July 6, 2026 | 68 minLatest Episode
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 process, 4K stereo at 120 frames per second, representing 40 times the data of a traditional HD video, and Chris's own experience helping produce a piece of content rendered through it as a proof of concept. Trumbull gives his blunt account of Ang Lee allegedly misusing his patented process on Gemini Man . This is a conversation about a man who understood something about how movies work that almost nobody in the industry, including some of its biggest directors, ever fully grasped. Guest: Doug Trumbull > Referenced in this episode: 2001: A Space Odyssey Close Encounters of the Third Kind Star Trek: The Motion Picture Blade Runner Silent Running Brainstorm Showscan process > Future General Corporation (Paramount R&D division) > MAGI process > Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/
June 29, 2026 | 74 min
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 production unit, and why the dual delivery format put black and white monitors at video village for the entire shoot. He also gets direct about where VFX gets siloed too late in the process, and what it means when the VFX supervisor is employee number four. Guest: Hnedel Maximore on LinkedIn > Hnedel Maximore on IMDB > References: Spider-Man Noir (Amazon / Sony) > Speed Shape Torchlight (previs) V-Ray > ILM > Fuse FX Zero VFX Scanline VFX Digital Domain > Sway Chinatown (1974) Wicked Is Pain (documentary) Backrooms Obsession Honey Don't (Ethan Coen) Blender This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
June 22, 2026 | 113 min
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 episode: Obsession (2025) Backrooms (2026) Audition (1999, dir. Takashi Miike) Avatar 3 (2025) The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan) (2026) Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) AMC A-list > A24 > Blumhouse > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
June 15, 2026 | 101 min
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 the filmmaker who understands this moment best, someone who always worked like he was discovering the movie rather than executing a plan, and who is now using AI the same way. The conversation keeps landing on the same uncomfortable truth: taste is the only thing that cannot be automated, and the industry keeps trying to route around it. Guests: Trina Renee on IMDB > Julianna Medina-Politsky > Referenced in this episode: Station X Ventures > Legendary Entertainment > Latina Squad > Jorge R. Gutierrez / Punky Duck AI on the Lot (Amazon) Obsession (Blumhouse / Universal) The Backrooms Gareth Edwards / Monsters Iron Lung / Markiplier This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
June 8, 2026 | 61 min
Sergio Cilli is going to get hate from both sides. The pro-AI crowd thinks he's mocking their tools. The anti-AI crowd thinks he's a hypocrite for using them. He's fine with that. Cilli is a director and writer who came up through sketch comedy and the writers' room of a David Spade Comedy Central show, went on to the Late Late Show as a segment producer, built a commercial directing career through Funny or Die, and has been making people laugh on the internet for twenty years. His Instagram series Will AI Replace Us? has become one of the sharpest, funniest pieces of AI criticism online precisely because he's doing both at once -- using the tools seriously enough to know exactly where they fall apart, then putting that failure on camera and reacting to it live. The comedy isn't a take. It's a demonstration. Chris and Daniel sit with Sergio and get into how the series actually started, why the joke stops being funny the second you swap in a human actor, what the gaps in AI performance reveal about what real acting actually is, and why all those viral "Hollywood is cooked" demo reels conveniently avoid putting anyone on camera with a speaking part. They also dig into the moat question -- why AI has flattened every competitive advantage in the industry except the one that always mattered: knowing what's good. Links Sergio Cilli on Instagram > Sergio Cilli on IMDb > Sergio Cilli on YouYube > Will AI Replace Us? > Will AI replace us Merch Store! > We Got That B-Roll > Ruairi Robinson's Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise video > Ruairi Robonson's "Are we Not Men" > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
June 1, 2026 | 89 min
Gothic horror is having a moment, and Justin Denton got there before the wave. His feature The Curse of the Sin Eater is now streaming on Prime, built for under a million dollars with 19 shooting days, a single private benefactor, Chicago theater actors, an English manor that half-burned down and got rebuilt by hand, and a composer found on Spotify who bowed his guitar like a cello because he didn't own one. Justin is a VFX veteran who has worked on $200 million productions, directed VR experiences for Legendary, and now has a completed independent feature with a Samuel Goldwyn distribution deal to show for a process that looks nothing like what Hollywood taught him and everything like what filmmaking actually requires. Chris and Daniel dig into the full journey with Justin: how the sin eater mythology stuck with him through COVID, why he pitched it as a drama dressed in horror clothing, what it costs to make a real film in a union town, how distribution actually gets done in the backroom deals before AFM (American Film Market) even opens, and why not having a recognizable name in your cast is the one decision that follows a first-time director all the way to the release screen. The conversation ranges from the Philippou Brothers grinding out horror on YouTube in rural Australia to Demi Moore chasing a script nobody thought she would want, to why the studios are wrong about Gen Z and the movies. This is a real-world map of what it takes to make a feature right now. Links and References: Justin Denton on IMDB > Justin Denton on LinkedIn > Justin Denton on Instagram > The Curse of the Sin Eater Trailer > The Curse of the Sin Eater on Amazon Prime > Film discussed: Talk to Me (dirs. Danny and Michael Philippou) The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat) My Old Ass (dir. Megan Park) Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger) Obsession (dir. Cory Barker) The Bride (dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal) Widows Ba y (Apple TV+) Honey Don't (dir. Ethan Coen) This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
May 25, 2026 | 96 min
The man who invented nonlinear editing is not done disrupting filmmaking. Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology and the engineer behind the tool that unlocked the indie film revolution of the 1990s, has spent the last several years pushing a new idea at Lightcraft: a CAD system for movies, built to take a filmmaker from first idea to final pixel without ever losing control to the technology along the way. If Avid gave editors the freedom to try things, Lightcraft is designed to give everyone on a production the freedom to stop asking permission. Chris and Daniel get deep into Bill's full origin story, from a spinal injury at 18 that he describes as the thing that set him free, to building a whistle-controlled device for a paralyzed roommate that eventually landed in the inventor's hall of fame, to getting into MIT with grades that had no business getting him there, to the moment in a video editing suite in 1987 when he decided he was going to build Avid because no one else had done it yet. Along the way, Bill lays out exactly what Lightcraft's Spark Story is designed to do, why he thinks prompting your way to a movie is a fantasy that will drive people insane, and why the goal is not AI that makes the movie but AI that says, "You're the boss of me." Links and References Bill Warner on LinkedIn > Lightcraft / Spark Story > Avid Wikipedia > USD (Universal Scene Description) > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
May 18, 2026 | 87 min
A movie from 2006 looks like it could have come out last year. The cars are the same. The computers are the same. The fashion, the cinematography, the music -- all of it effectively unchanged. Chris and Daniel use The Devil Wears Prada as a lens to ask a question that goes well beyond film: has Western pop culture simply... stopped moving? The conversation covers the film's craft -- Meryl Streep's uncommonly restrained performance, why the movie works better than it has any right to, and why Daniel reads Miranda Priestly not as a villain but as a Whiplash -style manifestation of what the main character actually wants. But the real thesis is bigger: the iPhone, social media, the collapse of risk-taking across studios and streaming, and why neither audiences nor executives are really to blame -- the incentive structure is. Chris and Daniel also get into the sin-eater problem, why indie film has lost its live-wire energy, and what it actually takes to stop doom-scrolling and just make the thing. Links and References What The Devil Wears Prada and Your iPhone Have in Common: Nothing Has Changed in Twenty Years > The Devil Wears Prada (2006, dir. David Frankel) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, dir. David Frankel) Justin Denton, The Curse of the Sin Eater Five Easy Pieces (1970) The Last Detail (1973) Whiplash (2014) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Swiss Army Man (2016) Sinners (2025) Suits (TV series) The Office (TV series) Frasier (TV series) The Big Picture podcast > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
May 4, 2026 | 68 min
Marc Rienzo is a veteran VFX artist and supervisor with his roots deep in compositing -- the kind of career that runs through Digital Domain, Sony, Weta, and the first Spider-Man 's web-swinging climax, a shot he was literally escorted away from by a PA to make sure he went home after three days straight. That obsessive standard for invisible work turns out to be exactly the skill set that matters most when everyone else is just typing prompts. Marc and Chris dig into what it really means to match a shot to the DP's camera rather than just making it look cool, why compositors add optical imperfections on purpose, and how the discipline of working to film print-outs created habits that digital pipelines quietly erased. They also get into the honest conversation about what AI changes for VFX artists who never wanted to make their own films -- versus those like Marc who are now using 30 years of production knowledge to self-publish a comic book series and build a solo movie trailer using AI tools. If you have spent decades making every pixel work, Marc argues, you know exactly what to ask AI to do and when it got it wrong. Most people typing prompts don't have that. Links: Marc Rienzo's website > Marc Rienzo on IMDB > Marc Rienzo on YouTube > Foundry Nuke > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
April 27, 2026 | 67 min
Hollywood isn't dying. It's being deconstructed and reassembled into something nobody has a blueprint for, and the people falling into the water right now are the ones who have to figure out what the new ship looks like. Chris Nichols, Daniel, and James are recording this one from a moving car, driving from Los Angeles to Angel's Camp, California for a live location shoot on their Monstrous Moonshine western, June July. The conversation they have on the way there turns into one of the more honest assessments of what the industry is actually going through: not an AI problem, not a streaming problem, but a collapse of the middle-ground ecosystem that used to grow directors, fund weird ideas, and keep creative risk alive. But first: how a pocket watch changed everything. Before any of that industry talk, the crew digs into what happened when they started shooting vid-viz for June July on an iPhone. James, who plays the outlaw Ross in the film, found something in that low-stakes exploratory process that nobody had scripted: a lonely man who thought he had more time, holding a dead man's pocket watch and staring at the life he ruined. That discovery rewrote Ross's entire arc, threaded a new storyline through the larger film, and proved that vid-viz isn't just a pre-visualization tool. It's where the real story gets found. From there the conversation opens up into what it actually means to survive a reshuffling industry, why the lens test mentality is the most insidious way creative people avoid making things, and what anyone with 25 years of experience and a suddenly obsolete skill set is supposed to do next. Links: Monstrous Moonshine > James Blevins IMDB > James Blevins LinkedIn > Virtual Production: 'June July' Filmmakers Test New "VidViz" Technique | The Creative + Tech Orbit > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
April 20, 2026 | 71 min
Hollywood has been gatekept for decades, but a multi-hyphenate who has appeared in films with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Werner Herzog, co-written a screenplay with Stan Lee, and produced for VH1 and Comedy Central is now building something the studios never could have given him. Victor Varnado, stand-up comedian, actor, filmmaker, National Science Foundation grant recipient, and CEO of Supreme Robot Pictures, spent the pandemic pivoting hard into tech and never looked back. The centerpiece right now is High Score Game Arcade, a global competitive gaming platform he built from scratch, recently showcased at South by Southwest, and is now closing a distribution deal that puts his games in front of over 100 million monthly users across Samsung TVs and beyond. The flagship product, a deceptively deep single-player tic-tac-toe championship with a heuristic scoring engine, is just the beginning. The conversation covers how Victor developed patented accessibility technology to help people with disabilities play video games, got a National Science Foundation grant for it, then watched a company called Infinite Reality buy it with shares right before a failed IPO. He and Christopher Nichols dig into what it actually takes for artists to pay themselves in 2025, the power of the hybrid newsletter and the email list as sustainable revenue engines, and why the Roger Corman model is still the smartest path forward for indie filmmakers. Victor also co-produces the Iron Mule Comedy Film Festival in New York, programming monthly short comedy screenings, and makes a sharp case that the biggest threat from AI is not the technology itself but the people deploying it who do not know what they are doing. Links: Victor Varnado on IMDb > High Score Game Arcade > Iron Mule Comedy Film Festival > Supreme Robot Pictures > The Great Fantasy Debate > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
April 13, 2026 | 88 min
500 episodes of television is a number that stops people cold, and Jay Worth hit that milestone last year without slowing down. Worth came up through the pressure cooker of Digital Domain's commercial division, survived the 23-episode broadcast grind on J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot slate across Alias , Fringe , Lost , and Cloverfield , and helped define what prestige television VFX looks like on Westworld before most people knew what a volume stage was. Now co-producer on Fallout , he has spent three decades turning budget constraints and impossible schedules into a methodology that the biggest shows in streaming depend on. On Fallout Season 2, Worth breaks down how the show shot entirely in California, brought Raynault VFX in Montreal in for New Vegas, tackled the Deathclaw sequence using fire as the only light source on a volume stage packed with practical snow, and delivered 3,200 shots while staying laser-focused on world-building over spectacle. He also gets into his philosophy of getting into the writer's room on day one, why VFX diplomacy is a craft that needs to be taught, and how he thinks about AI as just another tool in the same way the industry once thought the volume stage would be a magic bullet. Links: Jay Worth on LinkedIn > Jay Worth on IMDB > Fallout Season 2 (Amazon Prime Video) > Raynault VFX > Magnopus > Episode 542 - Refuge VFX: How a Portland Boutique Landed Fallout, Shogun, and One Piece > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)
April 6, 2026 | 86 min
The job market for visual effects and CG artists has not just contracted, it has fundamentally restructured. The skills that guaranteed a career five years ago are not the skills that will get anyone hired today, and the people who understand that shift most clearly are the ones placing talent for a living. Stan Szymanski and Susan Thurman O'Neal, arguably the two best-known recruiters working in VFX, return to CG Garage to talk with Christopher Nichols and Daniel about what is actually happening in the hiring landscape and what artists at every career stage should be doing about it. The conversation covers the death of the specialist assembly line, the rise of the generalist, and why there are almost no generalists left in the United States. Stan and Susan get specific: what the three open roles Susan is actively recruiting for right now tell us about where the industry is heading, why the recruiter's job today looks more like casting director than HR function, why a medieval history degree may be more valuable to an AI prompter than a Maya certification, and what both of them tell artists who want to resist AI entirely. The framing question underneath all of it is the one Sean Connery asks Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: what are you prepared to do? Links: Stan Szymanski LinkedIn > Susan Thurman O'Neal LinkedIn > Stan's previous episode (429) > Susan's previous episode (512) > Otis College of Art and Design > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
March 30, 2026 | 86 min
Portland, Oregon is not where you expect to find a VFX studio with credits on Fallout , One Piece , Shogun , and The Peripheral . Fred Ruff built Refuge VFX there anyway, starting with six freelancers crammed into an office barely big enough to breathe in, and grew it into one of the more interesting independent shops working in streaming today. The secret, if there is one, is that Refuge treats every sequence as a storytelling problem before it is ever a technical problem. On Fallout , they blocked out shots the production couldn't afford to ask for and sent them anyway. On The Peripheral , they redesigned alien characters mid-production to keep a show from looking like a Doctor Who budget episode. That is not how most VFX shops operate, and that difference is the whole point. This conversation with Fred and Alex Theisen, Refuge's Executive Producer, gets into how that philosophy actually runs a business, what the streaming bubble burst felt like from inside a mid-sized independent, and where AI fits into a professional VFX pipeline right now (short answer: not where clients think it does). Fred makes a sharp argument that AI is not making productions cheaper anytime soon, and that the industry's obsession with the cost question is the wrong frame entirely. Daniel Thron co-hosts. Links: Refuge VFX > Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) > Shōgun (FX/Hulu) > One Piece (Netflix) > The Peripheral (Amazon Prime Video) > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
March 23, 2026 | 55 min
Most filmmaking tools are built by engineers who have never made a film. Ashay Javadekar has done both. A PhD chemical engineer who directed two internationally awarded independent features on shoestring budgets, he approaches filmmaking the way he approaches any hard system: find the broken process, understand it from first principles, and build something better. Eagle Slate, his iPad-based smart production slate, is the direct result of that instinct. It creates a unique audio-visual fingerprint for every take, embedding metadata directly into camera and audio files with no extra hardware, no cloud upload required, and no handwritten take sheet that someone has to reconcile in post. What makes the conversation with Chris worth your time is the reasoning behind the tool, not just the tool itself. Ashay traces the problem back to where the clapperboard actually came from, why it worked beautifully in the film era, and how the digital transition silently turned a solved problem into a metadata nightmare no one properly fixed. He also explains how Eagle Nest, the companion media-scanning platform, builds a writable metadata lake that connects on-set data directly to NLEs (non-linear editors) and MAMs (media asset management systems), and why he sees this as the opening move in a much larger mission: removing the technical ceiling that stops capable storytellers from iterating fast enough to get good. Links: Ashay Javadekar > Ashay on IMDb > Eagle Studio / Eagle Slate > Ashay's film "DNA" (2019) > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
March 16, 2026 | 110 min
There's a Tuesday night writers group that has quietly shaped the careers of some seriously talented people working in Hollywood right now, and CG Garage is slowly pulling back the curtain on it. Sean Rourke is the second member of that group to come on the show, following Andy Cochrane, and his path through the industry is one of the more unlikely and instructive ones you'll hear. He spent 12 years as Head of Editorial at The Third Floor, the previz studio behind some of the biggest films in production, and he got there by being the only person in the building who remembered how to unjam a three-quarter-inch tape deck. What followed was a career built on dying technology, accidental promotions, and a consistent instinct for being exactly where the creative work was happening. Co-host Daniel Thron and Sean dig into what previz editorial actually is and why it attracts the kind of people who want to direct, how audiences have been quietly rewired by streaming into expecting 10-hour stories and now feel cheated by a 2-hour film, and what AI tools actually look like inside a working production pipeline versus the buzzword version that investors keep funding. Sean also teaches Comic-Con Film School, a four-day filmmaking fundamentals class he has run every year for 20 straight years, and makes a sharp case for why film school still matters even when every specific tool it teaches goes obsolete. And if you follow vampire cinema at all, he runs a YouTube channel called The Vampire's Castle, just scored an interview with Jason Patric about The Lost Boys that has apparently never happened before, and is very pleased about recent awards-season developments. Links: Sean Rourke / The Vampire's Castle YouTube > Sean Rourke > The Third Floor (Previz) > Andy Cochrane on CG Garage > Ben Hansford (AI educator, USC) on CG Garage > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
March 9, 2026 | 72 min
Most people who end up in VFX spent years obsessing over frames and film. Ryan Kelsey spent 13 years in telecom in Cincinnati, selling fiber and managed IT services, before stumbling into an industry where studios win Oscars and go bankrupt in the same month. That collision of worlds turns out to be exactly the perspective the business needs right now. Ryan is VP of Sales at Center Grid Virtual Studio, and his outsider's eye cuts through a lot of the noise around cloud infrastructure for creative studios. Why are small VFX shops still running overheating GPU racks in their back offices? Why does a freelancer getting a big render job have nowhere obvious to turn? Why does everyone talk about AI compute without knowing what they're actually doing with it? This conversation, recorded live at the HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) Tech Retreat, ranges from the broken economics of fixed-bid VFX work to what a genuinely boutique cloud partner looks like compared to the AWS-sized behemoths, to Chris's teenage son dragging his friends to see Chainsaw Man while the industry insists nobody goes to the movies anymore. Links: Ryan Kelsey LinkedIn > Center Grid Virtual Studio > HPA Tech Retreat > Scott Ross book > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
March 2, 2026 | 55 min
Jess Loren has built one of the most-followed voices in the entertainment technology space on LinkedIn, and she has earned it by calling industry shifts before they become consensus. Her read on Gaussian splats as a genuine production tool, not a novelty, is proving correct. As co-founder of Global Objects and a board member of the Visual Effects Society, Jess has spent the last year turning that conviction into working pipelines: partnering with XGrid as California's media and entertainment distributor, building Go Scout for collaborative splat-based location scouting, and installing a virtual production wall inside ISS (Independent Studio Services) where filmmakers can shoot a full day on LED for $6,000, props included. Recorded live at the HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) Tech Retreat in Palm Springs, this conversation covers why polygons are giving way to splats, how AI is quietly restructuring VFX workflows, the uncomfortable reality of synthetic actors and deepfake-flooded social feeds, and what happens when a research lab asks you to find 40,000 random objects for training data and you realize the answer is a prop house. Jess also breaks down Global Objects' partnership with ISS to digitize the world's largest prop library, creating 3D assets destined for Fab, Turbo Squid, and eventually, robot training sets. //links// Jess Loren on LinkedIn > Global Objects > Independent Studio Services (ISS) > XGrid > Visual Effects Society > HPA Tech Retreat > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
February 23, 2026 | 66 min
Here is a radical idea: what if you rehearsed the movie before you shot it? Not storyboards. Not an animatic. Live actors, real cameras, and actual creative decisions being made in the room. That is what Chris Nichols and Daniel Thron have been doing on June July, and cinematographer Richard Crudo, ASC joined them to find out if it actually works. Richard brings perspective from the Coen Brothers' dime-store ingenuity on Raising Arizona (yes, an Arri 2C strapped to a two-by-four), decades navigating the film-to-digital transition, and a long-standing argument that the industry has built a priesthood around tech complexity that actively gets in the way of the story. What he found in the VidViz sessions was the opposite: a blue screen, a rough key in OBS, and a team moving fast enough to make creative breakthroughs that quietly rewrote the arc of the entire film. One actor's performance changed the screenplay without changing a single line of dialogue. That kind of discovery does not happen in a pipeline. It happens in a room. Links: Monstrous Moonshine > Richard Crudo's website > Chaos Vantage > Chaos Arena > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
February 16, 2026 | 108 min
Why are we still waiting for a green light from people who do not understand our craft? This reality is at the heart of our conversation with Andy Cochrane, a creative who has spent twenty years navigating the collapsing bridges of the entertainment industry. Andy takes us through the trenches of his career, from the grueling 70-hour weeks as a runner on CSI: Miami to the high-stakes visual effects world of Asylum and Terminator Salvation . We discuss the hard realization that being a "button pusher" in a massive pipeline is no longer a safe bet, and why the most vital work is now happening in the "weird stuff" between traditional film and immersive technology. The future of storytelling belongs to the tactical generalists who are willing to build their own labs rather than wait for a studio to discover them. We look at how Markiplier bypassed the traditional, expensive studio marketing machine by leveraging his own fanbase to bring Iron Lung to life, and why artist-driven projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once have become the new blueprint for success. Andy breaks down his current mission in Santa Monica, where he is bypassing traditional distribution models to create "Loud Movies," an open-source medium that prioritizes human experience over corporate commodification. It is a deep dive into why the most important tool in your kit isn't a new piece of software, but the willingness to keep moving while the building collapses around you. The CG Pro Show > Andy Cochrane on LinkedIn > Andy Cochrane on IMDB > Mark Duplass: The Cavalry is not Coming > This episode is sponsored by: Center Grid Virtual Studio Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "cggarage" for 10% off)
