CG Garage

A passion for animation and computing landed Andrew Gordon a job at Pixar just after the release of Toy Story, the first of many mega-hits for the studio. From here, he helped bring some of the studio's most famous characters to life: Toy Story 2's Prospector, Mike from Monsters, Inc. and Edna Mode, The Incredibles' fashion designer. Today, Andrew has taken his experience from Pixar to DNEG, where he heads up the London VFX studio's feature animation team.

In this podcast, recorded at THU, Andrew tells Chris why Pixar movies are consistently brilliant. He talks about the playful office culture, mentorships and constructive criticism that bring out the best in employees, as well as its deft approach to storytelling, character development and filmmaking. It's the sum of 20 years' experience, with industry leaders such as Brad Bird, Ed Catmull and Pete Docter, packed into an hour-long podcast.

Recorded at the American Society of Architectural Illustrators' "Architecture in Perspective" event, this week's podcast is a panel discussion on architecture and imagined environments. Taking part are The Lion King and AR Wall CG Art Director Joy Lea, 3Marks and KitBash3d's Mike Golden, Luxigon founder Eric de Broche des Combes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens concept artist Nick Hiatt, Architectural Visualization Artist Isabella Eckmann, and Gensler's Creative Media Leader Megan Lubaszka. And, of course, the whole thing is moderated by CG Labs' Chris Nichols.

Among the topics discussed are the representation of space and storytelling in new mediums, the business of visualization and what different CG industries, such as arch-viz, VFX and gaming, can learn from one another. This lively debate is full of insight into modern creative methods and you'll discover what still images can do that VR can't (and vice-versa), the vast differences in cost between architectural and marketing VR experiences — as well as the importance of minigolf.

User experience is an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of modern technology and software — particularly in the field of video games, which have to introduce complex ideas without intimidating players. In this week's podcast, Chris is joined by UX Director, Celia Hodent, who put her PhD in psychology, specialized in cognitive development, to good use in helping create Fortnite.

Celia explains how user experience helped make military aircraft safer and how it's been a fundamental part of gaming since the days of Super Mario Bros. Using examples from casual titles such as Candy Crush to the notoriously tricky Dark Souls, Celia explains how games teach skills and use interaction to build worlds and reward behavior. She also gives excellent reasons why kids shouldn't play games outside of their age rating, and why culture is more important than gender when it comes to game design.

Whether you're a gamer or not, you'll undoubtedly come away from this podcast with a new perspective on the design of just about everything.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a critical and box office success on its release last year, garnering critical praise and even an Oscar for its vivid, touching and inventive take on Spidey's origin story. In this podcast, co-director Peter Ramsey tells his own tale of going from a humble, blue-collar upbringing in South Los Angeles to co-creating one of the best-animated movies of all time.

Peter tells Chris about the movies which inspired his career, including Star Wars, The Seven Samurai and ET. He also discusses how early experiences working with Francis Ford Coppola on Bram Stoker's Dracula and second-unit-directing Tank Girl came in handy in the world of animation, and the happy accidents which led to his directorial roles on Rise of the Guardians and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

It's one of the most inspirational podcasts you'll ever hear; Peter's free of ego and still looking at cinema with wide-eyed wonder.

To say John Chalfant could turn his hand to anything would be an understatement. Over the past 20 years, this multi-talented creative has served as a 3D artist, director of photography, game developer, VFX supervisor and art director on movies and games including The Day After Tomorrow, Diablo II, Warcraft III, Nosgoth, Batman: Arkham City, Wolfenstein, Hellgate: London and Final Fantasy.

Recorded over some rye whiskey, John tells Chris his origin story, from finding inspiration in animated TV series Robotech and Neo Geo video games, setting up a studio with some friends and convincing producers to let them work on a TV series, to partying at Blur Studio and working with filmmaking legend David Lynch on animations, nightclubs and immersive experiences.

Despite his incredible career, John is a laid-back guest and he offers some of the secrets of his success, his future plans — and thoughts on which franchise director Tim Miller will tackle next.

After dabbling with acting and music, Greg Downing found his true calling in all things photography related — and the world is a better place for it. His passion for the medium took him from home experiments with plaster casts and turntables to create panoramas of European landmarks to building a new HDRI camera for effects house Rhythm & Hues.

At the same time, Greg has indulged his passion for documenting the wonders of the world with cutting-edge technology. He's used gigapixel photography, photogrammetry, VR, HDRI, dome theaters and the Google Maps API to capture and display Yosemite's El Capitan rock formation, Everest's base camp and historic paintings in Chinese caves. In this podcast, Greg talks about these projects as well as his work with Björk in Iceland on her immersive VR album "Vulnicura" and his collaborations in the world of lightfields with technology pioneer Paul Debevec at Google.

A lot has changed in Joy Lea's life since she last appeared on the CG Garage podcast in 2016. The former games environment designer was hired by MPC LA as an artist on Disney's The Lion King, which broke new ground in terms of virtual production pipelines. Continuing the trend, Joy has taken on another game-changing role: CG Art Director at augmented reality virtual production company ARwall.

As someone who has switched between games and films, Joy has a unique perspective on the similarities and differences between the industries, as well as their working cultures and attitudes to women. She also talks about the more fun aspects of her job, such as watching The Lion King's creative team play in virtual reality environments she created and the greenscreen-replacing potential of ARwall.

Despite an original desire to be an architect, Arutyun Artur "Art" Sayan has pursued a career in VFX — and the industry's all the better for it. Art has contributed incredible work to movies including Oblivion, Tomorrowland, as well as the TV series Supergirl and Love, Death and Robots.

In this podcast, Art talks about some of the shots he's helped create — including a complex 417-frame, all-CG drone sequence for Oblivion (with Chris), a sci-fi cityscape for Tomorrowland and a 10-square-mile urban environment for Supergirl. Art discusses how he organizes his work on these epic shots and how he collaborates with other people.

Art is a humble and laid-back guest, and he offers some great tips on how to balance working on complex, stressful projects with looking after yourself.

Chris's guest this week is Neil Huxley, a director whose story is worthy of its own movie. Early exposure to The Terminator inspired Neil to follow a career in the film industry but fighting back against bullies at his South London school almost lead him off the rails, until his bouncer-artist dad intervened. In a spectacular comeback, Neil studied multimedia at university and graduated with a first-class honors degree thanks to his short film.

Recorded ahead of his talk at THU, Neil recounts how his career has taken him through title design for movies such as Watchmen and Gamer, creating holographic displays for Avatar and on to Digital Domain offshoot Mothership and then production company Ruffian to direct spectacular and well-received videogame cinematics, including an epic interactive trailer for Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Now, Neil plans to make a feature film that will take him back to the South London locales where his tale began.

Over the past 25 years, NVIDIA has gone from gaming hardware specialist to a major player in CGI, automotive technology and even healthcare. In this podcast, Director Ankit Patel joins Chris to reveal how huge innovations in GPUs and AI have helped the company become ubiquitous with fast, smart computing.

It serves as a great little explainer on the world of GPUs, how they have to be configured to work with numerous APIs and processor architectures, and the bottleneck whack-a-mole developers have to play as hardware and software advances. Ankit also goes into detail on NVIDIA's OptiX and CUDA APIs, how the company balances performance and power consumption on notebooks, and its groundbreaking research in machine learning.