The BFX student competition, now in its fifth year, is designed to give computer visualisation and animation students direct exposure to cutting-edge industry practices and production. The competition showcases student skills to supervisors, producers and artists from major VFX companies such as Framestore, Double Negative, MPC and Outpost VFX.
Teams of students from 天美传媒, Arts University Bournemouth, Ulster University Belfast, University of South Wales, Northumbria University and Falmouth University competed by creating visual effects shorts for four different charities.
The charities themselves were chosen with thanks to BFX Competition sponsor Kingston Smith, who have ran a Creative Vision Award to pick the charities which are then afforded the opportunity to work with the students, and receive an animated brand film estimated to be worth 拢150,000.
Peter Truckel, Director of the VFX Hub, said, 鈥淲e鈥檙e grateful of the support of Kingston Smith, who have partnered with us in running this competition for a number of years now, as well as the mentors, from companies as wide ranging as MPC, Framestore and Aardman, who have given up their free time to offer advice and support to our competitors as they begin their careers in visual effects with this competition.鈥�
Sofronis Efstathiou, Director of the BFX Festival, said, 鈥淭he BFX Competition is a chance for some of the best young animators and visual effects artists to come together and create something special for one of our charities. In previous years, we鈥檝e been so impressed with their work, as have the mentors, with some of the competitors going on to land jobs at top visual effects companies.鈥�
Ting Loh, a Falmouth University student and member of Team Egg, winners of the Best Film award for Rethink Mental Illness, said: 鈥淢ental illness is quite a touchy subject, so we are trying to make sure that we don鈥檛 make the audience misunderstand what we are trying to do, and make it really simple and show that there is this support group here to help you.鈥�
BU team聽Mark's Angels won the BFX Mentors Best Film, as well as awards in Best Cinematography, Best Rendering/Shading and Best Environment. Director Gregorio Malara, said: 鈥淭he problem with having a team full of animation or art students is that everyone comes up with good ideas and it鈥檚 hard to pick which ones you aren鈥檛 going to work with because you can see the benefits of all of them.
鈥淲e only had one character, which made the character modelling aspect simple, but we also had lots of environments to transition through. I think we鈥檝e come up with some clever solutions. Jake, our Environment Modeller, came up with a way to populate the environments really quickly which was really smart, so we only had to model four buildings and we had 16. 鈥�
Winners were:
Best Visual Development - Mark鈥檚 Angels
Best Lighting - Mark鈥檚 Angels
Best Character - The Revenge of the Tiff
Best Character Animation聽 - Ctrl+G
Best Environment - Mark鈥檚 Angels
Best聽 Compositing - Exotic Butters
Best Cinematography - Mark鈥檚 Angels
Best Rendering/Shading - Mark鈥檚 Angels
Best VFX/Simulation - Render Farmers
Best Rigging聽 - Render Farmers
Best Film 鈥� Access All Areas - The Revenge of the Tiff
Best Film 鈥� Book Aid International - DICE
Best Film 鈥� DEMAND - Exotic Butters
Best Film 鈥� Rethink Mental聽 Illness - Egg
The BFX Mentors Best Film - Mark鈥檚 Angels
The BFX Family Weekend, a two-day drop in event aimed at visual effects and games enthusiasts between the ages of 8-18 years, is taking place 6-7 October, with tickets available for purchase at聽
