What I learned from mentoring sessions with a top studio

Electric Theatre Collective (ETC) is a visual effects company based in Shoreditch, founded in 2011. The studio team produces incredible work with immense commitment to detail, largely working on short-form content such as commercials. They also invest a lot of time into the development of young artists - when Escape’s VFX department reached out regarding mentoring for third years, they were more than happy to help.

I’m a third-year student studying BA (Hons) The Art of Visual Effects, and over the past six months my class has been working in groups to create five short films as our final projects. Throughout this period, we have been lucky enough to receive mentoring from ETC.

Since January, we have had one session a month with ETC. We got to hear from Talent Manager, Pheya Tribelsky, CG Generalist, Tom Harrison, Compositor and Escapee, Scott Middleton and many more amazing artists who kindly offered their time to give us feedback. For our final mentoring session, we were invited to visit ETC’s London location in person, and it was so inspiring to get to see the studio.

We were really excited to receive an industry perspective on our projects because this helped us to take our work to a more professional level. Every month we had the opportunity to ask questions about specific areas we were struggling with and hear advice about how we were approaching our films and how we could improve.

To present our work, we uploaded project updates onto SyncSketch, and ETC’s artists would also post detailed comments there, providing thorough feedback on what we had done so far. It was really helpful being able to refer back to this, and the team were always very open to us reaching out for feedback outside of the mentoring sessions as well.

As a 2D Artist, a key takeaway for me was the abundance of comments we received on our compositing work; the ways we could improve specific parts of each shot were highlighted to us and this was very useful. CG Generalist, Tom also spent a lot of time talking to the 3D Team, which was really appreciated.

The mentoring sessions left us feeling well-equipped to overcome challenges we were facing with our projects and allowed us to improve the quality of the work. A massive thank you again to ETC for providing us with this support over the past few months! It was a great experience - we learned a lot and the team was so kind.