Fred Prigg
I'm a final-year VFX student at NCCA Bournemouth, focused on Houdini simulation, character and asset work, and Nuke compositing.
I started in 3D in Year 10, using Blender for my GCSE and A Level art, with a horror short as my final piece. Fine art taught me to look at reference properly and to be able to justify every decision, which is the same thing I do now.
- Bournemouth, UK
- NCCA Bournemouth — Final Year
- FX / Simulation, Character & Asset, Compositing
- Houdini, Maya, Nuke, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve Studio
Background
At 16 I got a placement as a runner at Blink Ink, a London animation studio. Got to do some real work while I was there and see how an actual studio runs.
More recently I did a placement at ETC and stayed in contact with one of their artists, who has given me a lot of feedback on my work since.
At Bournemouth I'm still making horror shorts. Same obsession, different tools. The work now just has to hold up technically as well as feel right. Our film HOST was screened at the BFX Festival 2026 as part of the Real-Time Horror & The Uncanny panel — the first time any of my work has been shown in a public industry context.
Process
I always start with reference. For the horse I went out and dropped concrete slabs, threw big rocks at them, and filmed it in slow motion. Reference stops you guessing. You build something that could have actually happened rather than what you assumed would, and we're normally wrong about that. Even the exaggerated or supernatural stuff has to be grounded in something real.
Then I do a lot of testing. The cloth went through a few different methods before I ended up combining them into one, and the horse took two fracture levels and animated constraints before the collapse looked heavy enough.