The next gen at The Studio

Students take part in two day challenge

Students from the games, animation and VFX skills level 3 course at The Studio have taken part in a two-day industry challenge hosted by its partner Next Gen Skills Academy.

It was an incredible opportunity for students to learn from and compete against 10 colleges from across England. Students were split into groups and given an industry standard brief to create assets for a low polygon based game centred around spaceships. The groups of students had to choose to design either: spaceships to take humanity to live on another planet, or spaceships to fight climate change.

The Studio student, Qaveem Ahmad said: “The industry challenge was interesting, it was definitely a challenge, but it was also fun. Having industry feedback, made the experience feel so worthwhile and gave me a taste as to what it would be like in a job.”

Students worked against the clock to develop a low poly 3D model. Each team created one low poly spaceship per student, and then created a ‘hero shot’ of their fleet of spaceships. Students created a back story for their fleet of spaceships, and explained why their ships would either transport humanity or fight climate change.

The challenge was created to help students develop key skills around responding to a client brief, working in a team, providing assets for a portfolio and responding to industry feedback. These skills have been identified as priority areas for development by the Next Gen Employer Group to help students secure future roles in the sector.

At the end of the first day, industry expert, John Dennis, a games designer from New Star games (formerly Team 17 and Activision) looked over the work documented using Miro, a collaboration software widely used in the sector. John provided incredible insight to each group of students with feedback from his experience and industry perspective. Each group then reflected on the feedback received and then used that to reiterate and refine their designs.

Following revisions, each group pitched their concepts to other internal students who helped choose a winning group which would then go on to present their final designs and receive feedback from a number of professionals from companies such as Framestore (Spider-man: No Way Home, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol.2).

James Phillips: leader of games development at The Studio said: “I am incredibly proud of how far the Year 12 students have come in such a short period of time. Not only have they proven they understand how to read, interpret and respond to a design brief correctly, they are also able to utilise industry standard project management techniques to selfmanage a project.

“I am also particularly impressed at their ability to have a challenging conversation with an industry professional. Well done to all the students involved.”