The company
From first page to final mix.
CGF Films is an independent motion picture company based in New York. We write, direct, score and finish our own films, from the first page of the script to the final mix.
Carlos Ferrer founded the company in 1999, after making films since the age of ten. At sixteen he directed a cast and crew of more than one hundred on his first feature, Scallop Pond, which won Best Student Feature at the Long Island Film Festival.
The latest feature, Retina, took six years, five of them in post. Ferrer wrote, directed, shot and scored it, designed its sound and built its visual effects, work he later presented at SIGGRAPH. Screen Media Films released it, and it is on iTunes, Amazon, DVD and video on demand.
Our own films come first. Between them we take on a few outside projects – music videos, commercials and branded films, short documentaries, and post and visual effects for other productions – chosen for what we can bring to them and made with the same in-house, director-led approach. See services.
In development: a trilogy of three connected features and two shorts, Zoey, a fantasy, and Sound of Obsession, a horror. Shorts are where we test ideas, and where the features usually begin.
How we work
Built for how films get made now
The tools keep changing. What makes a film worth watching does not.
We have taken up every real shift in the craft as it arrived – digital cameras, non-linear editing, node-based compositing, in-house color and sound. Machine learning is the latest, and we have been working with it for a while rather than waiting to see how the argument ends.
We treat AI as a collaborator, like any other. You bring it in, tell it what the picture needs, direct it, and keep only what earns its place – the standard every department here has been held to for twenty-five years. It is good at the parts of post that used to eat months: cleanup and roto, look development, the hundred passes between a shot and a finished shot. It is not what we hand a performance to.
Everyone has these tools now, and that is a good thing. It opens the door for people who could never afford a way in. It does not raise the ceiling. Access got cheap; taste did not. Which take carries a scene, where the camera belongs, how long to hold before the cut, what a cue is doing under the dialogue – none of that comes from a prompt.
Every part of a film is a decision somebody made. The writing and the performances are human. Nothing reaches the master because something generated it; it gets there because someone here decided it belonged. We do not make generated films.
That is our position, not a rule for anyone else’s set. What it buys us is a small company working at a scale that used to need a studio floor, with the time and money saved going into what an audience actually feels: actors, locations, days on set, and a score written for the picture.
See the work
Retina
Craft
Every department, in-house
Fifteen credited departments across the filmography. Not a boast about range – it is how a film with a studio look gets finished on an independent budget, and why a crew gets asked for the right thing at the right time.
I realized how little I actually knew, and decided to educate myself when creating the music, sound, color correction and visual effects – to make sure the quality would be as good as I imagined it being.
That was said about a film finished in 2015, and it is why we are calm about what is happening to the craft now. Doing a job badly, then doing it until it is right, is what builds the judgement to tell good work from work that only looks finished.
That judgement is the part that got scarce. Anyone can generate a plausible frame, cue or grade. Plausible is not right, and only someone who has spent a year mixing can hear that a mix is wrong. We have done every one of these jobs by hand, on a real picture, against a deadline – so whatever comes back from a collaborator, whether a composer, a colorist or a machine-learning model, we know straight away whether it belongs in the film.
1999 → now
Twenty-five years of it
1999
The company starts
CGF Films is founded in New York to make and finish original motion pictures.
2002
First festival screening
America’s Nightmare screens at the Deep Ellum Film Festival.
2004
First feature
Scallop Pond – ninety minutes, a crew of over a hundred, directed at sixteen.
2005
First award
Best Student Feature at the Long Island Film Festival.
2009–2015
Retina is built
Six years on one feature. One shooting, five in post – score, sound, color and every visual effect made in-house.
2015–2016
The industry notices
Profiles in the Los Angeles Times and Studio Daily; the visual effects work is presented at SIGGRAPH.
2018
Distribution
Screen Media Films releases Retina. It reaches iTunes, Amazon, DVD and VOD.
Now
A trilogy, and two shorts
Three connected feature films in development, alongside the shorts Zoey and Sound of Obsession, and commissioned music video, commercial and post work.
Who we are
Team
Carlos Ferrer
President · Filmmaker
Award-winning writer, director, cinematographer, composer, sound designer and visual effects artist. Born in New York City; BFA in Theatre Arts & Film from SUNY Purchase College, 2008. Has been making films since the age of ten; directed his first feature at sixteen. Presented the visual effects work on Retina at SIGGRAPH 2016. The protagonists in his films are usually women.
Gil Ferrer
Co-President · Executive Producer
Executive producer on Retina and Scallop Pond. Oversees financing, production management and distribution.
Let’s talk
Have something worth shooting?
Music video, commercial, or a feature that needs a director who can also finish it – tell us what you’re making.
Get in touch