Working in vfx? You need the Visual Effects Society

How membership of the Visual Effects Society can help raise your vfx game.

One of the key challenges in any industry is keeping up. Keeping up with new software, keeping up with new techniques, keeping up with new developments that might affect your career…It is, if anything, sometimes a full-time job in itself.

That’s where industry-specific clubs, associations and societies come in to play. There is a vast amount of information about everything available on the internet but sifting through it is close to impossible. That’s where making it a collective effort becomes important. If there are, say, a couple of hundred of you that do the same thing, then you’re all filtering information all the time and the really important stuff, the info-rich nuggets that can make or break a project or the next stage of your career, tend to find their way to the surface.

Meet with these people, interact with these people, network with these people in real life and online, and in many ways your job gets easier. At the worst, you might get the odd free drink out of it. And, in fact, if you’re a member of the Visual Effects Society, you also get free screenings of recent films to boot and a whole lot more.

All this is a roundabout way of introducing the Visual Effects Society, and VES London in particular which is the nearest branch to Redshark world headquarters. It’s a global organisation with several thousand members, including many of the biggest names in the vfx industry, and hosts regular events for its members throughout the year.

Essentially it’s a non-profit, professional, honorary society dedicated to the promotion and education of the art of the visual effect. It hosts free screenings for members in private cinemas throughout the year — VES London gets to use the rather lovely MPC private screening room — many with free drinks before and afterwards, and hosts a range of different events from practical skills-building workshops and career/business development forums to presentations by industry experts and cutting-edge new technology demos. It also has its own magazine, the rather lovely quarterly VFX Voice, and a prestigious awards ceremony, the VES Awards.

“All this is to encourage more socialising and exchange of information and ideas, which is what a society is all about!” it says quite reasonably.

Entire trade shows are built on the promise of networking, and the VES takes that concept, distills it, gets rid of the tyre kickers, and adds plenty of cool stuff to the mix as well. Find out more about the membership criteria here as well as ways you can get involved as a non-member. Its also worth pointing out that that organisation is keen to recruit new members and if you would like to join but don’t quite make the eligibility just yet, drop them a line at hello@ves.london and they’ll be able to advise you.