CG Garage

Kirk and Christopher from  A52  chat about their work at A52. We learn about the history of the company as well as some of the amazing work, including the  Daredevil main title  and  Nissan #WithDad  spots which got them nominated for  Emmys  this year. They are an extremely creative company which plays of their expertise in Directing, editing, and VFX.

Erik's background in Effects started way back as a director of photography in miniatures. Having done 8 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Deep Space 9, he claims that he has done more shots of space ships then anyone else. His experience as a DP is what most inspires the people that work with him as a Visual Effect Supervisor today. In doing so, he has earned 3 Oscar nominations for I...

Director Ruairi Robinson recently made  the news  when Fox picked up Leviathan, based on  the teaser   that he put out on the internet. Ruairi, a member of our  Digital Film  League , has a long history in filmmaking and CG. He was nominated for an Oscar for his short  Fifty Percent Gray  in 2002 and has produced several other great pieces such as his short  Blinky .

Rob Nederhorst is a veteran of the VFX industry. He has deep knowledge in compositing, lighting, 3D, 2D, as a supervisor, and even in programming. On top of that, he is also a teacher at University of Southern California. All this led him to his new venture  Live Mentor.   We talk about his history in the industry, and about his ideas behind the new project.

Dariush has recently joined Chaos Group as part of our education and documentation teams. I have known Dariush for a short time, but we quickly became great friends. He teaches at University of Southern California, and has written  several books on Maya and Max .  We talk about his past, how he stepped into teaching, and about the education in general.

With  Dan Roarty  in Los Angeles for E3, we took the opportunity to meet up, have lunch, and record a podcast. Dan, who now works for Microsoft's Game division, has been working in the game industry for most of his career. He is also well known for personal work of CG portraiture. It is because of his work in this area that we invited him to be one of the original members of the  Digital Human Lea...

Craig Shimahara, owns a fantastic Architectural Illustration company called  Shimahara Illustration . We talk about his background and how he started at Gensler, and what has also led him to start to become a fimmaker. We discuss the idea of style and story telling, and spend a bit of time talking about new mediums such as VR.

While at  FMX , I had the opportunity to visit  Luxx Studios ,  a n interesting small studio that does some really great Visual Effects work. I sat down with  Andrea Block and Christian Haas  in their very warm and inviting studio to talk about their work. Besides the work on  White House Down   and Grand Budapest Hotel , we also talked about the feature animation that they are producing called  M...

Paul Debevec's contributions to the CG field are well known. As the Chief Visual Officer at University of Southern California's  Institute of Creative Technology , he has broken ground with technology in many different ways for over 18 years. He may in fact be the godfather of Image Based Lighting, and probably the person that enabled HDR environment lighting to be as essential as most people cons...

We recorded this podcast while at FMX in Stuttgart. We had a great conversation with Jörn Großhans a VFX Supervisor and Christian Zilliken a CG Supervisor at Mackevision. They talk about what it was like to start a VFX department there and all the amazing work they did on Game Of Thrones Season 4 and 5. You will also hear a bit from Kian Saemian who is the Business Development Manager.

Allan and I both started our podcasts around the same time. And while he and I have similar audiences, history, and friends, we were inspired by different motivations. At the age of 33, Allan has been doing visual effects professionally for 20 years. Besides his strong drive, he feels a strong need to give back to the community through his new mentorship program.  I had a great time talking to All...

This week we talk to Ben West, a Creative Director at Framestore, and Director. His unique and interesting upbringing, combined with his strong creative education in both Architecture and Film School, led him to create interesting projects such as  Fugu and Tako . Based on it's success, Ben has launched a  kickstarter project  to expand the story into a graphic novel form. He tells us about his pa...

Most people that work in Visual Effects have a story about a person that helped get them in. For me, that person is Eric Hanson. In fact, for a long time he helped a number of people make the transition from Architecture to VFX. He has a long history in VFX, and continues to be a strong advocate in it's education as an associate professor of practice at  University of Southern California .  Greg D...

Scott Ross is an extremely important person in the world of Visual Effects. He was the general manager at ILM when they started to go digital. He also founded Digital Domain with James Cameron and Stan Winston. He later made great efforts to be an advocate for the visual effects industry based on his strong knowledge of how the business is run. Most recently, he has become an ambassador for  Troja...

Jonathan Litt has a long history in the world of VFX. We cover a large number of subjects in the podcast with Jon. From his first job at ILM, his work on the Matrix series, digital humans at Digital Domain, we even dive into his new passion for virtual reality. Jon offers insight into every part of the process.

How often to you hear people say: "It was so much better in the old days of special effects, now it is just all done on computers." There is a perception that VFX is easy, and that we, the artists, simply push a few buttons and it is all done. One of the places I often hear this is a place I actually have a huge respect for:  the Nerdist podcast . I'd like to call on our listeners to listen to thi...

We recorded this podcast while in San Jose California during the  GPU Technology Conference . Sponsored by NVIDIA, the conference is made for developers that are advancing development on the GPU with  CUDA . From Deep Learning to Raytracing, the conference covers a lot of different subjects. I went there with several of our developers from our main office in Sofia, including Vlado and Boris, who I...

Jeff Mottle, the founder of  CGarchitect.com   , has been a very strong voice for the ArchViz and Digital Design community since 2001. He also happens to be a good friend who I have known for years. While at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this last week, we ran into each other. As I started to ask him about what technology he thinks pushes the ArchViz and Digital Design community, we de...

Last year Gina Adden, our Marketing Director, and I attended an amazing event in Portugal called  Trojan Horse was a Unicorn . We enjoyed it so much that we felt strongly about supporting the event this year. We sat down and chatted with André Luis, one of the founders of the event, and Scott Ross, the Ambassador of the event. Even though the event is happening in September, it is nearly sold out....

You will quickly figure out that, not only is Lou Pecora a good friend of mine, but that I think he is one of greatest guys around. He has been been at Digital Domain for nearly 17 years. During that time, he went from working as a compositor on Super Nova to his first full credit as a VFX supervisor on X-Men: Days of Future Past, where he got nominated for an Oscar. True to Lou he remains humble...

Many of you probably know who Vlado is, but I bet many don't know Peter Mitev as well. Peter is the CEO of Chaos Group and started V-Ray with Vlado in 1997. For a long time, the whole company was just the two of them. Today, while there are offices around the world, he has tried to make sure that the company maintains the intimate feeling from their early days. He has a passion for experiencing di...

When Mike Seymour told me that he would be in town for a bit following the Sci-Tech awards at the Oscars, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to hang out, talk about Digital Humans, and do a podcast. As one of the founders of  FX Guide  and  FX PhD , he is at the center of both news and education in the world of VFX. So it was a pretty rare opportunity to turn the tables on him and have him tal...

After chatting and emailing  Important Looking Pirates  out of Stockholm for a year, I was super excited to hear that  Måns Björklund and  Niklas Jacobson were going to be in Los Angeles for the VES awards this year for their work on Crossbones. They talk about their past and what led them to start their company back in Sweeden, what it was like to start their studio there, and what has lead them...

It will be very clear that Graham and I are good friend, and that Jay and I have known each other for a while. Both Graham and Jay are from the Institute of Creative Technology, and have worked on facial scanning technology for a long time under Paul Debevec. They are both members of the Digital Human League and working on the Wikihuman project. It is a great conversation about all things ICT, vir...

There are several people at Chaos Group that have actual Architecture Degrees. We figured that since three of us happen to be in LA at the same time, lets have a chat about it. Corey Rubadue is the Director of our Baltimore Office, Lon Grohs is our Chief Commercial Officer, and Christopher Nichols is the Creative Director. We chat about our history, we chat about how the art of architectural illus...