fxguide’s own Mike Seymour will be leading a webinar on July 14th covering SCRATCH and RED workflow. If you own a RED camera — or if you don’t own one and need to manage productions and post that are using RED, this short webinar will be useful for you. Register here or click through for more details.

Here’s just five TVCs from the last few months that have caught our eye for their inventive use of visual effects.

The shortlist for the 2011 Film Craft Cannes Lions has been released, with the winners to be announced on 25 June. We’ve covered a number of these projects at fxguide. UPDATED to include the winners.

Tony Hudson, who worked at ILM as the CG Model and Creature Supervisor on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, outlines some of his favorite memories from the experience.

We spoke to Jules van Den Steenhoven of the NSC about their new iPhone & iPad app that maps global salaries for production and post professionals. Some things like this have been tried in the past, none it would seem as successfully as the NSC’s app is proving to be. But what was their approach to gathering this information and how current is it? Does it take into account month to month currency fluctuation? And just why is this being done by the NSC anyway?

Director Nash Edgerton along with producer Lauren Edwards have just completed a week at Cannes with the short film Bear.

We thought we’d point you to some of the latest work from Mirada, the new studio collaboration between director Guillermo del Toro, director Mathew Cullen, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro and executive producer Javier Jimenez.

We got some great entries for our HP EliteBook giveaway, but there can only be one winner. And that winner is Chris Hocking, whose “server room shower” took top place with an inventive install to get the job done in pinch. Click through for more images as well as some impressions of running The Foundry’s Mari on the EliteBook.

As NAB approaches, we’re starting to mark the showfloor map of products we’d like to check out. We’ve always been big fans of the tech behind Imagineer’s products over the years, so we thought we’d get a bit of an update from Imagineer’s Ross Shain. We chat about how the company started, the expanding user base, and how the development of the never-released mogul effected the company.

The Foundry released STORM 1.0 recently, but it’s already been widely in use in production during the beta process. Manchester-based Space Digital utilized the app along with Nuke, some Apple TVs, and Dropbox to create a useful on-set workflow for a recent Castrol engine oil project.

Silverdraft invited fxguide to tour Mobileviz, a 53 foot trailer with some serious and unique tech on board. Join us as we find out what users plan to do with 30 teraflops, 1536 cores and 20TB of SSD storage in a mobile configuration.

The Carlyle Group announced that it has acquired a significant majority stake in The Foundry, from Advent Venture Partners and other stakeholders. What does this mean for facilities and artists using the company’s software? In an fxguide exclusive, Mike Seymour caught up with Foundry CEO Bill Collis to get the scoop.