The magic of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters is happening in our backyard. The A-Scene’s Francesca Amiker takes us behind the scenes of a visual effects company who’s had a hand in some of our favorite movies and TV shows.
You’ve seen their work “Hidden Figures”, “Stranger Things”, even “La-La Land, “but what you may not know is this.
Meet Chris Ledoux, the founder of Crafty Apes Visual Effects. One of Atlanta’s first visual affects companies to be Hollywood’s visual FX essential partners.
“So, “La-La Land” was actually shot in Los Angeles but we actually did much of the work out here,” LeDoux said. “Famous part of the movie was the opening shot which was actually done in multiple takes that we actually then stitched together.”
But for Chris the stitching began in 2011 when the Alaska native came to Atlanta to work on a movie. He already had a Crafty Apes in Los Angeles and soon New York, so he decided to make Atlanta its next home. Now seven years later he and his 50 Atlanta employees are thriving.
Matthew Ackey is from Los Angeles and Sara Tremblay is from Chicago. They too believed in Chris’s dream of showing Hollywood that Atlanta had the infrastructure to be more than film location.
Crafty Apes Visual FX sustaining productions in Atlanta
“They will hand us a script and say, “Hey can you break this down, what are you thinking is going to be the extent of visual effects for this project,” Tremblay said.
“With “Uncle Drew,” we were the sole vendor on that film. We did a lot of work with Kyrie Irving and Shaq and a lot of prosthetic makeup touch-ups. You could add frost to tree branches or paint out a boom pole that dips and that kind of stuff, all the way up to creating entire cityscapes where you’re modeling buildings and that aren’t really there,” Ackey said.
Ackey told the A-Scene that more creatives should take advantage of the opportunities in the Metro.
“We should be able to do all the work not just production work. We have visual effects in LA. Let’s take advantage of the tax opportunities here so the filmmakers can do the entirety of the film not just the shooting in Atlanta,” Ackey said.
Sustaining a long-term industry in Atlanta, starting with visual affect is something that Chris helped pioneer seven years ago and hopes the industry continues this notion for years to come.
“The more we incentivize local filmmakers to create their own content and actually develop their own studios, much how Tyler Perry has, exactly, we need more Tyler Perry’s to develop more content, to build their own studios and create their own distribution networks. And at that point you’ll see every, every facet in the industry start to move to here,” Chris LeDoux said.
Check this out! The team at Crafty Apes worked on Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and it landed them a nomination for an Emmy award this year.
