CG Garage

Visitors to this year's Trojan Horse was a Unicorn digital arts festival in Troia Portugal were wowed by Aoi Yamaguchi's opening performance, in which the artist created beautiful large-scale calligraphic figures in response to pieces of music. Chris caught up with Aoi and discovered more about the ancient art of calligraphy, including its range of 2,000-plus characters, the importance of the tool...

How do you make a modern theme park ride? Framestore's Eugénie von Tunzelmann has the answers. As the Head of VFX for the studio's rides department, Eugénie has contributed to some incredible rides, including the Jurassic World VelociCoaster at Universal Orlando's Islands of Adventure. Eugénie talks about how her experience on movies including Interstellar and Batman Begins has fed into attraction...

Opening or closing credits have become a key part of the cinematic or televisual experience. In just a few minutes, these mini masterpieces have to convey the essence of the film or TV show in terms of its vision, music, and characters, and they serve a legal requirement in listing its cast and crew. Joining Chris this week is Karin Fong, who tells the story of how she became title designer for an...

Crafty Apes' Sean M. Ritchie and Chris Cook have seen changes in the VFX industry first-hand. The CG Supervisors both began their careers in architectural visualization before moving into VFX for movies and TV including The Walking Dead , Gravity , Once Upon a Time , Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 , and Dune . Now, Sean and Chris work at Crafty Apes, the prolific VFX studio that's delivered effec...

How has rendering evolved, and what does its future hold? In this podcast, Pixar's Dylan Sisson answers these burning questions, covering everything from Toy Story's and Renderman's beginnings in the mid-80s to the way Disney is now using AI to generate visuals, and even hone scripts and analyze audience reactions. Dylan also discusses his background in Macromedia Director and CD-Roms, how Moore's...

Break out the Martini, the CG Garage Podcast is 400 episodes old! To celebrate its quatercentenary, Chris has attracted a very special guest star: director Scott Leberecht, whose new documentary, Jurassic Punk , explores the impact VFX pioneer Steve Williams had on the movie industry via films including The Abyss , Terminator 2 , Jurassic Park , and Spawn . In doing so, Scott sheds light on the tu...

Could Muse's "You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween" become the soundtrack for the spooky season? The legendary rock band's song is packed with references to classic horror tales, and the music video brings the lyrics to life (or should that be death?) with a spooktacular trip into a deeply haunted house. In this podcast the video's director, Tom Teller discusses the creative process behind the pro...

What does it take to produce an animated movie? In this podcast, Chris meets talented and ambitious producer Jinko Gotoh, who has been a driving force behind pioneering, Oscar-nominated films including Space Jam , Dinosaur , Finding Nemo , The Illusionist , Klaus , and The LEGO Movie 2 . Jinko discusses her journey into movie-making, from being inspired by Lady and The Tramp and Astroboy to learni...

Strap in for a tour de force podcast episode. Mikal Vega's inspirational story begins in small-town Ohio, where he played Dungeons and Dragons and made movies with his grandma. After serving in the military, he received a break into movies via a role in Transformers: Dark of the Moon . From here, Mikal's combat experience and creative skills landed him directorial roles on mocap for games, includi...

This week's podcast guest is truly inspirational. By the age of 20, Zhang Jingna had won bronze for air rifle shooting at the Commonwealth Games and broken records in the sport. After moving into photography, she immediately picked up clients including Mercedes Benz, Canon, and Wacom, and produced fashion editorials for magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle. In this podcast, Zhang tal...

Taking part in a CG Garage podcast has been on Oliver Markowski's bucket list for some time — and with good reason. The self-proclaimed VFX geek has a lot to talk about in this lively and honest conversation with Chris, from his work on movies including Captain America: The Winter Soldier , Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 , Spectre , and Black Panther , to how new file formats and pipelines are ma...

Angie Jones' passion for character animation has fuelled a career that's taken in some of the world's biggest movies and games. Beginning with the groundbreaking videogame Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey , she's gone on to animate a variety of characters for Stuart Little 2 , X2 , Freddy vs. Jason , Stealth , Pan's Labyrinth , Red Dead Revolver , Bloodshot , Fortnite , and many more. Angie is full of hil...

An epic career deserves an epic podcast. During Garman Herigstad's 35-year journey in CG, the Houdini wizard has traveled to over 30 countries and worked on everything from real estate commercials in Bangkok to Disney videogames and Hollywood movies. At the same time, he's taught at prestigious institutions, including Savannah College of Art and Design and Gnomon, and he even completed his most re...

Mio Markovic's creative, production, and tech skills have resulted in some of the best animated TV series of recent years, including Voltron: Legendary Defender , Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous , and Fast & Furious Spy Racers . But Mio didn't just jump into animation: he had already risen to a high level in the advertising industry and, like Chris, had worked on large-scale architecture projects....

Over the past five years, Love, Death & Robots has completely resculpted the landscape of animation, feeding Netflix viewers bite-size chunks of violence, sex, and gore. Supervising Creative Director Jerome Denjean is a key player behind-the-scenes, giving Love, Death & Robots' talented directors the freedom to execute their visions (literally!) while ensuring that each episode fits in with the se...

VFX supervising Stranger Things is the latest in a series of remarkable achievements for Justin Mitchell. After trying his hand at acting and lighting, Justin moved into animation and VFX, scoring credits on Charmed and Final Destination 2 . In 2008, Justin joined Scanline VFX, where he's worked on a succession of incredible projects, including 2012 , Super 8 , Iron Man 3 , Tomb Raider , Cosmos ,...

Mike Romey, has an incredible talent for uniting the creative and technical aspects of productions. Before he'd even landed a full-time job, he'd already animated an advertisement, set up a curriculum, and created an interactive CD-ROM for a laser printer (yes, this was definitely the 90s). Then, his career took in successively bigger projects, from planetarium shows and Time Square electronic sig...

Isaac Irvin's incredible VFX industry adventures have taken him across countries and over oceans. From enthusiastic beginnings at Texan TV stations, he moved to Scotland to work on TV series and game cinematics, before returning to the States to flit between studios including Digital Domain, Method, Marauder, and Psyop on projects such as Speed Racer , Iron Man 3 , Robocop , and more. Today, Isaac...

As an executive at Disney in the 90s, Bob Bacon witnessed the rise of CG, supporting the production of increasingly big-budget blockbusters, including Beauty and the Beast , Mulan , and Lilo and Stitch . He then joined Elton John for Gnomeo and Juliet and moved to Paramount for The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water . Now, Bob is Head of Studio at Virtue Animation, a Web3-based company inspired...

Sean Devereaux has fulfilled his childhood dream of making movies, and he started and sold a software company along the way. After being inspired by a viewing of The Wizard of Oz , Sean got a break at Digital Domain thanks to fellow alumni Jonathan Egstad. After working on movies including How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Vanilla Sky , he returned to Boston to found Zero VFX, which has created s...

After getting on-set experience for a Canadian TV series, Mathew Giampa picked up compositing roles on White Noise 2 , Sucker Punch , Journey to the Center of the Earth , Green Lantern , and more. He then moved up to progressively more challenging VFX supervision work on The Joker (yes, there were visual effects in that movie!), Black Widow , The Suicide Squad , and the Cowboy Bebop TV series. Mat...

Thinking about starting your own VFX company? This week's podcast guest, Marc Morissette, has done just that. After gaining experience and friendships at Digital Domain on projects including Peter Pan and Ghost Racer , Marc returned to his native Canada to form his own studio, Cluster. The company has taken on a variety of CG work, from a VR version of the Universal Studios globe for The Mummy to...

This week Scott Kirvan shares his unique and in-depth understanding of the VFX pipeline, from on-set supervision to rendering the final frame. While working as a VFX programmer at Blur Studio, Scott developed Brazil R/S, the early ray-tracing renderer used on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Sin City . That's not all — he also VFX supervised movies including Swordfish and Jeepers Cre...

Eddie Smith is a MacGyver of the VFX industry. Over his career, he's figured out how to unveil the president as the bad guy for G.I. Joe: Retaliation, explode characters into cubes for Tron: Legacy , destroy planets in Ender's Game , all the way up to some spoiler-ific effects for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore . Eddie's weapon of choice for VFX is Houdini, SideFX's versatile node-bas...