Three Kodiak Brothers Conjure Trees and Paint Skies

Chris LeDoux. Via craftyapes.com

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Three Kodiak brothers are summoning demons, casting spells, and patching up facial blemishes in Los Angeles and Atlanta. You may wonder how these Alaskan guys ended up fixing actors’ complexions in the Lower 48. Well, it wasn’t through their powers with a brush and foundation. It’s all computerized.

The LeDoux brothers are part of a visual effects company called Crafty Apes, which has worked on big-budget flicks like “American Hustle” and “12 Years a Slave” and TV series like NBC’s “Constantine” and AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”

Chris LeDoux is one of the team’s founders and works with two of his three brothers. One is also a founder and the other will soon become a supervisor. LeDoux says, when it comes to working with his brothers, the employer-employee dynamic doesn’t always apply.

“With a family, they’ve seen your most embarrassing moments. They’ve seen you at your most vulnerable. So, they don’t have to take you that seriously if they don’t want to. There’s no fire to breathe at them. There’s no way to intimidate them or be like, no, I need this done. It’s more of a battle with family. But at the end of the day, they’re also the best reinforcements. They’ll have your back. You can call them at 3 a.m. and say the sky is falling, I need your help, or something like that.”

And with an industry that’s both deadline and detail-oriented, you need a good team. LeDoux explains a lot of the visual effects Crafty Apes does are ones you would never notice, like changing an actor’s chin or removing a blemish. You may think that you’re watching an actor deliver his lines while driving down the street, but he never really left the studio. Or you’re watching a night-time scene underneath a starry sky, but the actors are actually standing against a green screen.

LeDoux says, traditionally, film designers would hand-paint backgrounds and the directors would shoot in front of them.

“Nowadays it looks cheesy and you can tell, but for its time it worked. And we’re doing a similar process just all on the computer, so we might take elements from anywhere. We might go into CG software and create digital trees. We might go photograph trees. We might create a CG sky, but the idea is, and our specialty, is to combine all these things together so it looks real.”

Which takes practice. LeDoux says he started out making TV commercials and corporate video in Fairbanks and he broke into the industry when his friend offered him a job on the 2005 movie “Sin City” as a compositor, although he didn’t know what that job was at the time. He got the hang of it apparently, because he found more work as a compositor on “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which was released in 2006.

“My specialty was putting together the final shots. I’d do the green screen work, and I’d work on the environments, and I’d put it all together. I did one of the bigger shots where the little girl runs into this tunnel maze that opens up and all these trees open up and close behind her to save her from the antagonist, so that was a special one to work on. It was an unexpected hit. Because it was subtitled, we didn’t think American audiences would be that it into it. But it ended up winning a few Oscars, which is nice.”

LeDoux says it can be a hard industry to work in. He says one issue is the instability of film schedules.

“The average employees all make over $100,000 a year, so if a client is late, which they don’t care about you, they’ll be like, oh, we’ve delayed for two months. One day you’ve got all these people on salary for two months doing nothing, unless you have other work to fill the gaps. So, it’s become a very difficult business, but we kind of took a very different approach to the model, where instead of piling a lot of bodies in, we’re more like a Navy Seal type team. We went with very few people and very long hours.”

LeDoux say that was truer when Crafty Apes was just starting out in 2011 than now.
   
He says some of the projects the company is working on right now are “Dirty Grandpa,” a movie starring Robert De Niro, and the third film in the Divergent series.