Escape Award designed by Supernatural's Zissou

With the Escape Awards gearing up for a spectacular showcase of the industry’s best and brightest, thoughts have been turning towards the awards themselves. Not content to palm off any old tat we sought out both style and content in the form of Zissou, one of our own graduates.

Zissou trained as a 3D artist at Escape back in 2004, and he so impressed everyone that he seemed like a natural choice to ask to design the awards. One look at them and we think you’ll agree.

 “We discussed how this award would relate to Escape and to what Escape is about - namely 3D. We were looking for a simplicity and elegance to the form, and for something as classical as the new Escape re-brand but with a contemporary twist." said the artist.

True to his Escape training, Zissou then turned to Maya to make the designs, citing the speed at which you can rotate around and through a form, and the ease at which a final design could be “spotted”.

Zissou explained, “While rotating one of the forms I had built, a stylized version of the infinite loop symbol, I noticed that when I squinted at one of the shapes from a specific angle its silhouette had made the letter ‘e’.”

“I then began use various deformers on the initial shape to mould it into a form where, from three distinct angles you could read the ‘e’, ‘s’, and ‘c’ of the new escape logo, albeit stylized. It was important to balance the aesthetics of the piece with its ergonomics. The loop of the ‘e’ happily serves as two handles for the actual presentation.”

The design was then passed to Hypershot for accurate realtime reflections. And the process is far from finished apparently. The design’s been sent to Germany so a prototype can be made by stereo laser sintering, and from there adjustments can be made to details like the weighting if it doesn’t sit well.

Well, it sounds as if the brief is in safe hands, and with styling like this, it makes an Escape Award even more desirable.