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 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/

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 approach to what a Denis Villeneuve version might have looked like, and get into why single-vision directors are becoming Hollywood's new IP.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan), Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Memento, Oppenheimer, Denis Villeneuve, Dune, Avatar, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Annihilation (Alex Garland), Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven), Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown, Frank Gehry, Steven Spielberg, Disclosure Day, Zack Kreger, Ryan Coogler, Hoyte van Hoytema, Wally Pfister, David Lynch, Jack Fisk, Paris, Texas, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Master and Commander, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Neuromancer (trailer)
Special thanks to our sponsor:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 transforms into something much stranger, a train sequence built to feel genuinely dangerous rather than stylized, and the VFX work from longtime collaborator Matthew Butler. Along the way, a detour into Spielberg's actual filmmaking journey, from Close Encounters to Poltergeist to AI, makes the case that his reputation as the "obvious" director has always been the biggest misdirection in his own filmography.
Referenced in this episode:
Disclosure Day
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Poltergeist
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
War of the Worlds
Minority Report
The Fabelmans
Sugarland Express
Matthew Butler, VFX Supervisor
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/