Cg Garage

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 vide

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

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 valua

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 profes

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

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

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

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

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 ha

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 A

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 John Wick 3 and The Conjuring, and Ben Hansford, a prolific commercial director now leading the charge in AI filmmaking at USC. They are not just talking about tech for tech's sake. They are discussing how to move past the "lens test" phase of AI, where everyone is just showing off what the tool can do, and getting back to the actual discipline of telling a story that makes an audience physically flinch. The conversation pivots from the "all-or-nothing" marketing hype of AGI to the practical, gritty reality of modern production budgets. As Netflix-style algorithms push for "dumbed down" content designed for second-screen scrolling, these creators are using tools like VidViz (being championed by Monstrous Moonshine) to f

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: Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Both of these pictures have just locked in Best Picture nominations for the 2026 Academy Awards, and it feels like a signal fire. After years of franchise fatigue and focus-tested safety, we are looking at a lineup that suggests great, uncompromising cinema is finally clawing its way back to the center of the frame. Fair warning: we aren't holding anything back here, so consider this a total spoiler warning. We are going deep into the structure, the endings, and the technical magic tricks that make these films work: from the anxiety-inducing rhythm of Safdie's 1950s ping pong subculture to Anderson's mastery of the long-lens Mojave car cha

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 pushing the right buttons could lead to miraculous results. This foundation in precision and storytelling propelled him from a midnight gopher to the primary "fix-it guy" for landmark projects like The Last Starfighter and Stargate, ultimately leading to his pivotal role in founding the Visual Effects Society Awards. Beyond the technical wizardry and stories of killing Samuel L. Jackson on screen, Jeff offers a raw look at the systemic struggles within the visual effects industry. He explores the "kerfuffle" of 2013, the complexities of global unionization, and the rising tide of AI in the creative process. By advocating for a heist mentality where every shot is planned with surgical precision before a single frame is cap

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 Tokyo and Wembley while keeping the digital work entirely "invisible." He views his role as a bridge between the filmmaker's vision and the technical reality on set, ensuring that every digital element supports the story without drawing attention to itself. For Eran, the ultimate compliment is a viewer who walks out of the theater believing every single frame was captured in camera. The transition into high end visual effects was an unlikely one for Eran, who spent fifteen years as a classical music composer before a random software download steered him toward ILM and eventually the Safdie Brothers. This musical background provides a unique perspective on the rhythm and "choreography" of effects, whether he is timing C

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 actor-activist Juliano Mer-Khamis. By casting Palestinian, Israeli, and Lebanese actors to play different facets of the same man within a "rehearsal as performance" framework, Dahan explores the fluidity of identity and the tragedy of hardened political stances. This episode navigates the delicate "middle ground" of the Middle East conflict, focusing on the human friction that exists before ideologies take hold. Technically, Dahan breaks down the "weird and technical" mechanics of the shoot, including a four-camera multi-cam setup on a rotating stage where the cameras never stopped rolling. The discussion covers the sonic syncopation of sharp heels and metronomes, the influence of Freud's screen memories, and the phil

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 experiments, the group moves past the "Will Smith eating spaghetti" era of novelty to discuss the professionalization of tools, the massive consolidation of legacy studios, and the survival of the traditional theatrical experience. The conversation pushes boundaries, exploring everything from the rise of personal AI creative agents to the outlandish possibility of data centers orbiting in space. By examining the potential collapse of current tech giants alongside the emergence of AGI, the panel maps out a world where the lines between science, religion, and storytelling are permanently blurred. This episode isn't just a look at what's coming, it's a high-stakes debate on who will lead the charge in the collision of Hollywood and

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, sharing insights from his time managing Sony's pivot to digital workflows and his inspiring choice to return to film school later in life to master modern VFX. This convergence of deep technical experience and fresh artistic training has placed him at the forefront of optimizing LED stages for the next generation of filmmaking. The discussion digs into the technical and economic forces reshaping the industry, drawing parallels between the current AI explosion and the democratization of digital video. Ivan details how StradaXR utilizes Chaos Vantage to introduce real-time ray tracing to the volume , offering a superior alternative to standard game engine pipelines. The episode wraps with a compelling argument for the f

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 surface. Heston traces her journey from the chemical smells of a black-and-white darkroom to the high-pressure world of "Flame" compositing in New York, where she learned to be a "finisher" capable of managing clients and pixels simultaneously, a skill set that eventually propelled her to lead major projects like Arthur Christmas and Beasts of No Nation. The conversation pulls back the curtain on the gory, creative success of Gen V. Heston explains that the show's secret isn't an over-reliance on CGI, but a fierce commitment to practical filmmaking, using giant props for shrinking characters and silicone "blood darts" to anchor the digital effects in reality. She discusses the intense collaboration required between stun

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 journey of expanding his independent sci-fi universe, Huxley, from a passion project into a high-end graphic novel series published by Thames & Hudson. He shares the creative and business roadmap for launching his new prequel, The Oracle, and explains why maintaining full creative control is essential for building a lasting legacy in a committee-driven industry. Beyond the logistics of publishing, the discussion dives deep into the philosophical necessity of physical media in an age of fleeting digital licenses. Ben, Chris, and Daniel explore the "pride of ownership" that comes with tangible art, whether it's a collector's edition Blu-ray or a deluxe graphic novel, and how this tactile connection anchors the audienc

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 fundamental physical properties, like the shape (normals) and texture (metalness/roughness) of objects, and then uses this data to apply new, photo-realistic lighting instantly and securely. The desktop application is quickly becoming indispensable for both small production teams and major studios who need precise creative control over their shots. The conversation reaches a pivotal point when host Chris, an expert in real-time rendering, mentions his work with the real-time ray tracer Vantage, leading to mutual excitement about integrating their technologies. Switchlight provides the control that other generative AI tools lack, and Hoon sees its PBR data as a perfect control signal for future generative video models. They agr