You may have thought that The Brits was the hot event at the O2 this week but you’d be wrong. This week saw the 4th VFX Festival take place at London’s O2, created and run by Escape Studios, part of Pearson College London, the festival is a three day event bringing to London the best in VFX, games, animation and motion graphics.

This year was even bigger and better than ever, with a line-up that featured industry names including FrameStore, The Mill, MPC, DNeg, Aardman and Rushes, who presented talks on the VFX across films such as The Martian, Spectre, In the Heart of the Sea, and Pan. Our headliner was none other that ILM, who presented an exclusive talk on Star Wars: The Force Awakens featuring details on our favourite new droid BB-8!

Across the last few months we have been hard at work securing coverage for the event, to kick the activity off with a bang we secured two big pieces of broadcast coverage on London Live and ITV London. The feature on London Live included interviews with an Escape alumni and tutor Alex Williams about the festival, where they also chatted about all things awards and the London film industry.

We secured strong listings coverage in publications such as Coach, Digital Arts, VR Focus, WhatCulture, Sci-Fi Now, The De-Brief and The Londonist. Alongside this a full page interview feature in specialist magazine SFX ran with the founder of Escape Dom Davenport and a 2 page interview feature appeared in Imagine FX. For the festival we also secured a media partnership with 3DWorld, who have to date run over 6 print and online features on trends in the film industry to support the festival.

During the festival itself across the three days we completed junket interviews with the studios for a range of press, so watch this space for more coverage to come! Following the festival, we’ve got lots more exciting projects in the pipeline for Escape Studios, following our appointment to run their press office and develop their stakeholder engagement programme, so keep an eye on our blog for more updates!