Crafty Apes

Crafty Apes is a visual-effects and post-production studio founded in July 2011 in Culver City / Los Angeles, California, by VFX supervisors Chris LeDoux, Tim LeDoux and Jason Sanford. The company works across feature film and episodic productions, delivering high-end visual-effects work with an emphasis on photoreal, often invisible, imagery.

Its services span 2D and 3D compositing, on-set supervision, look development, CG assets and creatures, digital cosmetics, and machine-learning and AI workflows. This combination supports projects from production-side visual-effects planning through final post-production delivery.

Screen work

Crafty Apes’ reported credits include:

• Alien: Earth, The Bear, Stranger Things and Only Murders in the Building
• Spider-Man: No Way Home, La La Land, The Menu and Thunderbolts*
• The Residence, Star Trek: Discovery, Nobody 2 and Black Bag

The studio has expanded its North American footprint through acquisitions, including Vancouver-based CVD VFX in February 2020 and Molecule VFX in January 2022. The Molecule transaction expanded Crafty Apes’ East Coast presence, while the CVD VFX acquisition added Vancouver operations to its network.

Gemspring Capital acquired Crafty Apes in November 2019, with preferred equity provided by Everberg Capital. The company subsequently completed a leveraged dividend recapitalization in 2022 and received further strategic growth funding in 2024.

Crafty Apes maintains active production hubs in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, with its corporate headquarters and primary studio facility in El Segundo, California. Its network also includes a New Jersey regional hub, while some earlier locations have been restructured or consolidated as the business adapted to industry conditions.