CG Garage

Last week we spoke to Norman Seeff about his response to our discussion on the Uncanny Valley. This week, we spoke to Oleg Alexander , a member of the Digital Human League about his work at the  Institute of Creative Technology  and his response and feelings on Norman's point of view of the subject. We are also joined by Stephen Parker who is also a member of the Digital Human League.

There are those moments in your life where you feel lucky to have met someone special. I got a chance to sit down with  Norman Seeff one on one for over an hour which was was one of those moments for me. While many people may not know his name, everyone knows his work. He has made his fame through the most honest and real photographs he took of celebrities over the last several decades . He manage...

Alex Alvarez started the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games + Animation in 1997 when the industry itself had few resources to find talent. His motivation came from his own frustration of the current education system in the United States, and its lack of support for the arts, or art education. Today, Gnomon continues to be one of the leading schools for Visual Effects by keeping its enrollment...

Kevin and Snow Mack are both fine artist that met at Art Center. Kevin has a very long family history in animation and the VFX world where his mother and father both worked at Disney. Kevin, the self claimed reluctant VFX Supervisor, won an Oscar in 1999 for What Dreams May Come . Snow is an amazing and prolific artist that used her skills as a digital matte painter and many major feature films. T...

An old friend of Dariush Derakhshani, Nozawa Tetsuya is the CEO of Guncy in Japan, a new company focused on bringing tool sets to a Japanese workflow and pipeline. The interview was translated so that it could work for both English and Japanese speaking audiences. We find out a great deal about his past, as well as the the kind of projects and work people can expect as a CG artists in Japan.

Our second podcast from THU 2105 features two great artists. Jose Alves da Silva and Andrew Hickinbottom . Both have a love of character, have an amazing sense of humor, are great friends, but live in very different styles. We talk about their inspirations, and about our love for THU where we all became great friends.

Lon Grohs and I talk to  Kim Baumann Larsen , a licensed Architect and 3D artist for 20 years from Norway, about his experience in Virtual Reality. Kim has been working in the VR space since the early 90s. So when the new wave of VR happened a few years ago, he was ready. With all three of us coming from architecture we decided to talk about where we see how VR fits in the architecture world. We t...

David Prescott will kick off the first off a series off conversations we had at Trojan Horse was a Unicorn this year in Troia, Portugal. I first met David 13 years ago when we both worked at Digital Domain . We talk about his journey from South Africa to DD and Dreamworks . As a seasoned veteran, David has a great ability to balance logic, perception, reality, and inspiration. These ideas are what...

Blur Studio  has always been a good friend of Chaos Group, but we were still lucky to be able to get Tim Miller, one of the founders of Blur, on the podcast. Tim is in the middle of directing the upcoming film  Deadpool , due out in 2016. We talk about what it is like to get your first big feature film directing gig at age 50. We also have a very honest talk about running a studio like Blur, a ver...

My first real job out of Architecture School was at   Gensler  back in 1997. This year Gensler is celebrating it's 50th anniversary. I have very fond memories of my time there. This year, while at Siggraph, I ran into Scott DeWoody and Alan Robles who are now looking at a lot of new technology within the company. I figured it would be a great time to see what they are doing and help me see what ha...

Wes Ball   is best known as the Director of  The Maze Runner  and the upcoming sequel  The Scorch Trials  coming out September 18th 2015. After letting us know that he enjoys the CG Garage Podcast on  Twitter , I invited Wes to be a guest. He agreed right away and sat down with us in the garage in Culver City. As a big Lightwave and Modo user, he loves CG and has used it for many of his own projec...

While at Siggraph we sat down with Kevin Baillie from  Atomic Fiction . We speak about his interesting career starting on the Skywalker ranch, which, after a few extra stops along the way, led him to start Atomic Fiction with his childhood friend  Ryan Tudhope . Kevin and his company are not shy of trying new things. While most people think that eventually people will possibly be rendering on the...

We sit down at Siggraph 2015 to talk to Senior Compositor Shahin Toosi about how he has spent the last 2 years pushing  V-Ray for Nuke . Based on his self admitted addiction with the product, he explains how having that level of rendering power inside of a composting package opens the doors things to people may not realize is possible.

Based on a request on  Twitter , I asked Fausto to come on the podcast. His interesting background coming from São Paulo Brazil to working at  Blizzard  eventually led him to be a concept artist, now working at  Lightstorm Entertainment . We follow his interesting and inspiring story.

Legend 3D  is well known for it's work in stereo conversion. Over the years, they have brought this to a new level that has enabled them to expand into the realm of VR. That is where Justin entered the picture. He explains why a stereo conversion house has a unique ability that allows for greater flexibility in creating VR content. Through several projects, he explains their learning process and t...

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.