PODCAST · tv
CG Garage
by Monstrous Moonshine
Since 2014, CG Garage has brought lively, informal conversations with Oscar-winning legends, visionary artists, and the innovators driving the industry's biggest technological leaps. From in-depth interviews to spirited roundtable discussions, hosts Chris Nichols and Daniel Thron explore the art, craft, and future of filmmaking. With Hollywood in the middle of a major revolution, we talk to the filmmakers who are making that transformation possible, covering everything from behind-the-scenes stories on iconic movies to the cutting-edge tools reshaping the industry.
Episodes
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The Next Nolan and Scorsese Are Coming Out of YouTube | Episode 569
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...
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I Called CAA to See If My Agent Still Worked There | Jonathan Goldman | Episode 568
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…
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A Record Summer, Yet Studios Still Can't Pick Winners | CG Garage #567
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...
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Backrooms VFX Was Built Around Kane Parsons' Blender Workflow | Edward Douglas #566
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:...
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Widow's Bay's Invisible VFX: How a New England Team Fakes Nothing | Brian Drewes | Ep. 565
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...
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Obsession's Secret VFX Behind Nikki's Uncanny Face | Peter Timberlake | Ep 564
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…
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Easy Rider Is the Roadmap Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 563
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...
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CEO of Crafty Apes Alana Newell on What Actually Motivates Artists | Episode 562
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…
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Spider-Man's Record Weekend, the EU vs. AI Video, and the First Rule of Being a VFX Supervisor | Episode 561
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...
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Inside the VFX of Disclosure Day with Matthew Butler | Episode 560
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...
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Nolan's Odyssey Is Really a Movie About Waiting | Episode 559
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...
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Split Diopters, Indie Film Private Equity, and the Rock and Roll of Making Movies | Episode 558
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...
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Disclosure Day and The Secret Weirdness of Steven Spielberg | Episode 557
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...
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A24, DeepMind, and the "No CGI" Marketing Lie Everyone's Tired Of | Episode 556
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,...
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He Cold-Called Kubrick's Secret Number | Doug Trumbull | Episode 555
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...
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What If Orson Welles Had a Steadicam? | Hnedel Maximore | Episode 554
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....
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Obsession, Backrooms, and the 1970s Moment Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 553
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…
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Why Hollywood Keeps Getting Its Audience Wrong | Trina Renee & Julianna Politsky | Episode 552
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…
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Mocking AI With AI: Sergio Cilli on Why the Joke Only Works If You Actually Use It | Episode 551
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…
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How to Make and Distribute a Gothic Horror Film on a Shoestring | Justin Denton | Ep. 550
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...
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Filmmaking Needs a New Revolution. Bill Warner, Founder of Avid, Is Building It | Ep. 549
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…
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The Devil Wears Prada Predicted 20 Years of Cultural Stagnation | Episode 548
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...
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Your VFX Skills Are Your AI Advantage | Marc Rienzo | Episode 547
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...
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VidViz, a Pocket Watch, and the Character That Rewrote June July | Episode 546
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,...
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Episode 545 - Victor Varnado: Why Every Creator Needs to Think Like an Entrepreneur
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,...
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Episode 544 - Jay Worth: Fallout Season 2, 500 Episodes of Hard Lessons, and when to say no
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,...
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Episode 543 - Stan Szymanski and Susan O'Neal: What VFX Talent Actually Needs to Look Like Now
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…
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Episode 542 - Refuge VFX: How a Portland Boutique Landed Fallout, Shogun, and One Piece
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...
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Episode 541 - Ashay Javadekar: The Clapperboard Is 100 Years Old and Nobody Fixed It
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...
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Episode 540 - Sean Rourke: The Third Floor and the Tuesday Night Writers Group
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...
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Episode 539 - Ryan Kelsey on Why Boutique Cloud is the Secret Weapon for Indie VFX Studios
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...
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Episode 538 - Jess Loren on Gaussian Splats, AI Actors, and the Real Future of Virtual Production
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…
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Episode 537 - Lights, Camera, VidViz! Richard Crudo Joins Chris and Daniel to Plan Our Western: June July
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…
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Episode 536 - Stop Waiting for the Studio to Save You: Andy Cochrane on the New Media Frontier
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...
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Episode 535 - Rob Nederhorst and Ben Hansford: The end of "good enough" in filmmaking
The "good enough" era of streaming is hitting a wall, and a new rebellious streak in Hollywood is reclaiming the theater as the primal source of the cinematic experience. We are joined by two veterans navigating this shift: Rob Nederhorst, a VFX supervisor who has shaped the visceral worlds of…
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Episode 534 - Why Safdie and PTA are Saving Cinema: Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another Breakdown
If the movies you're seeing lately feel like they were assembled by a committee rather than a creator, you're looking at the wrong side of the lens. We are dusting off a classic format today, leaning into the kind of raw film breakdowns we used to live for. The spotlight is on two heavyweights:...
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Episode 533 - Jeff Okun's Decades-Long Battle for VFX Respect and the Future of the VES
Long before he was codifying the industry in the VES Handbook, Jeff was a kid in Los Angeles pouring ketchup on his friends to stage fake street fights for a hidden camera. His journey into the heart of cinema began under the mentorship of graphic design icon Saul Bass, where he learned that...
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Episode 532 - Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme and the Invisible Mastery of Eran Dinur
Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme transports audiences to a vibrant 1950s world of professional ping pong, yet many viewers remain unaware that the film contains over 500 visual effects shots. Eran Dinur, the film's VFX Supervisor, reveals how his team meticulously recreated period accurate crowds in...
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Episode 531 - Deconstructing Juliano: Michael Moshe Dahan's Yes, Repeat, No
What happens when a filmmaker abandons a studio career on Saving Private Ryan and a PhD in history to create a film so challenging it is rejected by both Israeli and Arab film festivals? Michael Moshe Dahan joins the podcast to discuss Yes, Repeat, No, a meta-fictional deep dive into the life of...
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Episode 530 - The 2026 Forecast: CG Garage Predicts the Future of Tech and Hollywood
Will 2026 be the year of the ultimate industry reckoning or a digital renaissance? Hosts Chris and Daniel are joined by guests James Blevins and Erick Geisler for a deep dive into the "mild, medium, and spicy" predictions that will define the next year. As the dust settles on early AI…
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Episode 529 - Efficiency, Artistry, and the LED Wall: Ivan Reel, Executive Leader in Virtual Production, StradaXR
From disrupting the print industry with the original Macintosh to building bespoke tech for Premier League teams, Ivan Reel has always lived at the bleeding edge of media. Now the Head of Studio Technology at StradaXR, Reel traces his evolution from graphic designer to virtual production leader,...
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Episode 528 - Why Gen V VFX Looks So Real: A Deep Dive with Supervisor Karen Heston
Why does the superhero spinoff Gen V often look more visceral and grounded than its blockbuster feature film counterparts? The answer lies in the unique philosophy of Visual Effects Supervisor Karen Heston, who joins Chris and Daniel to reveal the analog soul beating beneath the show's digital...
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Episode 527 - Ben Mauro: Expanding the World of Huxley
Ben Mauro is one of the industry's most respected concept artists, known for defining the look of blockbusters like Halo Infinite, but his latest venture is a masterclass in how artists can successfully build and own their own intellectual property. Ben returns to the podcast to break down the...
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Episode 526 - Hoon Kim of Beeble AI: How Switchlight Creates 'Relightable Footage' for Real-Time Filmmaking
AI is revolutionizing cinematic lighting control with Beeble AI's Switchlight. Founder Hoon Kim explains how his tool, originally a general AI concept, became a powerful VFX asset by tackling the difficult process of relighting. Switchlight "unlights" any video footage to figure out the…
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Episode 525 - Dennis Berardi on Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein & Resurrecting Mr. X
Visual effects veteran Dennis Berardi joins the podcast to discuss the resurrection of his legendary studio, Mr. X, and his latest collaboration with Guillermo del Toro on Frankenstein. Dennis shares the technical and artistic challenges behind the film, detailing how his team blended massive...
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Episode 524 - VFX Soldier & Scott Ross: The Subsidy Wars
The anonymous "VFX soldier in the trenches" who took on the studios is back, and the fight he started is far from over. Two legends of the VFX labor rights movement, Daniel Lay (the formerly VFX Soldier) and veteran exec Scott Ross, join Chris and Daniel Thron to revisit the pivotal moment their...
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Episode 523 - David Morin, Executive Director of the ASWF, on His Journey from Softimage to Securing Open Source
What was it like to be inside Softimage during the Microsoft acquisition? How did Bill Gates' "big pivot" to the internet change everything overnight? Industry veteran David Morin joins Chris to share his fascinating origin story, from programming with punch cards and an 8-year art detour to...
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Episode 522 - Gabriel Regentin: How Ingenuity Studios Made Weapons Unbelievably Real
For our special Halloween episode, we sit down with VFX Supervisor Gabriel Regentin to discuss his work with Ingenuity Studios on the smash-hit horror film, Weapons. Gabriel details his close collaboration with director Zach Cregger, whose primary goal was to ensure every visual effect felt 100%...
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Episode 521 - Tim Miller Gets Real About Hits, Misses, and What's Next
Returning to the podcast for his fourth appearance, director Tim Miller, the creative force behind the blockbuster hit Deadpool and the acclaimed anthologies Love, Death & Robots and Secret Level, pulls back the curtain on the unpredictable reality of a Hollywood career. In a candid discussion,...
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Episode 520 - Dan Fowler on 20 years of Virtual Production on the Avatars
After nearly 20 years dedicated to James Cameron's groundbreaking Avatar saga, virtual production supervising stage operator Dan Fowler joins host Chris Nichols in the garage for a deep dive into his incredible 30-year career. Dan recounts his journey from being the drummer in a 90s hair metal…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Since 2014, CG Garage has brought lively, informal conversations with Oscar-winning legends, visionary artists, and the innovators driving the industry's biggest technological leaps. From in-depth interviews to spirited roundtable discussions, hosts Chris Nichols and Daniel Thron explore the art, craft, and future of filmmaking. With Hollywood in the middle of a major revolution, we talk to the filmmakers who are making that transformation possible, covering everything from behind-the-scenes stories on iconic movies to the cutting-edge tools reshaping the industry.
HOSTED BY
Monstrous Moonshine
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does CG Garage have?
CG Garage currently has 570 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is CG Garage about?
Since 2014, CG Garage has brought lively, informal conversations with Oscar-winning legends, visionary artists, and the innovators driving the industry's biggest technological leaps. From in-depth interviews to spirited roundtable discussions, hosts Chris Nichols and Daniel Thron explore the art,...
How often does CG Garage release new episodes?
CG Garage releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 570 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to CG Garage?
You can listen to CG Garage on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts CG Garage?
CG Garage is created and hosted by Monstrous Moonshine.
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