Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the titles of Sam Claitor and Kolby Kember, which were originally swapped in the story. 225 regrets the error.
Crafty Apes, the Baton Rouge film industry’s primary visual effects company, is hoping to bridge the gap between filmmaking, technology and video games, thanks to new funding from Epic Games.
Crafty Apes secured the funding in May 2022 from Epic MegaGrants, split into grants ranging from $5,000 to $500,000 to fund projects utilizing virtual assets from Unreal Engine, a video game engine known for its flexibility and accessible nature.
Despite Unreal Engine’s initial development as a video game engine, Epic’s website incentivizes the use of its engine for filmmaking.
|
|
|
“It’s an opportunity to apply bleeding edge technology to filmmaking,” Crafty Apes’ head of studio, Sam Claitor, says.
California-based Crafty Apes opened its Baton Rouge office in January 2020 with only two people working out of a single room. It now has 50 employees working to integrate live-action footage with computer generated images on 100 projects, including Home Team, National Treasure: Edge of History and Where the Crawdads Sing, out of Baton Rouge’s film production studio, Celtic Studios.
“One thing that we do differently than a lot of other companies is that we take a filmmaker’s approach to every project,” Claitor says.
Part of this approach is accomplished with the MegaGrant, partnering Crafty Apes with Louisiana Entertainment, the state-run body in place to cultivate the state’s entertainment industries, including film, to continue experimentation with digital filmmaking tools.
One of the primary projects the grant funded was the completion of Before the Beard, Before the Belly, an animated short film telling a reimagined origin story for Santa Claus set to release theatrically in December 2023.
Originally developed by filmmaker Darin McDaniel as a feature-length film in 2008 before Crafty Apes got involved, Claitor and McDaniel say their involvement with Unreal Engine breathed new life into the project.
McDaniel hopes the feature film, The Legend of Santa Claus, will be given a new life as a “charming little holiday beauty” with the help of Crafty Apes and the visual effects artists working on it.
WHAT THEY DO:
• Through their visual effects studio Crafty Apes, the duo and their team have created computer-generated images on 100 projects, including National Treasure: Edge of History and Where the Crawdads Sing (pictured here).
• Their work transforms studio backdrops into sweeping landscapes and adds elements like leaves swirling through the air.
It’s collaborations like the one with McDaniel that excite the team at Crafty Apes, creative director and senior VFX supervisor Kolby Kember says. He hopes that their collaboration allows them to “fight for the little guy,” making the project’s Unreal Engine elements available to the public to be played with by up-and-coming visual effects artists and filmmakers as a learning tool.
According to Louisiana Entertainment, another part of Crafty Apes’ MegaGrant is the development of a junior workforce program to train the next generation of visual effects-focused filmmakers.
|
|
|
Through the MegaGrant, Crafty Apes hopes to create an ecosystem to foster more visual effects jobs where there weren’t many before, creating new opportunities with the merger of film and video game technology.
“When I was a kid, I would’ve thought you would have had to live in Los Angeles or New York to work in the entertainment business,” Claitor says. “I didn’t think it was a real possibility to do that from Louisiana, probably until I started working in VFX.” craftyapes.com
This article was originally published in the February 2023 issue of 225 magazine.