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 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/

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/