CG Garage

Doug Trumbull spent fifty years trying to convince Hollywood that the way movies are projected is fundamentally broken, and most of the industry never listened. The visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Blade Runner , and Star Trek: The Motion Picture , and the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm , Trumbull passed away in 2022. This con...

Hnedel Maximore did not come up through the traditional VFX pipeline. He started drafting floor plans in Liberia, studied architecture in Michigan, got laid off during the housing crash, and worked his way across industries before landing at Speed Shape in Detroit doing automotive commercials. That's also where he and Chris first crossed paths, years before either of them could have predicted wher...

For years Chris and Daniel have been saying the corner was going to turn, that history would repeat itself the way it did in the 1970s. It turned. Jason Blum said the same thing last week. Two horror films made by twenty-something YouTubers just proved everything the studio system has been getting wrong, and the box office numbers are not being polite about it. Obsession cost under a million dolla...

Hollywood is having a Marie Antoinette moment. The people running studios and making AI announcements have no idea how their decisions are landing with the audience that actually buys tickets, and the backlash to Jorge R. Gutierrez announcing Punky Duck as an AI project is just the most recent and visible proof. Chris and Daniel are joined by Trina Renee, a studio-side post producer whose client c...

Sergio Cilli is going to get hate from both sides. The pro-AI crowd thinks he's mocking their tools. The anti-AI crowd thinks he's a hypocrite for using them. He's fine with that. Cilli is a director and writer who came up through sketch comedy and the writers' room of a David Spade Comedy Central show, went on to the Late Late Show as a segment producer, built a commercial directing career throug...

Gothic horror is having a moment, and Justin Denton got there before the wave. His feature The Curse of the Sin Eater is now streaming on Prime, built for under a million dollars with 19 shooting days, a single private benefactor, Chicago theater actors, an English manor that half-burned down and got rebuilt by hand, and a composer found on Spotify who bowed his guitar like a cello because he didn...

The man who invented nonlinear editing is not done disrupting filmmaking. Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology and the engineer behind the tool that unlocked the indie film revolution of the 1990s, has spent the last several years pushing a new idea at Lightcraft: a CAD system for movies, built to take a filmmaker from first idea to final pixel without ever losing control to the technology alon...

A movie from 2006 looks like it could have come out last year. The cars are the same. The computers are the same. The fashion, the cinematography, the music -- all of it effectively unchanged. Chris and Daniel use The Devil Wears Prada as a lens to ask a question that goes well beyond film: has Western pop culture simply... stopped moving? The conversation covers the film's craft -- Meryl Streep's...

Marc Rienzo is a veteran VFX artist and supervisor with his roots deep in compositing -- the kind of career that runs through Digital Domain, Sony, Weta, and the first Spider-Man 's web-swinging climax, a shot he was literally escorted away from by a PA to make sure he went home after three days straight. That obsessive standard for invisible work turns out to be exactly the skill set that matters...

Hollywood isn't dying. It's being deconstructed and reassembled into something nobody has a blueprint for, and the people falling into the water right now are the ones who have to figure out what the new ship looks like. Chris Nichols, Daniel, and James are recording this one from a moving car, driving from Los Angeles to Angel's Camp, California for a live location shoot on their Monstrous Moonsh...

Hollywood has been gatekept for decades, but a multi-hyphenate who has appeared in films with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Werner Herzog, co-written a screenplay with Stan Lee, and produced for VH1 and Comedy Central is now building something the studios never could have given him. Victor Varnado, stand-up comedian, actor, filmmaker, National Science Foundation grant recipient, and CEO of Supreme Rob...

500 episodes of television is a number that stops people cold, and Jay Worth hit that milestone last year without slowing down. Worth came up through the pressure cooker of Digital Domain's commercial division, survived the 23-episode broadcast grind on J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot slate across Alias , Fringe , Lost , and Cloverfield , and helped define what prestige television VFX looks like on Westwor...

The job market for visual effects and CG artists has not just contracted, it has fundamentally restructured. The skills that guaranteed a career five years ago are not the skills that will get anyone hired today, and the people who understand that shift most clearly are the ones placing talent for a living. Stan Szymanski and Susan Thurman O'Neal, arguably the two best-known recruiters working in...

Portland, Oregon is not where you expect to find a VFX studio with credits on Fallout , One Piece , Shogun , and The Peripheral . Fred Ruff built Refuge VFX there anyway, starting with six freelancers crammed into an office barely big enough to breathe in, and grew it into one of the more interesting independent shops working in streaming today. The secret, if there is one, is that Refuge treats e...

Most filmmaking tools are built by engineers who have never made a film. Ashay Javadekar has done both. A PhD chemical engineer who directed two internationally awarded independent features on shoestring budgets, he approaches filmmaking the way he approaches any hard system: find the broken process, understand it from first principles, and build something better. Eagle Slate, his iPad-based smart...

There's a Tuesday night writers group that has quietly shaped the careers of some seriously talented people working in Hollywood right now, and CG Garage is slowly pulling back the curtain on it. Sean Rourke is the second member of that group to come on the show, following Andy Cochrane, and his path through the industry is one of the more unlikely and instructive ones you'll hear. He spent 12 yea...

Most people who end up in VFX spent years obsessing over frames and film. Ryan Kelsey spent 13 years in telecom in Cincinnati, selling fiber and managed IT services, before stumbling into an industry where studios win Oscars and go bankrupt in the same month. That collision of worlds turns out to be exactly the perspective the business needs right now. Ryan is VP of Sales at Center Grid Virtual St...

Jess Loren has built one of the most-followed voices in the entertainment technology space on LinkedIn, and she has earned it by calling industry shifts before they become consensus. Her read on Gaussian splats as a genuine production tool, not a novelty, is proving correct. As co-founder of Global Objects and a board member of the Visual Effects Society, Jess has spent the last year turning that...

Here is a radical idea: what if you rehearsed the movie before you shot it? Not storyboards. Not an animatic. Live actors, real cameras, and actual creative decisions being made in the room. That is what Chris Nichols and Daniel Thron have been doing on June July, and cinematographer Richard Crudo, ASC joined them to find out if it actually works. Richard brings perspective from the Coen Brothers'...

Why are we still waiting for a green light from people who do not understand our craft? This reality is at the heart of our conversation with Andy Cochrane, a creative who has spent twenty years navigating the collapsing bridges of the entertainment industry. Andy takes us through the trenches of his career, from the grueling 70-hour weeks as a runner on CSI: Miami to the high-stakes visual effect...

The "good enough" era of streaming is hitting a wall, and a new rebellious streak in Hollywood is reclaiming the theater as the primal source of the cinematic experience. We are joined by two veterans navigating this shift: Rob Nederhorst, a VFX supervisor who has shaped the visceral worlds of John Wick 3 and The Conjuring , and Ben Hansford, a prolific commercial director now leading the charge i...

If the movies you're seeing lately feel like they were assembled by a committee rather than a creator, you're looking at the wrong side of the lens. We are dusting off a classic format today, leaning into the kind of raw film breakdowns we used to live for. The spotlight is on two heavyweights: Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another . Both of these pictures...

Long before he was codifying the industry in the VES Handbook , Jeff was a kid in Los Angeles pouring ketchup on his friends to stage fake street fights for a hidden camera. His journey into the heart of cinema began under the mentorship of graphic design icon Saul Bass , where he learned that pushing the right buttons could lead to miraculous results. This foundation in precision and storytelling...

Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme transports audiences to a vibrant 1950s world of professional ping pong, yet many viewers remain unaware that the film contains over 500 visual effects shots. Eran Dinur, the film's VFX Supervisor, reveals how his team meticulously recreated period accurate crowds in Tokyo and Wembley while keeping the digital work entirely "invisible." He views his role as a bridge bet...

What happens when a filmmaker abandons a studio career on Saving Private Ryan and a PhD in history to create a film so challenging it is rejected by both Israeli and Arab film festivals? Michael Moshe Dahan joins the podcast to discuss Yes, Repeat, No , a meta-fictional deep dive into the life of actor-activist Juliano Mer-Khamis. By casting Palestinian, Israeli, and Lebanese actors to play differ...