Cg Garage

Ed Ulbrich thinks the world needs more slop. Flood the market with AI-generated content and work with real taste becomes impossible to miss, which is how he expects the next Fincher to break through. That take comes from someone who has called these shifts early before. As a Digital Domain executive and later its CEO, he helped get Benjamin Button and Tron: Legacy made, then produced Ender's Game himself. He went on to run production at Metaphysic, doing licensed likeness work during the strike, and now he advises the startups building AI into film production. Those startups are where he sees the trouble. AI-native studios are walking into the trap that hollowed out visual effects. Most came from tech and raised money to make movies, then found that selling a film is as hard as it ever was. So they are taking VFX work on franchise films to keep cash flowing, with nobody on staff who knows how to price a bid, and the studios are happy to play them against each other. Ed's advice to them, in his words, is to sw

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 garbage is a skill most of them never had to build. Chris and Daniel also make the case that Digger is the answer to Don't Look Up. Adam McKay's film knows it's right and treats anyone who disagrees as the enemy. Digger opens as a broad cartoon of a Texas oil baron, then slowly asks you to feel for him, with Jesse Plemons delivering what Chris calls one of the best speeches ever put in a movie. They also get into why this i

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 them have blunt advice for graduates who can't find a studio that's hiring. The panel also takes on AI. The year's breakout films came from YouTube-native directors working without generative tools, while Scorsese has signed on to advise Black Forest Labs. Ed argues the word "AI" now covers dozens of unrelated technologies and the industry needs sharper language for them. Chris raises the one-person Grok remake of The Ody

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 Daniel get their answer about CAA. Jonathan's version is that the people who greenlight shows aren't paid to take risks, in a town that gamblers built. The route there runs through Noyce handing him second unit at Shea Stadium once he'd fetched the coffee, a Phoenix strip club series he pitched as the Sopranos of the Southwest, a Terlingua, Texas murder trial he covered for Nat Geo, and why Obsession, Backrooms, Widow's Ba

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 tickets on. Daniel said on an earlier episode that if Backrooms hit, everyone should look into SCP and liminal space horror. A24, the studio behind Backrooms, has since taken worldwide rights to V/H/S: SCP, set for a 2027 theatrical release. Daniel says Spielberg is producing The Mandela Catalogue and Siren Head is headed for a major movie, all from a horror genre born on YouTube that the studios missed while they skipped two

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 built on constraint outperforming movies built on scale. Douglas walks through the CG grounding rule that shaped the film (the practical hat that never gets replaced), the VHS pass every found footage frame ran through, and why horror keeps producing the year's most interesting visual effects work while franchise budgets keep climbing. Guest links Edward Douglas on IMDB > Edward Douglas on LinkedIn > Tools and companies

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 instead of shooting a split screen, and why the darkest, cheapest choice on set is usually the right one. The conversation turns hard on AI provenance. Drewes is building Somantix, a system for embedding C2PA policy data directly into delivered files. He says the terms of service governing AI tools change almost weekly, and that studios have no central record of which vendor used what tool under what rules. He and Daniel

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 it's exactly the kind of restraint the team wanted. Peter walks through why the studio debated whether to talk about this work publicly at all, and lands on a simple answer: nothing he says can take anything away from the lead actress's performance. Before Obsession, Peter built his career the hard way: driving to LA with two thousand dollars, sleeping in a parking lot, and landing his first industry job cleaning dishes

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 dropped in a bathtub. Every mistake became doctrine. The conversation keeps circling back to a bigger question: why does a movie built entirely out of accidents still work, and what does that tell filmmakers chasing polish today? Kovács shot on instinct and natural light because the budget demanded it, not because he planned a movement, and Crudo, Chris, and Daniel trace how that constraint produced a documentary rawness no amo

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 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 pipel

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 the murky line between VFX and deepfakes. In the second half, Todd Perry, VFX supervisor on For All Mankind, pulls back the curtain on the unwritten rules of working on a film set. He's spent seasons quietly compiling a running list of roughly forty five lessons on surviving the day to day chaos of a shoot, from managing the assistant director relationship to knowing exactly when to call for balls and charts. He walks Chri

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 back through Close Encounters and Sugarland Express. This time they bring on the person who actually built it, for a conversation about matching digitally-replaced train sequences to real-world reference plates, a shot count that came in smaller than planned going in, and why the biggest emotional gut-punch in the movie has almost nothing to do with visual effects at all. Butler walks through how Spielberg directs VFX wi

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 when a director spends the entire movie making an audience feel exactly what an intractable wait feels like, and why Nolan's obsession with time connects everything from Memento through Tenet to this one. Daniel makes the case that Nolan has finally figured out how to deliver Tenet's disorienting rewatch effect without forcing anyone to actually rewatch anything. Chris and Daniel also compare Nolan's spectacle-forward appr

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 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 Sponso

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 specifically because Spielberg's glossy reputation could disguise a bleak, unnerving film, and the moment James Lipton caught Spielberg off guard by connecting his parents directly to Close Encounters on camera. Disclosure Day itself is proving strangely divisive, and Chris and Daniel dig into why. They break down its Sugarland Express-style chase structure, an Emily Blunt performance that starts as broad comedy and quietly tr

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 The Odyssey and the practical-versus-VFX marketing dance that VFX artists roll their eyes at every single time it resurfaces. They close with a Monstrous Moonshine state of the union, walking through the June July shoot and a quick, lighthearted aside on why the show still uses AI tools like Suno for its own theme song. Mentioned this episode: A24, Google DeepMind Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. Discovery, Mark Ruffalo,

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 conversation originally aired in July 2020, before a lot of you were listening, and it's one of the fullest records of him explaining his life's obsession in his own words. We're pulling it back out of the archives because it deserves a wider audience than it got the first time around. Chris and Doug cover the whole arc: getting hired at Graphic Films off a satellite painting, cold calling Stanley Kubrick's secret phone number to get on 2001, the accidental discovery of double stars that led him toward persistence of vision research, and the Showscan process he patented at Paramount. They also get into Trumbull's MAGI proc

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 where things would end up. What Hnedel built along the way was not just a technical skillset but a spatial intelligence that became the secret weapon behind one of the most visually distinctive streaming shows in recent memory. Spider-Man Noir is shot in color and black and white simultaneously, built on sets too small for the scripted action, and executed with a noir discipline that its showrunner and director Harry Bradbeer summed up as: what if Orson Welles had a Steadicam? Hnedel breaks down how previs shaped what they could actually afford to build, how the stunt team and VFX department merged into a single producti

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 dollars. Backrooms cost ten million. Both are outperforming movies that cost a hundred times more. Chris and Daniel break down both films as filmmakers. They get into what Obsession borrows from Takashi Miike's Audition and why that works, how Backrooms uses the architecture of infinite scroll and TikTok as genuine psychological horror, why sound design and shadows are a more effective budget tool than any AI pipeline, what the economics of AMC A-list are doing to studio revenue models, and why the wrong lesson from all of this is to go hire these directors to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel. Referenced in this epis

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 credits run through Warner Brothers and Fox, and Julianna Medina-Politsky, who spent a decade as an executive at Legendary Entertainment and now runs Station X Ventures, for a conversation that is more grounded in the realities of production and finance than most discussions of this subject ever get. The episode tracks what is actually happening right now. Obsession got made with private equity because Universal passed, and it worked. The Backrooms built a decade of community before anyone put it in a theater, and the studios still haven't figured out what that means for distribution. Gareth Edwards keeps coming up as