You know you’re in a unique VFX house when your first day on the job means receiving a gift basket full of termites and walking in on an ape playing chess in the break room.
Recognize the movie? It’s 1997’s George of the Jungle starring John Cleese’s voice as Ape.
Okay, none of that has ever happened at any of the seven international Crafty Apes’ VFX offices (as far as we know), but it doesn’t hurt to dream.
The full-service visual effects studio has been rapidly expanding since post-Covid productions picked back up, especially the Baton Rouge office, which serves as a primary stop for post-production magic in Louisiana and is well-known for its talented pool of VFX artists and supervisors.
Crafty made two major moves in the first half of November. On November 7th, the studio named Craig German its new CEO. German will operate out of the Los Angeles headquarter office and will oversee the “expansion of the company’s footprint, leveraging technology to remain on the forefront of the industry, and maximizing operational scale”.
German has moved to Crafty from his position as Head of Worldwide Post Production Operations at Amazon Studios. He’s also held executive management roles previously at NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Technicolor.
Crafty continued its pursuit of free-agent executive talent on Wednesday, November 16th by signing Sean Looper as its Chief Technology Officer. Looper has been in the digital content creation realm for 25 years and has specialized in software engineering and business and product development. He brings a depth of experience to Crafty Apes that include his status as a patent holder in cloud-driven rendering technologies and credits on over 50 feature films (many of them credited as ‘senior software engineer’).
Looper’s role will be to power forward technical strategy, asset management, AI/ML utilization, and “work-from-home enabling technologies”.
Crafty Apes continues to grow its talent at an exciting rate, now carrying 540 employees with a 64% employee growth rate over the past two years.
Human Resources is gonna be spending a whole lot of money on termite welcome baskets.
