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 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 at Framestore. He went on to found his own studio, Queen Studio, in 2018, work at Weta and The Mill, and eventually build the small, scrappy team that shot Obsession in twenty days after blocking the entire film shot for shot in Unreal Engine before a single frame was captured. Chris and Daniel dig into what indie filmmakers can actually learn from this: planning replaces budget, ownership replaces plug-and-play pipelines, and the best VFX work is often the kind the audience never notices.
Guest links:
Peter Timberlake LinkedIn > 
Peter Timberlake IMDB > 
Peter Timberlake Instagram > 
Queen Studio LinkedIn > 
Focus Features LinkedIn > 
Focus Features Instagram > 
Tools and companies mentioned:
Framestore LA, Weta, The Mill, Sony Imageworks, Queen Studio, Maya, Cinema 4D, TurboSquid, DaVinci Resolve, Embergen, Unreal Engine, Arri Alexa 65, Panavision, Peacock, TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), Focus Features
People mentioned:
Curry Barker (director, Obsession), Taylor Clemens (DP), Haley Johnson (producer), Michael Rolla (comp supervisor, mutual connection), Janelle Croshaw Ralla (VFX supervisor colleague, Spike Jonze collaborator), Edward Douglas (upcoming guest re: Backrooms)
Thank you to our sponsor:
CenterGrid Virtual Studio >

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 amount of intentional design has matched since. It's a conversation about permission: what happens when the people trained to avoid every mistake in the book stop caring what the old guard thinks.
Reference:
Richard Crudo, ASC >
Gear referenced: Arriflex IIC, Angenieux 25-250mm zoom, Bolex 16mm, Kodak 5254 film stock, 9-light fixtures
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 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.
Alana's LinkedIn
Crafty Apes' Website
Crafty Apes' Instagram
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/

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 Chris and Daniel through the ones that matter most for anyone stepping onto a set as a VFX supervisor for the first time.
Links & mentions:
Todd Perry on IMDB >
Todd Perry on LinkedIn >
ArtStation > 
The EU AI Act is Here >
Siggraph >
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 without ever really discussing VFX, and the two of them dig into what makes his process so different: a shot list that shrank instead of ballooning, something Butler says has never happened on any other project in his career, a director who wants to solve problems himself rather than have them solved for him, and a 30-year veteran realizing mid-conversation that the AI moment VFX is living through right now feels exactly like the unsolved chaos of the 1990s. A conversation about restraint, trust, and knowing when the effects work is actually done when nobody notices it.
Mentioned in this episode: Digital Domain, James Cameron, Titanic, Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper, Eric Barba, Doug Roble, Janusz Kamiński, Chris Columbus, Gremlins reboot, The Odyssey, Dune
Guest links:
Mattew Butler on IMDB >
Matthew Butler on LinkedIn >
Special thanks to our sponsor:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/