Congratulations to Charlie Shaw from the University of Huddersfield, our winner of the Games VFX category in Search For A Star 2023!

Despite being a role that’s always in high demand at games studios, there’s still very few universities and colleges that give much specialised teaching toward Games / Realtime VFX. Although we only had 25 signups for the category this year, it’s always an area that’s full of excitement and surprises. Students were given a project brief co-developed with games studios across the UK, to develop a themed, game-ready effects sequence. Each had 4 weeks to create, document and present their projects to our assessment teams.

Charlie’s project documentation opened with possibly the greatest outline and statement of intent we’ve ever seen in SFAS – it’s so succinctly perfect I’ll be using it as an example for future entrants to learn from. This excellent foundation and research led to an equally impressive and detailed project inspired by the effect sequences in League of Legends (you can check out Charlie’s project video below). At the final interview, the judges were also stunned by his incredible planning and research. Coupled with his excellent technical knowledge and ability, it was clear that that Charlie was an incredibly deserving winner!

“It’s amazing! It’s great – I didn’t expect to be the winner and this feels really good!“

This year’s Search For A Star VFX challenge was created alongside our studio partners as a way of helping technical game art & VFX students to create a portfolio piece that showed exactly the type of skills that studios want to see from graduates starting a games career. Thank you also to our judging panel for the SFAS Games VFX challenge, Alex Korakitis and Mark Pinney from Bulkhead, and Jordan Langley from Aardvark Swift.

After Charlie’s interview, the judges shared with us the reasons behind their decision:

“Charlie’s project was an extremely well-researched and documented piece of work which laid the foundations for an exciting sequence of visual effects. He showed knowledge far beyond his years and were able to break down their own showpiece for critical analysis and suggest improvements.”

Congratulations once again to Charlie, and we look forward to seeing a whole lot more from him in future 💚