Escape Studios

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Escape Studios is a computer graphics training, recruitment, hardware and software, and production services company founded in April 2002 and based in Shepherds Bush, London. Escape has built a reputation delivering premium training, recruitment, software and hardware services to the global computer graphics (CG) community.

The London based company boasts one of the foremost schools of computer animation and visual effects. Escape’s partnerships with top studios gives students the opportunity to work on ‘live’ visual effects and games projects including 'Battlefield 360' (X-Box 360) and 'X-Men: The Last Stand' and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Escape Studios is a leading visual effects recruiter in the UK as well as Europe’s largest reseller for Autodesk® Maya (software™, Pixar® RenderMan® and Boxx Technologies®.

1 Courses
2 Tutors
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Courses

Escape Studios offers full-time courses designed to take complete beginners to the point where they are able to perform at an industry entry level.These are:

Visual Effects,Animation,Characters, Games, and Compositing.

A variety of part-time courses are also available, these include:

Maya Foundation,^[1]
Compositing Foundation,^[2]
ZBrush

As Pixar’s European distributor and training partner for RenderMan®^[3], Escape also offers a RenderMan® Fundamentals course^[4] in conjunction with Pixar’s official RenderMan courseware.^[5] The online RenderMan courseware is Pixar’s official learning tool for the software, and provides content for both academic tutors and existing professional artists alike^[6]. It contains the ‘Fundamentals’, introductory and advanced How To’s and production examples from leading visual effects facilities worldwide. The courseware has a Wiki-based structure to facilitate a flexible and non-linear learning approach, making it "the one authoritative source of RenderMan knowledge"^[7]. RenderMan Fundamentals is a tutor led classroom course, being held at Escape Studios in London on June 23rd 2008.

[edit] Tutors

The Animation course was developed and is taught by Jeff Pratt^[8], a Pixar veteran having worked as an animator on films such as 'Toy Story' 1 and 2, 'A Bug’s Life', 'Monsters Inc'.
The Characters course was developed and is taught by Nick Savy^[9], former Head of FMV at Glassworks,^{[citation needed]} Head of Character setup at Indestructable,^{[citation needed]} and Senior character TD at Double Negative^{[citation needed]} and Cinesite.^{[citation needed]}
The Games course was developed and is taught by Simon Fenton,^[10] having worked on titles such as 'Total NBA '97', 'TIF', 'Getaway Black Monday', 'Kinetic', 'Kinetic Combat' and Home whilst at Sony.^{[citation needed]}
The Visual Effects course is taught by James Owens,^[11] and Bhaumik Patel,^[12] both with extensive experience working as VFX professionals for companies such as Glassworks,^{[citation needed]} Partizan^{[citation needed]} and Atlantic Digital.^{[citation needed]}
The Compositing course is taught by Mark Pinheiro,^[13] formerly of three of the most prolific post-production houses in the world- Mill Film,^{[citation needed]} Framestore-CFC^{[citation needed]} and The Moving Picture Company.^{[citation needed]}
James Rumball, formerly of Smoke and Mirrors^{[citation needed]}, Mook^{[citation needed]}, Th1ng^{[citation needed]} and Partizan^{[citation needed]}, teaches the ZBrush course^[14].