Industrial Light & Magic take our Freshers behind the scenes of ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

We were super excited to kick off the academic year with a HUGE ‘An Evening with...’ event as part of our September 2025 Welcome Week. It was fantastic (no pun intended) to be joined by Kiel Figgins, the Animation Supervisor on The Fantastic Four: First Steps. We wanted to go big, so this month's edition was held at Cineworld inside the O2 in North Greenwich, where we had a private screening of the movie followed by a behind-the-scenes talk.

The event was a collaboration between Escape Studios and Industrial Light & Magic who are industry partners with us. They were kind enough to send us Kiel who is a legend in the animation world! Kiel Figgins is an American Animator specialising in Visual Effects for feature films. He is known for his work on Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Jurassic World Dominion (2022) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2020).

Kiel shared information on the animation of the film and told us stories about how each of the four lead characters were different. It was interesting to hear about the different approaches to animating each character. After the talk, our students were able to have a Q&A to find out even more. There was a range of questions about portfolios, the industry, his career and much more!

This was just one of our Freshers' events for Welcome Week. We also had an arcade night at Four Quarters in Elephant and Castle, and a Freshers' Fair so students could see which societies they can join.

If you're already an Escape Studios student, you don't want to miss out on our ‘An Evening With...’ series of exclusive student events with top industry speakers - more information on our next event will be coming your way soon.

If you are looking to join our Escape Studios community in the future, here's some more information about student life!