Blog

Welcome back everyone! I hope you all had a cracking weekend. Right now we are going to pick up where we left off on Friday with FG Maps.

Many of you have been eagerly anticipating May’s free tutorial, and I’m delighted to announce to you all that it’s now live. So check it out here.

We live in a time of minimalistic female role models. Gone are the days where young females looked up to icons like Florence Nightingale, Rosa Parks and The Pankhurst Sisters. If you look at our culture today we are inundated with reality TV role models. In no way do I have any issues with reality TV, everyone needs a little light relief in their lives and if watching the current episode of Made in Chelsea or TOWIE does it for you, then who am I to judge?

You may think we are a little behind the curve with posting our views on the new Avengers Assemble movie. That, my friends, is where you are wrong. We don’t want to be just like everyone else. We want a new angle, something fresh, something different and something utterly delicious. If you are starting to wonder where we are going with this, do not fret! And after exerting all our man power with many hours of scouring we found the perfect piece.

We would like to be one of the first to congratulate Assimilate for their success at the Cannes Festival 2012. Although the winning films are yet to be announced, several films on the competition's roster have been created using SCRATCH, Assimilate’s digital workflow and post-production tools. SCRATCH has been used on recent screen successes like The Artist, Thor and Underworld: Awakening as well as the films nominated at Cannes 2012.

This year, Escape Studios is ten years old, and it’s a pretty big deal for us. It’s also a big deal for all of the students who we’ve trained over the years and are now dotted throughout the world of VFX. So, from now on, every week, we’re going to be launching a story from our escapee Wall of Fame which will showcase all of the escapees who have gone on to work on the biggest and boldest films, TV shows, commercials and games over the years. It’s a chance for them to step up and take a bow, albeit a virtual one.

As a follow-up to my post on learning resources for coding, I'd like to share our recent efforts to open source some of our in-house code.

Want to see a demo of how computer games will look in the not too distant future? You are in luck. Here is a big breakdancing bunny courtesy of Samuel Lapere. Forgive us, the quality isn't great but it's still pretty phenomenal.

Special effects with computer graphics are all the rage recently. There are very few films produced these days without jaw dropping stunts courtesy of the digital department. But a lot of directors still prefer to shoot the real thing if they can as it nearly always looks better than the CG equivalent.

As we all know the countdown to the 2012 Olympics is on, in fact it is at 77 days to be precise. The buzz of the Olympics is infectious and seems like a time for us to celebrate all things British, especially when it comes to VFX. So thankfully I found this in little beauty in the VFX news this week, the final version of Studio AKA’s introduction sequence for the BBC and their Olympic Torch Relay Coverage.