Firstly, a big thanks to everyone who has entered our CG Graduate Design Competition Award so far. Entries have been coming thick and fast and as always the standard has been exceptional.
Thanks also for keeping in touch via all our social networks - it really is great to hear from you all and it just reaffirms our belief that the UK and the US have a wealth of talent and will undoubtedly produce many future stars in the CG world.
CG Graduate Design Awards competition entry date extended to 16th August
Christian Roberton joins our Advisory Board
Everyone who studies with us knows how much emphasis we place on our close ties with the industry. The members of our advisory board include some of the biggest names in CG, and they advise on everything from course content to placing escapees in work after they graduate. We are therefore very pleased to announce that Christian Roberton, MD of Film at MPC, has joined the team.
Competition reminder
It's great to see entries coming through for our Graduate Design Awards. Just a quick reminder you need to upload your show reel to our YouTube channel and then complete your entry by sending your contact details to escapestudios@brands2life.com. We need your name, showreel title, email address, telephone number, year of graduation, university and course attended.
Escape Studios gets a makeover
The eagle eyed amongst you will have seen that we’ve got a slightly different look about us – we’ve got a new website and a new brand. We’re still the same Escape Studios, we’ve just revamped everything to make it more accessible and better connected.
Latest VFX Graduate Showreels
Check out some of the latest work from the VFX Course that's just finished. The work is really imaginative and demonstrates real technical ability - all pretty cool considereing they were here for just 12 weeks. If you're interested in VFX now is the time to get in touch so you can take advantage of our early bird discount.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Our New Animation Tutor
Meet our new animation tutor, Alex Williams who comes from a rich tradition of 2D animation. With over 20 years of industry experience that includes work as a storyboard artist, character designer and animator on more than 20 feature films for Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Fox, DreamWorks and Sony, his film credits include animated masterpieces such as 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?', 'The Lion King' and 'The Iron Giant'. His most recent work includes animation for the Oscar-winning 'Monster House', as well as 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'.
Fancy winning an iPod or an online 3D course?
Then take a look at Escape Studios’ Graduate Survey. If you’re a student or have graduated from a UK university we’re keen to hear how you got on finding a job, and how well you think your university prepared you for the world of work.
Sixty Seconds with Featured Artist: Compositor Tara Roseblade
The compositing industry is booming right now which is why we were grateful to Tara for taking a couple of minutes out of her busy day to answer a few questions about what it’s like working in the industry since leaving Escape Studios. Tara’s reel shows everything that a good junior compositing showreel should. It includes examples of roto, rig/wire removal, colour correction and some good CG comping. Each shot is accompanied by a detailed breakdown - which is a great way of demonstrating these skills.
Free Advanced Level Tutorial - Perfect Your Shading Skills
This month's Free Tutorial is taken from our Advanced Shading with Maya & Mental Ray online course and is one of many videos which explains how to harness the power of Maya's utility nodes to simplify, speed up & add realism to your work. This tutorial is great because you'll use a practical example.
This month's Free Tutorial - Reflections, Raytracing and Render Settings
Make sure you don't miss out on this month's free tutorial - Reflections, Raytracing and Render Settings. This month we've focused on the skills that graduates need when looking for work. This free professional-level tutorial concentrates on developing those key skills as well as understanding reflectivity, material attributes & render settings. Here's a quick breakdown of what's included:
Featured Artist - VFX Graduate Diego Pastor
It's proving to be a very busy month for the recruitment team at Escape Studios. Lots of our students are going straight from our classroom courses into paid work, proving it's an ideal time for Junior Artists to make that break into the post production industry.
New dates for short courses announced
Escape this Spring!
Birds Eye View Training Course
Are you a woman trying to break into the film industry? If so, this training course could be just what you’re looking for.
Another new recruit – Graham Harris
Following last week’s announcement around the hiring of Tim Flett, we’ve got another new recruit that we’re all very excited about. We are pleased to announce that Graham Harris as joined our team as our new Finance Director.
New hiring for Escape - Tim Flett
We’ve got some exciting news: we’ve hired games industry veteran Tim Flett. Tim will be our new Business Development Manager for Games and Interactive, in charge of growing our professional services, which include training, technical consulting as well as hardware and software solutions.
Escapee wins BAFTA for Flock! game
Our very own Escapee, Chris Bradwell, has won a BAFTA for his fantastic work on the game Flock! just five years after graduating.
CG Whiz Awards video
Regular readers of the blog will know that last week we had the awards ceremony of the CG Whiz competition. We managed to grab the three winners and some of the judges, including Steve Venning from The Mill, to film their views on the competition. We think everyone had a great time, and over the next few months we’re hoping to have blog posts from Adam Droy, the overall winner, and runners up Ronan McMeel and Marco Barrato, to see how the competition prizes have helped them break into the CG industry.
Latest work from the Skillset VFX Course
The Skillset Visual Effects Course is now underway and the work which the guys have produced after just six weeks is incredible!
Taking online, offline: Escape studios meets the Twitterers
Over the last few months we've spent a lot of time meeting various people from the CG world on Twitter, and have been discussing everything from the latest Autodesk upgrades or Softimage updates, to Nick's doodles and even elephant clocks (this conversation really did happen). After all of this interaction, we thought it was about time that we got to meet some of you face to face, so on Friday we invited three of the more vocal Twitterers to a beer and CG evening at Escape Studios.
Announcing The Winners of the CG Whiz Competition...
Congratulations to all the finalists of our CG Whiz competition. We had a great time at the Reveal Event last night, meeting the future stars of the CG industry. As we’ve said before, we were overwhelmed by the sheer number and quality of the entries we’ve received.
