CEO of Crafty Apes Alana Newell on What Actually Motivates Artists | Episode 562
Release Date: 08/24/2026
Widow's Bay's Invisible VFX: How a New England Team Fakes Nothing | Brian Drewes | Ep. 565
CG Garage
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...
info_outline
Obsession's Secret VFX Behind Nikki's Uncanny Face | Peter Timberlake | Ep 564
CG Garage
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...
info_outline
Easy Rider Is the Roadmap Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 563
CG Garage
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...
info_outline
CEO of Crafty Apes Alana Newell on What Actually Motivates Artists | Episode 562
CG Garage
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...
info_outline
Spider-Man's Record Weekend, the EU vs. AI Video, and the First Rule of Being a VFX Supervisor | Episode 561
CG Garage
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_outline
Inside the VFX of Disclosure Day with Matthew Butler | Episode 560
CG Garage
Steven Spielberg doesn't want you to know his aliens aren't real. That's the standard Matthew Butler had to hit on Disclosure Day: total photographic believability, zero tolerance for anything that reads as fantasy, even when the story is about a supposed decades-long government cover-up of extraterrestrial contact. Butler has been Spielberg's go-to VFX supervisor for grounded, "make it real" work since Ready Player One, and before that, he was Chris's first VFX supervisor ever, on The Day After Tomorrow. Back in Episode 557, Chris and Daniel broke down Disclosure Day as fans, tracing its DNA...
info_outline
Nolan's Odyssey Is Really a Movie About Waiting | Episode 559
CG Garage
Is it a good movie if you have to watch it ten times? That's the question Chris and Daniel keep circling back to as they take on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, skipping the marketing noise and the wireframe-cyclops conspiracy theories to actually ask whether the thing works as a film. They dig into what Nolan is doing as a filmmaker, structurally and emotionally, in his adaptation of the oldest story in Western literature, and why a three hour runtime built around a decade-long wait might be the whole point rather than a flaw. The real conversation is about adaptation itself: what happens...
info_outline
Split Diopters, Indie Film Private Equity, and the Rock and Roll of Making Movies | Episode 558
CG Garage
Something 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...
info_outline
Disclosure Day and The Secret Weirdness of Steven Spielberg | Episode 557
CG Garage
Steven Spielberg is the most famous filmmaker alive, which is exactly why almost nobody actually understands him. Chris and Daniel use Disclosure Day, Spielberg's new alien chase thriller with Emily Blunt, to argue that the "safe, mainstream" reputation is a decades-long misdirection: underneath the crowd-pleasing surface is a genuinely weird, deeply personal artist who has been smuggling strange, uncomfortable ideas inside blockbuster packaging since at least Close Encounters. They trace it through Fabelman's casting David Lynch as John Ford, the theory that Kubrick handed Spielberg AI...
info_outline
A24, DeepMind, and the "No CGI" Marketing Lie Everyone's Tired Of | Episode 556
CG Garage
A24 announced a $75 million research partnership with Google DeepMind and framed it as R&D for production tools, not a content deal. Nobody cared about the distinction. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins spend the first half of this Rough Cut on why that announcement landed like a betrayal anyway, then pull the same thread through the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Mark Ruffalo's New York Times op-ed on quiet industry retaliation, and what it means that four studios now control what used to take six. From there the panel turns to Christopher Nolan's press tour for...
info_outlineAlana 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 paycheck is not what motivates them.
Alana walks Chris and Daniel through the three values she reverse engineered by watching the founders work instead of putting them in a room and asking, the one company one profit and loss rule that keeps a dozen satellite offices from competing against each other, and why agility beats chasing tax subsidies. She makes the case that machine learning is a feature of the visual effects pipeline and not a bug to be engineered out, argues that pretending you do or do not use AI is equally dishonest, and explains why the projects nobody could afford to attempt before are the real opportunity. Plus Wizard of Oz at Sphere, the VES Award for The Residence, Jumanji, the Australia expansion, and why the only operational problem she has never solved is the speed of the Earth's rotation.
Mentioned in this episode:
Crafty Apes founders Chris LeDoux, Tim LeDoux, and Jason Sanford
Sphere and The Wizard of Oz at Sphere
The Residence, VES (Visual Effects Society) Award
Jumanji
Autodesk Maya
Blender
The Backrooms
Life of Pi
The Odyssey
Obsession
CG Garage:
CG Garage website: https://www.cggarage.com/
Podcast page: https://podcast.cggarage.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mmstudios71
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/monstrous-moonshine
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cggaragepodcast
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mmstudios71
Special thanks to our sponsor:
CenterGrid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/