Split Diopters, Indie Film Private Equity, and the Rock and Roll of Making Movies | Episode 558
Release Date: 07/27/2026
Why Half the Critics Got Tom Cruise's Digger Wrong | 570
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Digger opened to $8 million on a nine-figure budget, and critics split almost exactly in half. Chris and Daniel think Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise made one of the best films of the year, and they spend this Moonshine Drive-In trying to work out why so many people hated it. Their suspicion is that the divide runs by age. Chris and a friend his age both loved it. Both of their teenage sons hated it. Daniel's theory is that younger audiences find films like Brazil and A Clockwork Orange on Tubi with fifty years of approval already attached, so liking something the whole internet calls...
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The Next Nolan and Scorsese Are Coming Out of YouTube | Episode 569
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Most VFX supervisors trained on tentpoles have no idea how to make an independent film. Ed Douglas (VFX supervisor on Kane Parsons' Backrooms) and Peter Timberlake (VFX on Curry Barker's Obsession) have built careers doing exactly that, and they're back with Chris and Daniel for a Rough Cut on where VFX leadership is heading. Ed recently bid the same work at $8,000 with a legacy vendor and $250 elsewhere, which is why on a $10 million film he works as supervisor and VFX producer at once. Peter makes the case that big-studio pipelines got complicated to impress other pipeline TDs, and both of...
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I Called CAA to See If My Agent Still Worked There | Jonathan Goldman | Episode 568
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Jonathan Goldman called CAA to find out if his agent still worked there, and the replies to his Threads post said more about Hollywood's middle layer than most trade coverage this year. Jonathan has spent thirty years on the development side of the business. He started as Phillip Noyce's assistant, directed second unit for him, then rose from story producer to showrunner at Thom Beers' Original Productions on series including Ice Road Truckers. Last year he pitched six projects with CAA packaging and A-list partners. One got a development step, and the network passed a year later. Chris and...
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A Record Summer, Yet Studios Still Can't Pick Winners | CG Garage #567
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Warner Bros. was ready to write off Coyote vs. Acme, and after a sale to another company it has taken in about $85 million as of this episode's release. That sits inside a summer that put $4.7 billion through the box office, a record in dollars with ticket sales still short of the peak, and theaters full of young people lining up for smaller originals like Buddy alongside Nolan's Odyssey and Spider-Man. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins read it as proof that the majors can no longer pick winners. Daniel adds that Neon and A24 now sell what the studios used to sell, an identity people buy...
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Backrooms VFX Was Built Around Kane Parsons' Blender Workflow | Edward Douglas #566
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Kane Parsons was 19, had never worked inside a professional visual effects pipeline, and had taught himself the shots he needed in Blender in his bedroom. Edward Douglas, VFX supervisor on Backrooms (also Long Legs, Keeper, and multiple Oz Perkins films), built the production pipeline to fit him: direct access to vendor files, animation, and cameras, so Kane could work the same way he always had. The film delivered 600 VFX shots inside an 830 shot runtime, on an indie budget and timeline. Chris and Daniel connect this to the same shift they discussed with Peter Timberlake on Obsession: movies...
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Widow's Bay's Invisible VFX: How a New England Team Fakes Nothing | Brian Drewes | Ep. 565
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Chris and Daniel are thrilled that Widow's Bay is now shooting its second season, and they've brought on Brian Drewes, the man whose team at Zero VFX made the show's VFX disappear, to talk about how they did it. Drewes and his crew are based in Massachusetts, and the show's authentic New England vibe, the peeling paint, the real fishing towns, the moldy-book-smell houses, comes from a team that actually lives there and knows the difference between real and Disneyland-fisherman. They walk through the twin-boat rig, the night the crew knocked on doors across a real town to kill practical lights...
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Obsession's Secret VFX Behind Nikki's Uncanny Face | Peter Timberlake | Ep 564
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Nobody thinks Obsession has visual effects. That's the point. Peter Timberlake, the VFX supervisor behind one of the year's biggest indie breakouts, joins Chris and Daniel to break his silence on work so subtle most audiences never register it as VFX at all. The centerpiece is the character Nikki: rather than fighting to escape the uncanny valley, director Curry Barker asked Timberlake to push straight into it, mismatching her facial expressions on purpose so her eyes tell one emotional story while the rest of her face tells another. The result reads as a performance choice, not an effect, and...
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Easy Rider Is the Roadmap Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 563
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Easy Rider is not a good movie. It's a chaotic, half-improvised, drug-fueled mess that stumbles for its first half and only becomes a movie in retrospect, once the ending lands. And that's exactly why Chris and Daniel keep coming back to it. Joining them is Richard Crudo, ASC, who spent years in friendship with László Kovács, the film's cinematographer, and brings firsthand insight into how a low-budget biker-movie veteran ended up accidentally rewriting what cinematography was allowed to look like. Flares, handheld chaos, a single zoom lens pushed past its limits, film stock literally...
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CEO of Crafty Apes Alana Newell on What Actually Motivates Artists | Episode 562
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Alana Newell is CEO of Crafty Apes, a company that grew through the worst stretch this industry has seen in decades. She got there the rare way. She came up as a compositor, ran 2D, and took on what was effectively a chief operating officer (COO) role at Rising Sun Pictures because she was tired of watching the end of the pipeline absorb every problem created upstream. Then she went and got a master's in business to understand how the machine actually works. She still holds both jobs. Her read on why most visual effects companies struggle is uncomplicated: the business is people, and the...
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Spider-Man's Record Weekend, the EU vs. AI Video, and the First Rule of Being a VFX Supervisor | Episode 561
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Spider-Man just posted the biggest opening weekend in box office history, and Chris, Daniel, and returning panelist Todd Perry dig into why, right after a year of everyone insisting the superhero genre was dead. From there the panel tackles Kitbash3D's surprise acquisition of ArtStation and Sketchfab from Epic Games, the strange history of ArtStation's own anti-AI protest era, a visibly shrinking Siggraph 2026 show floor that still delivered on the research side, and the growing push to label AI-generated video content on social media, including where the EU's regulatory reach is headed and...
info_outlineSomething is shifting in independent film right now, and Ron Cohen, one of the producers on June July and a veteran of physical production, is exactly the person to make sense of it. Chris and Daniel bring him in for a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from The Odyssey's marketing to the A24 backlash of the moment, but the real news is that the team just wrapped a shoot on June July, and Ron walks through how it actually went.
The conversation moves into the details of that shoot, where fully ray traced and relightable Gaussian splats, an unplanned split diopter, and a crew that improvised through a rough second day produced a shot nobody storyboarded. Ron also weighs in on private equity's growing role in indie film financing, the five to ten million dollar sweet spot for creative freedom, and what the Warner Bros/Paramount consolidation could open up for smaller studios willing to bet on story over stars.
References mentioned:
A24
Google DeepMind
The Odyssey
Warner Bros / Paramount
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/