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 extraterrestrial contact. Butler has been Spielberg's go-to VFX supervisor for grounded, "make it real" work since Ready Player One, and before that, he was Chris's first VFX supervisor ever, on The Day After Tomorrow. Back in Episode 557, Chris and Daniel broke down Disclosure Day as fans, tracing its DNA back through Close Encounters and Sugarland Express. This time they bring on the person who actually built it, for a conversation about matching digitally-replaced train sequences to real-world reference plates, a shot count that came in smaller than planned going in, and why the biggest emotional gut-punch in the movie has almost nothing to do with visual effects at all. Butler walks through how Spielberg directs VFX without ever really discussing VFX, and the two of them dig into what makes his process so different: a shot list that shrank instead of ballooning, something Butler says has never happened on any other project in his career, a director who wants to solve problems himself rather than have them solved for him, and a 30-year veteran realizing mid-conversation that the AI moment VFX is living through right now feels exactly like the unsolved chaos of the 1990s. A conversation about restraint, trust, and knowing when the effects work is actually done when nobody notices it. Mentioned in this episode: Digital Domain, James Cameron, Titanic, Poltergeist, Tobe Hooper, Eric Barba, Doug Roble, Janusz Kamiński, Chris Columbus, Gremlins reboot, The Odyssey, Dune Guest links: Mattew Butler on IMDB > Matthew Butler on LinkedIn > Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 into what Nolan is doing as a filmmaker, structurally and emotionally, in his adaptation of the oldest story in Western literature, and why a three hour runtime built around a decade-long wait might be the whole point rather than a flaw. The real conversation is about adaptation itself: what happens when a director spends the entire movie making an audience feel exactly what an intractable wait feels like, and why Nolan's obsession with time connects everything from Memento through Tenet to this one. Daniel makes the case that Nolan has finally figured out how to deliver Tenet's disorienting rewatch effect without forcing anyone to actually rewatch anything. Chris and Daniel also compare Nolan's spectacle-forward approach to what a Denis Villeneuve version might have looked like, and get into why single-vision directors are becoming Hollywood's new IP. Mentioned in this episode: The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan), Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Memento, Oppenheimer, Denis Villeneuve, Dune, Avatar, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Annihilation (Alex Garland), Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven), Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown, Frank Gehry, Steven Spielberg, Disclosure Day, Zack Kreger, Ryan Coogler, Hoyte van Hoytema, Wally Pfister, David Lynch, Jack Fisk, Paris, Texas, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Master and Commander, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Neuromancer (trailer) Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 marketing to the A24 backlash of the moment, but the real news is that the team just wrapped a shoot on June July, and Ron walks through how it actually went. The conversation moves into the details of that shoot, where fully ray traced and relightable Gaussian splats, an unplanned split diopter, and a crew that improvised through a rough second day produced a shot nobody storyboarded. Ron also weighs in on private equity's growing role in indie film financing, the five to ten million dollar sweet spot for creative freedom, and what the Warner Bros/Paramount consolidation could open up for smaller studios willing to bet on story over stars. References mentioned: A24 Google DeepMind The Odyssey Warner Bros / Paramount Sponsors: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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 the crowd-pleasing surface is a genuinely weird, deeply personal artist who has been smuggling strange, uncomfortable ideas inside blockbuster packaging since at least Close Encounters. They trace it through Fabelman's casting David Lynch as John Ford, the theory that Kubrick handed Spielberg AI specifically because Spielberg's glossy reputation could disguise a bleak, unnerving film, and the moment James Lipton caught Spielberg off guard by connecting his parents directly to Close Encounters on camera. Disclosure Day itself is proving strangely divisive, and Chris and Daniel dig into why. They break down its Sugarland Express-style chase structure, an Emily Blunt performance that starts as broad comedy and quietly transforms into something much stranger, a train sequence built to feel genuinely dangerous rather than stylized, and the VFX work from longtime collaborator Matthew Butler. Along the way, a detour into Spielberg's actual filmmaking journey, from Close Encounters to Poltergeist to AI, makes the case that his reputation as the "obvious" director has always been the biggest misdirection in his own filmography. Referenced in this episode: Disclosure Day Close Encounters of the Third Kind Poltergeist A.I. Artificial Intelligence War of the Worlds Minority Report The Fabelmans Sugarland Express Matthew Butler, VFX Supervisor Sponsors: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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, then pull the same thread through the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Mark Ruffalo's New York Times op-ed on quiet industry retaliation, and what it means that four studios now control what used to take six. From there the panel turns to Christopher Nolan's press tour for The Odyssey and the practical-versus-VFX marketing dance that VFX artists roll their eyes at every single time it resurfaces. They close with a Monstrous Moonshine state of the union, walking through the June July shoot and a quick, lighthearted aside on why the show still uses AI tools like Suno for its own theme song. Mentioned this episode: A24, Google DeepMind Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. Discovery, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Stoller Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey, D-Neg, Weta Workshop Monstrous Moonshine June July Suno Special thanks to our sponsor: Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

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/

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)

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)

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)

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)