Beyond-FX’s Year In Review

‍A Big Year 

2024 was a massive year for Beyond-FX; we achieved a lot of big things, saw a lot of changes, welcomed new members to the team, and even saw some titles we collaborated on release into the wild! We’re really proud of everything that the Beyond-FX family has accomplished over those 12 months, and cannot wait for the year to come!

As we’re beginning our journey into 2025, we thought it would be nice to take a look back at everything we did across 2024, highlighting our major milestones and biggest moments. We hope you have a fantastic 2025 and enjoy exploring this year of innovation!

Joining The Virtuous Family 

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Perhaps the most important milestone of the year for us was joining the Virtuous family. Back in March, it was announced that the leading video game development company had acquired Beyond-FX, ensuring that our real-time VFX knowledge could be added to their family of diverse studios. We’re honored to be joining sister studios like CounterPunch, Black Shamrock, and Sparx* and are excited to see what the new year brings for this partnership. 

To find out more about Virtuous' acquisition, you can head to their official website. 

Leveling Up Our Office

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Another major milestone that took place in 2024 for Beyond-FX was an exciting office change! As the company has continued to expand, we finally outgrew our space and took on the daunting task of moving our team to a new, larger space. This was also a great excuse to host an office-warming party with our amazing teammates and clients. We broke in the new studio in style, with balloons and snacks!

Launching BFX-U | Learn With Us

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One of our main goals for 2024 was to continue to help our community grow as artists and we’re always hoping to pass on our knowledge and experience to help newcomers enter the industry. To that end, we launched BFX-U, a new educational content banner that will continue to expand in 2025 and beyond.

Our very first course is Learn With Us | First Playable Grenade Explosion, in which our Founder Keith Guerrette and Director of Content Julian Bahmani walk through creating your first playable effect in Unreal Engine from start to finish. It’s a great starting place for anyone wanting to break into Real-Time VFX but unsure where to begin!

You can check out the full series on our blog and YouTube channel right now! 

Charity Efforts

While we might have made progress on our educational goals and on our industry ambitions, we still wanted to make sure that we were giving back to the community. In 2024 the Beyond-FX team really stepped up with their charitable contributions, as they got involved in a wide array of fantastic causes.

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Firstly, our participation in the CHOC Walk In The Park on behalf of Gamers for CHOC, allowed Beyond-FX help to collectively raise over $100,000. The fantastic event, which was held at Disneyland, meant that we hit a group total of 50k steps! No wonder our feet hurt.

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Our fantastic team also volunteered at the Central Texas Food Bank, helping to sort donated items. This is a crucial facility and one that is doing brilliant work for those who require the support. 

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Plus we were involved in hosting three live streams for the Extra Life initiative, which raised a total of $6047. Not only were these organized sessions a great deal of fun, but they were a brilliant way to bring together our wider community. 

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And we can’t forget the festive cheer that our Los Angeles-based team provided over the holidays. Working with Toys for Tots, our Beyond-FX colleagues helped collect gifts that would find new homes with children in need. 

All in all, we’re very proud to have given back to our communities! Thank you to everyone who helped contribute to those causes, both within the team and our community, and to those who donated. You can learn more about these events on our blog. 

Internal VFX Jam 

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2024 also saw the return of our annual VFX Jam! This yearly event brings our entire team together for a single day to create VFX based on a fun, creative prompt. Our two previous VFX Jams (Project Frosty and Project Spooky) each boasted some incredibly imaginative holiday-themed effects from our artists. This time around, the event saw our VFX artists basing their work on the following prompt: "The craziest thing happened last week, I was _________……and then it EXPLODED!"

Needless to say, we saw some wild projects come to life as part of BFXplosion. TVs, fireworks, and ancient statues all went up in smoke, in a stunning display of our artists’ skills. 

Batman: Arkham Shadow & Towerborne

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Another major highlight of the year was the launch of two games that Beyond-FX contributed to. We are constantly partnering with great studios and brands on their incredible titles, and it's a joy to see these projects come to fruition.

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We collaborated with the VFX teams at Camouflaj and Stoic Studio to help bring to life Batman: Arkham Shadow and Towerborne respectively. We’re so happy to see both titles enter the world to such acclaim, and are looking forward to more players discovering our work out in the wild!

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VFX Awards 2024

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2024 wouldn’t be complete without our VFX Awards, and we had the privilege of hosting the biggest entry yet into our annual awards show! With seven different VFX categories, our community flocked to vote for the VFX they loved and appreciated, and were honored to have incredible guests from the industry join us and present the various awards. The VFX Awards are very much rooted in our desire to celebrate the talented artists who don’t always get the recognition they deserve from traditional award shows and we’re proud to have brought another amazing show to life with the help of our community!

To get the full list of winners you can watch the ceremony right now, and read all about it on the official Beyond-FX blog. 

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Reach Out

If you want to learn more about Beyond-FX and what we’ve done over 2024 feel free to reach out to us on social, or in the comments below. Tune back into our blog across 2025 to learn more about what we have in store. 

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‍Want to stay in touch with our studio as we craft world-class real-time VFX? Follow Beyond-FX on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, & Twitch!

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