CG Garage

Alex Alvarez started the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games + Animation in 1997 when the industry itself had few resources to find talent. His motivation came from his own frustration of the current education system in the United States, and its lack of support for the arts, or art education. Today, Gnomon continues to be one of the leading schools for Visual Effects by keeping its enrollment small and selective, making sure that they can sustain the demands of a selective industry.

Kevin and Snow Mack are both fine artist that met at Art Center. Kevin has a very long family history in animation and the VFX world where his mother and father both worked at Disney. Kevin, the self claimed reluctant VFX Supervisor, won an Oscar in 1999 for What Dreams May Come. Snow is an amazing and prolific artist that used her skills as a digital matte painter and many major feature films. These days, Kevin has focused his art in the medium that he always dreamed of: Virtual Reality. Together with Snow they have created Shapespace, an abstract, virtual reality, experience that defies description.

An old friend of Dariush Derakhshani, Nozawa Tetsuya is the CEO of Guncy in Japan, a new company focused on bringing tool sets to a Japanese workflow and pipeline. The interview was translated so that it could work for both English and Japanese speaking audiences. We find out a great deal about his past, as well as the the kind of projects and work people can expect as a CG artists in Japan.

Our second podcast from THU 2105 features two great artists. Jose Alves da Silva and Andrew Hickinbottom. Both have a love of character, have an amazing sense of humor, are great friends, but live in very different styles. We talk about their inspirations, and about our love for THU where we all became great friends.

Lon Grohs and I talk to Kim Baumann Larsen, a licensed Architect and 3D artist for 20 years from Norway, about his experience in Virtual Reality. Kim has been working in the VR space since the early 90s. So when the new wave of VR happened a few years ago, he was ready. With all three of us coming from architecture we decided to talk about where we see how VR fits in the architecture world. We talk about all the challenges, different flavors, pitfalls, of this new medium..

David Prescott will kick off the first off a series off conversations we had at Trojan Horse was a Unicorn this year in Troia, Portugal. I first met David 13 years ago when we both worked at Digital Domain. We talk about his journey from South Africa to DD and Dreamworks. As a seasoned veteran, David has a great ability to balance logic, perception, reality, and inspiration. These ideas are what led to his talk at THU called: "Perception, Problem Solving, and Finding Inspiration in the Default World."

Blur Studio has always been a good friend of Chaos Group, but we were still lucky to be able to get Tim Miller, one of the founders of Blur, on the podcast. Tim is in the middle of directing the upcoming film Deadpool, due out in 2016. We talk about what it is like to get your first big feature film directing gig at age 50. We also have a very honest talk about running a studio like Blur, a very unique and creative place. Tim has a very different philosophy about how to run a studio which for the most part has been a huge advantage for them. But he is also honest about the mistakes he has made and owns up to them.

My first real job out of Architecture School was at Gensler back in 1997. This year Gensler is celebrating it's 50th anniversary. I have very fond memories of my time there. This year, while at Siggraph, I ran into Scott DeWoody and Alan Robles who are now looking at a lot of new technology within the company. I figured it would be a great time to see what they are doing and help me see what has changed at Gensler since I left 14 years ago. We discuss VR, cloud rendering, real time raytracing, and a lot more.

Wes Ball is best known as the Director of The Maze Runner and the upcoming sequel The Scorch Trials coming out September 18th 2015. After letting us know that he enjoys the CG Garage Podcast on Twitter, I invited Wes to be a guest. He agreed right away and sat down with us in the garage in Culver City. As a big Lightwave and Modo user, he loves CG and has used it for many of his own projects. We discuss how his career started right out of film school and how he had one of the most amazing weeks anyone in Hollywood could every hope for.

While at Siggraph we sat down with Kevin Baillie from Atomic Fiction. We speak about his interesting career starting on the Skywalker ranch, which, after a few extra stops along the way, led him to start Atomic Fiction with his childhood friend Ryan Tudhope. Kevin and his company are not shy of trying new things. While most people think that eventually people will possibly be rendering on the cloud, they have already been doing it for 5 years. He talks about how the company led over 600 shots on Robert Zemeckis's The Walk rendering on the cloud and with V-Ray for Katana.