Crafty Apes

Crafty Apes

The Baton Rouge artist-technicians behind Hollywood's wildest illusions

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

The love story at the core of Olivia Newman’s film adaptation of Delia Owens’ blockbuster novel Where the Crawdads Sing emerges in a forest clearing, where the wind—embodied by golden, fluttering leaves—begins to dance around Kya and Tate, eliciting laughter, unbridled joy, and then a kiss. The camera circles the couple, a sunbeam breaking into the space between them, Spanish moss dripping from branches above, the leaves twirling in approval.

Such a scene is not created by happy timing. Nor are there special effects production assistants tossing leaves out of the camera’s view. Such magic can be attributed, rather, to visual effects (VFX) teams— and this particular moment was the work of the Baton Rouge branch of the international VFX company Crafty Apes.

“We’re really just a bunch of computer nerds in a dark room,” laughed Sam Claitor, head of studio production at the Baton Rouge branch, based at Celtic Studios. “We are one of the bridges between what happens during production and delivering the final film. We are the digital side of cinematic effects.”

For Where the Crawdads Sing—which was filmed in the swamps of Houma, Fairview-Riverside State Park, Venice, and several other locations across Louisiana—VFX played a crucial role in enhancing the richness of the film’s setting-heavy backdrops, in raising the story’s stakes, and in making certain scenes possible at all. The hundreds-feet-tall fire tower from which Kya sees the entire swamp for the first time, and from which a certain character meets certain peril, would have presented a very dangerous filming situation on a practical level. So, those scenes were actually filmed in a parking lot, with a twenty-foot-tall tower setup against a greenscreen. “When the characters are on top of the firetower, none of the glass windows are real,” explained Kolby Kember, Crafty Apes’ Senior VFX Supervisor/ Creative Director. “That’s CG (computer graphics) glass on everything.” The moths and fireflies populating the verdant swamp? Created from nothing, on a computer. When Kya, in self-defense, lands a killer punch—the effect is enhanced by the VFX team. The Pontchartrain Bridge, Claitor said, was in the background of just about every scene that they shot at Fontainebleau State Park, and had to be removed in postproduction.

It’s a collaborative effort, explained Kember, whose role as supervisor involves working closely with directors, actors, and film crews to anticipate and plan for VFX that will be added in post-production. For instance, he explained that for the 2019 DC television series Swamp Thing, there was a scene in which an actress held a flower that would unfold and emit a dust—all to be created via VFX. Kember had to sit down and explain, in as much detail as possible, what the flower looked like and how it was going to open, and where the dust would go, so that she could convincingly react to it.

Before and after shots showing how the Baton Rouge team at Crafty Apes added swirling leaves to the iconic kissing scene in Where the Crawdads Sing.

Courtesy of Crafty Apes

“I think my favorite type of work,” said Kember, “is getting to work with the showrunners and directors to develop sort of how a character should look. I enjoy that sort of concept building during the creative phase.” This is particularly fun, he said, for superhero films—which involve a lot of creative VFX when it comes to developing characters’ powers and how they manifest in the film.

Kember’s first-ever VFX gig was as a roto artist on the night shift of Captain America.

“Even though my role in it was very small, it was still exciting to see those kinds of big projects coming together and play a part in helping do the work,” he said. Since then, his career has brought him to projects such as The Avengers and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and television series Gotham, Scream, Black Lightning, and The Passage.

After a few years working in Los Angeles, Kember—who grew up in Plaquemine—learned that the VFX company Pixomondo was opening a studio in Baton Rouge. He headed home, and it was while working at Pixomondo that he met Claitor.

Claitor, a New Orleans native who grew up in Baton Rouge, had been working in design and advertising, with Celtic Studios as one of his clients. They introduced him to the folks at Pixomondo, where “I went into what I thought was going to be a potential freelance gig one day, and walked out with a whole new career.”

At Pixomondo, Claitor and Kember worked on major projects that included Star Trek: Into the Darkness and the Game of Thrones Season 3 episode “Mhysa”. “The story I tell people about working on Game of Thrones,” said Claitor, “is I remember working on this show and wondering why people liked it. The dragons are tiny. Why is everybody in Westeros scared of these chicken-sized dragons? An entire army is in awe of them.” Now, he admitted, he is a full-on binged-the-whole-thing fan, currently watching House of the Dragon.

A moth from the film Where the Crawdads Sing, created by the Baton Rouge Crafty Apes team using VFX.

Courtesy of Crafty Apes.

Pixomondo’s residence in Baton Rouge was short-lived—reflecting larger disruption in the global visual effects industry spurred by the bankruptcy of the high-profile VFX company Rhythm & Hues, which took place only a few days before winning the 2013 Oscar for best visual effects on Life of Pi. The event revealed and elevated awareness of the film industry’s unsustainable exploitation of visual effects artists—who were in increasing demand but consistently underpaid and overworked.

“A lot of us visual effects artists saw the writing on the wall,” said Claitor, who moved on to take a job with Gentle Giant Studios as a manager and coordinator, working with companies like Marvel and Universal Pictures— before founding his own Louisiana production company, Fable House, in 2014. Kember opted to stay with VFX, doing some 3D work for Louisiana Economic Development before taking up dual residence in Atlanta, Georgia to work independently on movies full time.

In 2019, Kember was working in Georgia as a visual effects supervisor on the set of Black Lightning, and Claitor was in town for a conference. “Serendipity is a real thing,” said Claitor. While at the conference, a friend of Claitor’s (who had worked on episodes of American Horror Story) told him he should meet with the guys at Crafty Apes—who at the time were a growing VFX company based in Los Angeles, Atlanta and New York. Claitor wasn’t particularly interested in getting back into the VFX world, but he had heard that Crafty Apes co-founder Chris LeDoux was also a producer and director, and decided to meet with him to discuss making a movie together.

During the course of the conversation, Claitor mentioned some ideas he had for if he were ever to own a visual effects company. “It wasn’t a pitch or a proposal, it was really more like saying ‘Hey have you ever thought about doing this before? I’m not in the VFX business anymore, but if I was I would consider trying this or that.’” Two weeks later, LeDoux came back to him with a proposal: “Why don’t you do those ideas, but for Crafty Apes?”

In January 2020, Claitor opened the Baton Rouge office, bringing Kember on board immediately. “At that point, Crafty Apes maybe had one hundred and fifty employees globally,” said Claitor. “Today they have over six hundred employees, seven offices across two countries.” Today, the company is considered one of the top VFX companies in the industry, tapped to execute the post-production magic that brings many of today’s biggest television shows and films to life—including Stranger Things Season 4, Yellowstone, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Respect: The Queen Arrives, Mulan, and many more.

From the film Home Team, before and after the Crafty Apes Baton Rouge team added in the crowd using VFX.

Courtesy of Crafty Apes

Since its opening and in addition to Crawdads, Crafty Apes in Baton Rouge has contributed to Seasons 2 and 3 of Hightown, Halle Berry’s directorial debut Bruised, the Sean Payton biopic Home Team for Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions, and the forthcoming film, National Treasure: Edge of History—among many others.

Though much of the work completed by artists like Claitor and Kember is easily appreciated—explosions and superpowers and dancing leaves— much more of it is incredibly subtle, secret adjustments you’ll likely never notice (if they are done well, at least). Since the pandemic, Crafty Apes has done a lot of crowd replacement—a strategy that relieves the film company from having to organize and hire masses of extras. Claitor said that other, more grist of the mill work that they do are things like creating phone screens, aging, de-aging, and removing blemishes. “If someone has a big ole beer belly and they need to look a little more fit? We can do that. We do a lot of that kind of work,” he said.

“I think a lot of people in visual effects will tell you that their favorite effects are those hidden effects,” said Kember. “Background replacements or set extensions and things that the average viewer wouldn’t notice, unless it looked awfully wrong.”

The work, though certainly creative, is—Claitor and Kember agreed—more technical than most people likely realize, involving constantly-evolving technology and software. “The new push with AI is huge right now,” said Kember. “And I would say that visual effects is part of the leading edge of developing modern AI stuff with face replacements and tracking … you sort of tie that science and art together.”

Kember reflected on how far the effects industry has come over the last century—the 1940s and ‘50s setups with video wall backdrops and cars on treadmills. “Now, we’re able to do it in ways where we can track the cameras in real-time, and the background is moving in sync with the camera. You can control things like lighting and the time of day, with just a click of a button. The technology is all brand new, and it’s still growing.”

Learn more about Crafty Apes at craftyapes.com.