Art&Design Saturday Clubs from University of Staffordshire and Escape Studios had a fantastic opportunity to take part in a Masterclass with Academy Award winning visual effects artist and supervisor Andrew Whitehurst from ILM.
Andrew has worked on films including Ex Machina, Paddington, Spectre and Harry Potter and in the Masterclass he introduced the Club members to VFX with a particular focus on the art department and how moodboards are used professionally throughout the creative process to communicate across the teams a realise their creations.
Club members were then given three character concepts and began a process of searching for images online to inspire the design process for an item of clothing, a vehicle, prop, or environment connected with one of the characters.
Then, Club members assembled a collection of their chosen images and presented their moodboards to explain how they would take these further as a reference for creating their own designs.
The Masterclass was a fantastic exploration of visual communication and understanding the processes VFX teams use to create whole worlds and characters that wouldn’t be possible within physical reality. Club members found the session so inspiring and many commented that they will be using this technique in the future within their own work.