Last weekend I stumbled across an album cover with the VES (Visual Effects Society) logo on it. For those of you who don’t know, the current logo for the VES is the iconic image of the moon from the film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), a 16 minute black and white silent film from 1902. It was a revolutionary film for its time, being not only the first sci-fi but also using special effects that were very high tech at the turn of the century. Though the film was distributed predominately in black and white there was also a hand-coloured version that was thought to be lost for quite some time until the only surviving print was found in Spain in 1993.

This week, my round up of CG news features software and hardware announcements, interviews with VFX professionals, and some cool new VFX breakdowns. Hope you enjoy it!

My, what a busy week! There are announcements from the likes of Pixar about their RenderMan software, interviews with London studios such as Pixomondo and the much more education controversy. Here's my pick of last week's more interesting stories.

The Visual Effects Society (VES) are holding their 10^th annual awards ceremony very soon, set to define the greatest VFX moments from 2011. Earlier in the week VES released their nominations for this year’s awards, a list that recognises the outstanding VFX achievements across film, animation, television, commercials and games. Regularly referred to as the “Oscars” for the visual effects world, this is a highly prestigious event for VFX professionals internationally. Receiving an award from any of the 23 categories is a great honour.

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.

We came across this video and just had to share it with you all. Check it out!

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, here is a great video that shows life behind the scenes at Dneg. It is a really good way to get an idea of what it would be like to work for a world class Visual Effects house like Double Negative. They are one of the fastest growing Visual Effects houses in the UK and one of the top Visual Effects houses in the world.

This will be my last Weekly Round-Up of News for this year..., hope you enjoy it. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment. I'll be sure to look at your suggestion during the Xmas break.

I thought I would let you guys into something special... A look at the truly fantastic Christmas video from The Mill's 2D department. In between working on some of the world's best VFX for commercial spots, The Mill still finds time to make a departmental Christmas video to compete at their Christmas party.

The judging is done, and the votes are in – the winners for CG Whiz 2011 have been decided upon, but you’ll have to wait until the 14th December to find out who the winner are. I know, it's a bit cruel, but we like to make a big deal of our Reveal Event. It's only fair considering how much work all our entrants have put in to their reels.