will now be a trilogy of films.

Following on from my previous blog about The Dark Knight Rises, I thought you would all be interested to see what IGN claim are Batman’s Greatest Movie Moments. They span across all Batman films and, although there will be some obvious choices thrown in there, a couple will probably shock you.

Last week I accompanied the current Compositing class on a trip to the MPC studio in London. It's all part of the industry mentoring scheme we're encouraging at Escape, as we work to prepare our students for the working world. With aspirations for one day working in the industry, we feel it's really important for all our students to get a taste for what is expected from them as early as possible in their training. Irene Bonilla was one student who joined us that day, and here's what she had to say about it...

It has been brought to our attention that Visual Effects facility Union VFX have recently collaborated with award winning director Danny Boyle on a couple of projects.

We are pleased to share you that The Pixel Farm products PFTrack and PFMatchit are now available on the Escape Studios Technology Store.