VFX incentives

Lots of countries (and regions) have tax breaks to entice film and TV production into their jurisdiction. But the situation with visual/special effects is less expansive. The main reason for this is that most countries aren’t geared up to handle VFX jobs. Put simply,...

An embarrassing year

I went into 2014 with some hope. We had new consoles from both Microsoft and Sony, including an ascendant PS4 that seemed to defy all the doomsaying about the end of consoles, we had a vibrant indie scene that the big players were doing their best to foster, we had,...

Job skills teacher

It’s a common belief that young people play too many video games. Interestingly, one company thinks it’s found a way to tap that love of gaming to fight youth unemployment. Cognotion founders Jonathon Dariyanani and Joanna Schneier knew something must be done to...

Sales decline woes

The video game industry managed to reverse an almost year-long trend in November, but the question now is at what cost? Nearly every month since Microsoft and Sony launched new game consoles in November 2013, hardware purchases have made up for the fact that players...

Eyes on Disney

Researchers at Disney have developed a new image-capture system that can reconstruct all the visible parts of a person’s eye in animated form, at unprecedented levels detail – and the end result is damn impressive. Eyes are notoriously difficult to render...