Hailing from Alaska, Chris LeDoux's fascination with cinema and storytelling paved the way for his illustrious career in visual effects (VFX). His journey, beginning as a compositor, has led him to his current role as a high-level VFX supervisor and director. More recently, LeDoux has extended his expertise to encompass the arenas of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer vision, leveraging these advanced technologies to drive further innovation in the VFX industry and enrich narrative filmmaking. LeDoux’s portfolio showcases collaborations with acclaimed filmmakers on highly-regarded projects, such as Hidden Figures, La La Land, and 12 Years a Slave, as well as TV series like Stranger Things. His directorial talent is displayed on CW’s Pandora, where he also serves as a producer. Furthermore, he has directed commercials for high-profile clients, including Boeing. Currently based in Atlanta, the hub of Crafty Apes' headquarters, LeDoux balances his professional life with his personal life, spending quality time with his wife and three children. An identifiable figure in the VFX industry, he is often seen sporting his favorite Seahawks cap. Specialties As a supervisor and director, LeDoux is highly esteemed for his adept management of complex VFX projects and his proficiency in AI, ML, and computer vision. His solid foundational background in compositing, with expertise in tools like Nuke and generative ai, serves as the basis of his expansive industry knowledge. His pivot towards focusing on AI and its applications in VFX has positioned him as a pioneer in his field. Positions: Board Member at Deep Market Making Inc. (2023 - Present), Founder at LumaLogic (2023 - Present), Advisory Board Member at IDEAL EXCHANGE (IDX) (2022 - Present), Co-Founder - Chairman of the Board at Crafty Apes (2011 - Present), Advisory Board Member at Filmustage (2022 - 2023), Creative Advisor at Magic Leap (2011 - 2016), Director at Pusher Media (2007 - 2013), Visual Effects Supervisor - Compositing Supervisor at Scanline VFX (2009 - 2011), Sequence Supervisor at Method Studios (2009 - 2009), Sequence Supervisor at R!OT (2007 - 2009) Skills: Board Level, Independent Film, Board level experience, Board Governance, Board Administration, FinTech, financial ai, machine learning ai, Business Strategy, Television Directing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Camera Operation, Public Relations, Photo Shoots, Cinematography, Editing, Client Relations, Client Services, Film Direction, Strategic Planning, Digital Fusion, After Effects, Visual Effects, Nuke, Compositing, Shake, Digital Compositing, Look Development, VFX Supervision, PFTrack, Rotoscoping, Matte Painting, Feature Films, Renderman, Maya, Houdini, Particle Effects, Special Effects, Commercials, Music Videos, Film, Photography, Computer Animation, Film Production, Computer Graphics, Video, Animation, Traditional Animation, Live Action Recent Posts: Thoughts from the prolific Jayson Abalos. While AI excels at execution, it lacks the soul that comes from starting with deeper meaning - the 'why' that resonates with human experience, shapes 'who' we serve, defines 'what' we create, and influences 'where' we make impact. Like great storytelling, true innovation lives in this intersection of purpose and emotional intelligence. It's a bit of a learning curve but I've been playing with this the past few days and it's the most fun I've had in awhile. Yes, I should get out more, but it really makes exploring ideas a blast and far more effective than any other approach I've tried so far getting LLM's to really out complex systems. Worth checking out. Matrix Thoughts The MATRIX framework is undeniably impressive, pushing the limits of AI training through multi-agent simulations. But when I reflect on this approach, it feels like we’re still missing a vital piece in the larger puzzle. Right now, training agents on diverse, simulated data teaches our models what happened, but does it really help them grasp why things happen? That distinction matters. As humans, we don’t just passively collect data—we evolve and adapt because we have to. We’re driven by our needs, desires, and experiences, which push us to understand the why behind everything we encounter. Think about how we learn as kids. We’re born with a genetic “operating system,” ready to learn, but it’s through our interactions with the world that we start to understand cause and effect. We learn by doing, by seeing consequences, by figuring out why things work the way they do. So, what if we could build an agent architecture that learns more like we do—evolving through experience? Imagine starting with a foundational “genetic” layer that encodes basic learning and reasoning skills. We could then drop this agent into a multi-agent environment where it has to navigate diverse goals and needs. In this world, the agent wouldn’t just soak up information passively—it would be actively experimenting, gathering experiences, and most importantly, inferring causal relationships. With the right mix of adaptive learning modules and causal reasoning engines, it could start understanding not just what’s happening, but why. Obviously, building something like this is a massive challenge. The computational requirements would be off the charts, and we’d need environments complex enough to foster real, meaningful learning. Plus, there’s an ethical minefield in simulating evolutionary pressures and human-like needs. But if we could pull this off, the potential would be huge. By focusing on why things happen and letting agents learn through experience, we might be able to close some of the gaps between where AI is now and where we want it to be. In my work in VFX and AI, I’ve seen firsthand that it’s not enough to just understand what makes something look real—you have to understand why it looks real. It’s the difference between someone who follows directions and someone who can truly innovate and solve problems. The MATRIX framework is promising, but it’s just one of many paths we could take. The idea of evolving AI through experience is exciting, but it’s going to be incredibly complex to implement. Still, I’m convinced that current AI, as powerful as it is, doesn’t really understand. This evolutionary approach might not be the silver bullet, but it’s at least taking a shot at understanding the ‘why’ behind intelligence, not just the ‘what.’ I’ve tried it. It works. It’s insanely fast. It’s cool. Not production ready, but for a VR holodeck it'll do. Impressive https://lnkd.in/etBtMFVB Oh Thank God Another rad step forward. Yes indeed. Hey friends, fam, and fun folks of LinkedIn, For three years, I've been pretty tight-lipped about a project that's been consuming my every waking moment. Today, I'm beginning to pull back the curtain on Star Forest - not just a show, not merely a virtual band, but an entire universe crafted from the ground up to revolutionize kids and family entertainment. It began with a simple observation from my five-year-old: "Mom, I can't find any music for me." In that moment, the glaring void between "Baby Shark" and Top 40 hits became painfully obvious. I joke that this age group quickly moves from wanting Cocomelon to knowing about Cardi B overnight. We were failing an entire demographic - kids aged 5-8 - despite them being the fastest-growing market in music streaming. And so, the work, or better yet, play, began. Star Forest isn't just filling this gap; it's blasting it wide open. What we've built with a small team is unprecedented: 1. A full album of genre-defying music that speaks to kids and parents alike. 2. A virtual band with deep, richly layered characters that rival any prime-time drama. 3. A mythological universe with its own sound, physics, creatures, and lore. 4. Fully animated music videos that push the boundaries of visual storytelling. 5. A narrative that weaves through every piece of content. 6. An audio department to tell all sorts of stories that sound and feel next level. These aren't your typical kids' podcasts. 7. Games. Small or epic. From Fortnite-like experiences to mobile games to RPGs. Games had to happen. 8. Low-fi music and videos to help kids chill out and vibe to- perfect for downtime, creating and learning. 8. A digital ecosystem designed to meet kids on every platform they inhabit. And we've done it all independently, without major studio backing, proving that a small team with a big vision can move mountains. Is this ambitious? Absolutely. Is it too much? Not even close. We're creating for Gen Alpha - the most informed, connected, and capable generation in history. These kids can access any information, play any song, or create entire worlds in Minecraft before breakfast. They're dopamine drunk and overstimulated, yes, but also primed to change the world in ways we can barely imagine. Star Forest isn't just content; it's a movement. We're not just telling stories; we're building a community. We're not just making music; we're composing the soundtrack for a generation that will reshape our world. As we march towards our August launch, I'll be sharing more about the Star Forest universe. This is an open invitation to my industry colleagues: join us in redefining what's possible in children's entertainment. Partnerships? Collabs? Let's talk. The future is here, it's bright, and it's teeming with possibility. Are you ready to step into the Forest? We made magic happen. And I couldn't be prouder. I can’t wait to share what this star-filled forest is all about. - Genevieve LeDoux (DeMars) The benign version of ai war drones duking it out. This is a cool step forward. It could quickly be incorporated to help pre-viz scenes and sequences. Anything that helps move more production to the front end so the back end doesn't turn into more of a janitorial endeavor. VFX should happen at all phases of production in a more holistic manner than the current silos of department vs department. More production data. Bad but starting to trend in the right direction. These are based on 1st day of principal photography which on the average means VFX lands ~6 months later for artists working en masse on a given project. A little faster in TV/Episodic and potentially a little longer with a blockbuster film, but as a general mean its solid. Autobots emerging from the primordial ooze. Time to bring back 1998 Jerry Springer. It’s crazy impressive. Oh boy. Been waiting for this. Time to get into the propaganda business! Good news, fingers crossed. Happy Easter We might skip the 4th turning and invent a 5th and 6th. Every day there are multiple breakthroughs it’s a bit insane. 90's kids taking over. Life in vfx since the hipster hijacking of Hollywood. Least surprising news of the day. Good lord this is cool. Screen record yourself browsing a website and build the code for a prototype. This is getting better and better. Weights available as well. Demo: https://lnkd.in/gzqxiNkZ This is rad. VFX needed something like this for a long time and I bet it could be applied to the rest of post as well. Will be super useful once there are actual shows to work again. Pretty damn useful. My compadre Jon Cowley made a pretty helpful tool if you are one of the cursed few who has ever had to bid and calculate VFX tax philanthropy. #VFXProduction, #FilmTaxCredits, #AnimationIncentives, #FilmFinance, #TaxRebateFilming, #FilmMakingCanada, #FilmProductionUSA, #VisualEffectsGrants, #AnimationTaxBreaks, #PostProductionSavings We finally got temporal depth and inpainting to work pretty damn well and Robin Graham cooked this up pretty quick. If you have a headset, take a look. It works surprising well with sports footage which was pretty rad for Seahawks games, NBA, and especially Hockey. Create stunning stereo footage or images from regular videos or photos for free. Currently in beta, Depthify.ai can automatically create stereo footage from regular video up to 60 seconds long. You can also compress and create spatial video for the Apple Vision Pro or the Meta Quest. Check it out at https://lnkd.in/eEvN2yY2. #applevisionpro #metaquest3 #spatial #spatial Luke Thompson, Cathy Hackl, Rodolphe Pierre-Louis Coolest new tool I've used in awhile that is production ready and applicable out of the box. I'm taking an un-released film right now and reframing, relighting, and recoloring the entire thing using SwitchLight. Combined with some other custom tools for auto-targeting and you have something that can help realize a vision that much faster. So cool. Jarvis is coming! LeCun vs Altman. Similar to when the the Ultimate Warrior took on Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania VI. A match that changed history. Still one of my favorite articles. Contextual framing ftw! Where it’s headed. Jarvis v Jarvis. 💹💥 Film & TV Productions have been under attack all of 2023, globally. The war in Europe, Hollywood writer-actor strikes and financial markets turmoil were global factors that played a part in slowing things down. But then there were internal industry factors primarily the revenue pressures for box-office, linear channels and SVOD or the margin pressures on animation and big budget features. Vitrina A.I.'s latest Entertainment supply-chain digest puts a spotlight on the 2023 Film/ TV Productions vs Licensing along with all the big news from the entertainment supply-chain. You can access the full digest here: https://lnkd.in/gnjHtWW4 #globalsupplychain #entertainmentindustry #svod #fremantle #sonyliv #zee5 Still learning how to implement what the author talks about but reading his material every day helps make the llm world a bit more understandable. TLDR on this article. LogicBots for simulated goal seeking! 1. Fine-tuning for superior logical reasoning and systematic thinking. 2. Grounding structured knowledge graphs for deeper, grounded reasoning. 3. Implementing Agentic Orchestration for efficient information retrieval and response generation. By merging symbolic and neural techniques, we’re reinventing LLMs into highly reliable, explainable, and efficient reasoning engines for complex business scenarios. Let’s leverage the power of AI to overcome real-world business challenges! #AI #BusinessIntelligence #MachineLearning Simulators are the name of the game. It's what we do naturally as we try to make decisions. Once you can establish the ground rules for a 'system', then given a list of goals, resources, and constraints you can simulate out various decisions. For personal life, business etc the possibilities are endless in that you can maximize ROI and mitigate risks by seeing how things play out. There is a reason the military has always used wargames in this manner. It's what sports teams do in practice etc. Being able to see how decisions cascade dimensionally through a system is by far the most valuable piece to recent AI developments. If you can raise the confidence that choice X will increase Y results, then it becomes far easier to achieve your goals. While not easy by any means, its really more of a game engine simulation with AI attempting to figure out the 'maze' so to speak vs just AI for everything. A mouse in a maze with infinite lives that can explore rapidly. Ultimately, this will be used to help maximize the utilization of the only real commodity to humans which is time. Or I'm just slightly tipsy right now. Super useful insight from Luminate on the state of our industry in terms of spending for film and television. It’s down but also looks worse when compared to the over correct post Covid. It will start to even out especially if interest rates level out or drop this year. 1st CES. This Game of Thrones slots is on point. I was playing with image generation and then this image spit out which illustrates the current limitations of most AI tools without putting in effort to provide them with proper context. (RAG with Knowledge Graphs can help) The prompt was '<lora:epi_noiseoffset2:.5>, <lora:epiCRealismHelper:.5>, A cinematic Two shot image from a Comedy of A disgraced prince hunting a legendary monster to restore his honor standing in Ambient lighting , GoPro HERO11 Black, 400mm' Here is the result: Makes sense. Great basic guide to really get ChatGPT into its full potential. Too good not to repost - Happy World VFX Day! ✨🥳😄 #vfx #worldvfxday 📣📺 Film/ TV Productions in Q1 2024! Get ready for the new year... At Vitrina A.I., we have been tracking major streamers, broadcast networks, and production houses who have optioned a surge of new IP for pre-production/ development. Our predictions on new productions? Drama, Thrillers, Animation, Comedy, and new Formats will dominate. Stay ahead of the curve by attending our LIVE session tomorrow to learn why we're extremely bullish on these genres. We will also reveal the companies that are going to hit the production circuit early in 2024! https://lnkd.in/g8JmsAs4 #filmproduction #tvproduction #entertainmentindustry #2024predictions#globalsupplychain #mediasupplychain Introducing, Motion Brush. A new way to add controlled movement to your generations. Coming soon to Gen-2. Jerry Seinfeld started performing stand-up comedy in 1976. Since then, to this day, he sits with a yellow legal pad and writes jokes every day. Given that he’s been honing his craft for 47 years, he was asked, “How do you know a joke is going to work on stage?” Seinfeld said, “You don’t.” Interviewer: You just trust yourself? Seinfeld: No you don’t. There’s no trust. It's excruciating—8 or 9 times out of 10, it doesn't work. The interviewer said that he had recently seen Seinfeld perform at The Beacon Theatre in New York City, where Seinfeld seemed to get nothing but laughs. “What you saw is what's worked,” Seinfeld said. “But you only saw 1.5% of what I’ve tried.” Takeaway 1: The writer Morgan Housel points out the importance of distinguishing between two categories: fields of precision and fields of uncertainty. Astrophysics, for instance, is a field of precision: when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA said it “took about one minute less than predicted when the craft was launched in January 2006.” NASA’s forecast was 99.99998% accurate. Comedy, on the other hand, is a field of uncertainty. Even Jerry Seinfeld’s forecasts are 1.5% accurate. It’d be great if more things in life were like astrophysics. It’d be great if, before you started a business or wrote a book or quit a job, you were 99.99998% sure it’d all work out. But most things in life are like comedy. Most things in life, Housel writes, “are fields of uncertainty, overwhelmingly driven by decisions that can’t easily be explained with clean formulas, like a trip to Pluto can.” Takeaway 2: In a world of uncertainty, where most things are more like comedy than astrophysics—more than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats famously wrote, you need the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Even if he’s going out with jokes that have worked, Seinfeld said, every time he steps on stage, “it’s slightly terrorizing.” Rarer than comedic talent, Seinfeld adds, is the ability to handle that terror. “A lot of people can be funny, a lot of people can write jokes, but not a lot of people can handle that daily slight terror.” - - - “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” — Robert Greene Follow Billy Oppenheimer for more content like this! In these trying times, as strikes and layoffs cast a shadow, we empathize with the challenges our community faces. We've scouted a lifeline — a list of companies currently hiring. If our post can be a ray of hope for someone in need, please share and help us reach those who seek it. Together, we can be a beacon of support for our VFX family. 1. Disney Careers https://lnkd.in/dE5x_i8r 2. Framestore https://lnkd.in/dGhdTg28 3. Sony Pictures https://lnkd.in/eEhtz4p 4. Milk VFX https://lnkd.in/dAG-h2FK 5. Ingenuity Studios UK https://lnkd.in/dYEXN8ei 6. The Mill https://lnkd.in/gbuaPES 7. Luma Pictures https://lnkd.in/gKAXw3p 8. Jellyfish Pictures UK https://lnkd.in/dntbaECw 9. Scanline VFX https://lnkd.in/gSs5Mh3 10. Barnstorm https://lnkd.in/gAXY9CvC 11. Rodeo FX https://lnkd.in/eKBby_Ai 12. DNEG https://lnkd.in/fEa7fBX 13. Company 3 https://lnkd.in/dsp4b-Gj 14. Flibook Studios UK jo@flipbookstudio.co.uk   15. Cinevisual FX jobs@cinevisualfx.com 16. Mustad FX https://lnkd.in/djqQV-_T 17. Moon Active Studios https://lnkd.in/dDgZ7ayv 18. Giant Squid Studios https://lnkd.in/dTw9S5tM 19. Rockstar Games https://lnkd.in/dfHukWSM 20. The Embassy https://lnkd.in/drvx6j-x Follow Humans of VFX #vfxjobs #jobs #hiring #hiringnow #vfxartist #vfxstudio #viral @$$?!$&@!!!!