#13 Creating VFX in Blender, with Ian Hubert

if you are into vfx then you will love the guest on this podcast today we have with us the lord the wizard of vfx ian hubert how's it going ian hey how are you doing it's going very good over here yeah yeah you are in seattle mm-hmm so sun sunset a couple hours ago nice nice lovely um yeah i mean i i assume most people that are watching this video clicked it because they know who you are at least um but for those who don't let's just say they were curious why don't you uh do a little introduction to who you are and yeah been uh been doing cg honestly since like the the mid late 90s i was using a piece of software that you can barely even find online um like reference to online called corel motion 3d and uh yeah it was kind of just going hand in hand with supplementing the stuff i couldn't make out of like cardboard and all of that because it was like stop motion and claymation and everything just kind of kept evolving but all of my visual effects stuff always came out of uh wanting to make films cheaply and so like being able to build a set or uh at a spaceship or drive a car you know we did like vfx for driving cars back before we could legally drive um and now i'm like oh digital extras we can fill in the background because wrangling people's schedules is almost impossible um and so i have now i'm like i'm a grown up i actually have like a little bit of money but still all of my skill sets are like we can make this out of cardboard and i'm kind of trying to figure out what to do with that um and your youtube channel which uh i suppose a lot of people would know you for um the lazy tutorials and the uh insanely detailed sci-fi sets uh which is dynamo uh yeah so what do you like people have have seen your stuff i'm sure um but yeah like what what okay what is dynamo what are you building exactly um actually i think it's funny that like nobody watch anything i i put out because you know it's an internet it's it's very vast and so i'd work for years on something and put it out there and people like okay um and since then i've did the lazy tutorials which is kind of just the thought of like okay what if you took what if you took something that you knew really well and just condensed it down kind of into it like a bite-sized thing and i feel like if everybody did that like um and that's what youtube's so cool about is like i'm like i want to learn how to install an outlet and you've got a guy who's been doing it for like 50 years he's like all right here's how you install an outlet and i i love that type of like condensed information but that means everybody's following me since then has no idea that normally i'm actually kind of like a poster and i make like weird films and stuff like that um i've been scared to upload them since then because uh now you've got now there's a channel yeah it's easy to upload anything when nobody's watching it um so i'm really excited to now release this new episode that i've been working on for like the past the past three years but yeah dynamo was just kind of a passion project project it was a catch-all for all of the random things that i kind of wanted to try with with film and all that like i'd see star trek and i'd be like i want to do spaceships so i'd see like a zombies i'm like i need some zombies and i just lump it all into this one world um i've got i've got dozens of notebooks full of all of the stuff and it's like way too much world building um yeah what impresses me the most is just how your knowledge within blender and just vfx in general is like i'm always surprised that like you'll you'll do like motion capture rigging animation uh lighting set design texturing uh and then you'll like project like textures and then build a building out of it and it's like all of these like things that normally on a full set or production is done by like 20 different artists or teamed um but you're just a one-man show almost right i think i think it's just a byproduct of doing it for a long time because the joke used to be that everything i did i did kind of hackishly and like i talked to people who actually knew like what they were doing and they're like i can't believe anything you do actually like looks good at all because that's like not a good way to do it um it's like duct tape and cardboard you're like it works like what kind of yeah like mesh onto a rig and i'm like look it kind of looks looks alive a little bit and so like yeah the translation um like putting out the tutorials and people like oh ian really knows blender and i'm like i i guess at some point over the last 15 years i did kind of learn blender but i think that's that's all it is um and also there's there's a puzzle aspect that's that's fun when there's a new tool that comes out is kind of like trying to decontextualize like there's the demo but then there's also um like okay what else what else could we do with this can we project footage on it can we do whatever i with geometry nodes that are now you know all the whole thing uh have you played with it yeah a little bit i haven't reached the familiarity uh to be able to do anything with it but i feel like i feel like that's everyone right now they're like it's cool i can move sliders and make things that i couldn't do before but i don't really know what to do with it yet i feel like it's gonna change like it's gonna blow up once like people do with um like i know shader nodes you mix the stuff and you can make it do cool things and then uh simon tom's toms um yeah makes a makes a a ladybug life site of like what yeah vectors and math and and it's like i wow i don't know how you did that insane i love it so much it's so impressive yeah um yeah no geometry nodes is it's gonna change everything i think like i don't know if that's overstating it or understating it but it feels huge like especially when you know that it's just the start right now and next there's like the ability to like fully procedurally model things and then it's going to include the simulation system and then it's going to include particles and then collection collection nodes so objects interacting with other objects and it's just like oh this is cool it's going to be houdini within a few years i'm i am very excited um because right now it's like i i love figuring out those especially the procedural tools like the random input um oh yeah yeah yeah for uh which okay so funny i guess maybe funny story um i and i independently invented that like random into the color ramp to randomize the color thing okay and i was so excited i was like oh i came up with this this is i'm so excited to like stick this in something and so um i don't know if you remember it was like a joke lazy tutorial in response to oh geez who who was it was it to cg matter um yeah then and then andrew prices like in there yeah yeah like a joke thing um but the thing that i thought was like actually useful in it was that randomization color thing and then i found out that the person who tagged me had used that in their video and then i saw that it was actually in your original donut video and this is actually just like a classic technique that i was like i that's how it always is it's like i think i've invented something it's like ah it's cool and then people are like yeah you could have googled that that's how you do it but the it's you can run into the limits of that so quick with just the way the blender's infrastructure is set up right now like all right you can randomize i i actually i just made a tool it's kind of a a proto car and every time you duplicate it it randomizes all the nodes and the different mix shaders and the the shape keys and stuff and so you get like a different car kind of like a a random face gen thing because i wanted to populate the backs of scenes um and it worked okay but it very much showed me kind of where the limits are of of what blunder wants you to do and i started getting into like drivers and stuff like okay i can use a driver to randomize this stuff but then like blender gets down to like half a frame per second and i don't know i don't know why it's because it's checking everything like i can think of two million things a second but if they're these things it it's hard yeah what blender stalls on is is surprising sometimes it's like you can handle all that but there's one little object that is dense or whatever it just crashes yeah yeah um that's cool um i can't remember what we were talking about originally but uh yeah everything knows nodes nodes yes yes but i i when you were talking about that i was kind of curious um because what what is really impressive about what you do and i often think this like when you're showing one of your videos and it's like here's this little janky thing and i project the thing and it said ah it's a building and i always think like that's so cool but i know that if i try this on a project i'm gonna run into a limitation right like i'm gonna need to show the building from another angle and therefore that projection technique won't work or like so all these like all your solutions are so cool and clever and it's so efficient for what you need it for um but how do you know when to take that shortcut versus like doing it the proper way you know what i mean yes yes yes um and i think a lot of things that i do and that i enjoy doing only work on a small scale um like that work if you're a hobbyist whereas if i were on an actual production where they're like we're making a video game and i'm like i made this building that looks really good from this angle and like cool well we're we're walking around a little bit um but that's what i really enjoy i like being able to do the the path of least resistance and um i one thing i've i've really found over the past couple years actually is i actually feel like i plateaued for a long time i was kind of getting better along with technology but like the past couple years i feel like i've i've stepped up a little bit and i think a lot of that honestly is just because more people are following me so when i upload something i'm doing it with the mindset of like i should actually call it i should do that final 10 to make it actually like good um yeah came the realization and i think that's actually a very useful tip is like if you want to make better art make it with the assumption that a lot of people are going are going to see it um like especially like the whole twitter environment where like stuff can be shared if somebody posts something cool the twitter it like yeah it gets gets around um like that one out of the girl that was like on a turntable or she was just turning her body and there's a green screen and it creates this full sci-fi world from this uh little janky home setup almost against the green screen how many views did that get millions right like i 50 plus million yeah um and actually okay so i made that i worked specifically hard on it because i thought it could be a really cool uh demonstration of what you could do in your garage with like 30 bucks of green fabric and like a camera like i specifically made it as kind of a showcase for like look this is blender you can motion track you can key you can you can do all of this in open source software um for me it was very very much this like exciting it was supposed to be like i think look we you can do stuff this is very cheap um i have a 50 light kit you know lighting the thing um but seeing it like having it go viral i like that's uh that was weird because again it had nothing to do with me it was just shared over and over and over it was on the front page of reddit like three or four times um and every single time people are just responding to the fact that she's in like a green void and they're like this is so depressing and they're like this is why ian mckellen this stupid quote about ian mckellen crying on the set of the hobbit um we shared every it was always the top comment and like this is why ian mckellen cried it's like eva kelly cried because he's trying to have an emotional connection with like a tennis ball like for days and days on end on like an absolutely problem like was a gandalf in lord of the rings and the hobbit he i don't actually know the story so hang on he cried on the hobbit why is that there's there's an anecdote where he was um like first the hobbit production was like very stressful um oh yeah and there's a thing where to talk to these like uh tennis balls and having to pretend they're hobbits and apparently he like he cried and he's like this isn't why i got into like acting um and i think later he kind of walked it back a bit but like that's the anecdote that people love for like why actors hate uh cg and i have a bunch of it's it's gonna be hard it's gotta be hard yeah to to a degree yeah like if you're what actors want to do is they want to feel as if they're they're creating a moment for real like they're they're trying to to um they're trying to build that inside of them and they want to make that for the audience and so the what when they get something back that's when they're talking to somebody and things just click and suddenly it isn't just like this fake thing they're doing it's suddenly like you get this synergy and it actually feels as if you're there in the moment and so if you're just acting off of ping pong balls you're never going to be able to get any of that but to say like an actor can't be on a green screen stage like like stage actors will be black box theaters their imagination is totally normal for for an actor um but the thing they don't want to fake is that is that interaction um and i found that on my end too like i'm always it's hard for me to schedule uh actors because we're all adults now and so i always schedule like but phone calls calls are easy because you just get um uh either film on different days or like i film one actor and then i have it be like a video phone and i can literally just do like a web call with them and screen capture it and be like there we go do not like that because again they're they're acting to the air and they have to be both sides and there's no way to get get that synergy um everybody watching that clip was like oh her acting is like uh amazing um and both katelyn and i like caitlyn is a good a good actress but for that scene literally all she's doing is walking across the stage standing in a place waiting and that worked perfectly for the scene because yeah that's what you would be doing in real life is like actually what you'd be doing you'd be doing the steps to get to the place and all of that um yeah and so yeah that was that was interesting just seeing these same comments like literally thousands of times but um first time you're on reddit yeah they just beating a dead horse is putting it lightly on reddit this is very few original ideas floating around it was weird seeing like accounts i follow just start um reposting it like you know creator unknown like it's like oh it was me but yeah speaking of um uh yeah like act as being able to act better uh yeah what about led volumes that i actually just watched a little uh like a making of thing for the mandalorian too and ilm have gone all in on led volumes they've actually launched like their own product called stagecraft 2.0 it's like an end-to-end solution which is the led volume the whole t the kit i don't know what it is um and they also launch their own uh real-time engine helios it's called because i guess apparently unreal engine was not good enough but this one is built from the ground up just for virtual production really yeah yeah i didn't know so i mean if you needed any more proof that like green screen sorry the led volumes of the new green screen like ilm is just sold on it it's it's huge that's cool oh and explain what it what an led volume is by the way for those who don't know what we're talking about at led volume if you were in in a room and every just surface of the inside of the room or a screen you could make that room be be whatever and normally like that illusion is is broken if like you start moving around you can see like the parallax shifts but they're tracking the camera location and so they're actually just showing on the screen that moving perspective uh calculated and like retriangulated so it just all looks right like on the on the screen um and the reason it's so much more uh groundbreaking over green screens the reflections and the lighting is real so the mandalorian who's entirely shiny uh is actually reflecting the real environment because it's like wrapped around him so they don't have to you know if it was a green screen it would be horrible you wouldn't get the real reflections uh oh it's crazy it's so cool i i hate green screen because it's just it's it's in a bomb you're trying to capture an image and then you just have this big green slab in the middle and so like all of the indirect lighting and little things that like make the world feel tangible and make places feel real you just you have to recreate that but i mean you can't get it on set you have to maybe stick i don't know one of my favorite things to do on a green screen is set up practical lights that you can match in cg so everything like ties together but um even like the cinematography like even accomplished experienced dps when they go to shoot a green screen scene they kind of resort to like all right i'm shooting an element and they back up and they let the person walk around like they're on like a high school theater stage or something because there's no background you can't create a composition if it's just a a person in front of green and so yeah being able to have that actual lighting from the location being able to tweak the lighting like in real time and being able to like see the background so you can discover new shots like every time on set it's always a happy accident of oh oh but over here this looks good and you can't have any happy accidents when you're in like just a green void it's just different angles of a person so that part is very cool and it finally brings all of that other aspect of cinematography kind of back into the story which is exciting what i don't like about it is for like 20 years now we could do at home basically everything they were doing in in hollywood like maybe not the wire work and stuff but we had cameras we had uh we could key stuff we could track stuff we could do all of that and now it's like the big boys are off doing their own thing again yeah that's right with a half million dollar led volume setups yeah yeah and so it's one of those things like that is cool technology if i had millions of dollars yeah i'd build my own cyber room too have fun um like i guess i'm just kind of like i'm a little jealous there's uh we we just rewatched uh well i rewatched caitlyn never seen the lord of the rings movies before and those things are absolutely gorgeous like all of the love and the handcrafted everything but there's um there's a texture there's a texture to to all of the films and um but what i loved is that you can still kind of see how how it fits together like you can see a little bit the depth of field is maybe a little bit too shallow when it's a miniature but there's still motion tracking in all of these little you know cg goblins where maybe the walk cycle is like but you and because of that you can appreciate it kind of all the more and like at the time it was like absolutely it still holds up because it's the artistic vision behind it and you know the artistry that went into it is still absolutely top-notch but you can see the different methods they use even between like the second and the third film gollum went from like kind of honestly kind of awkwardly animated he's slipping and sliding kind of going post a pose and by the third one the next year he is the animation and like even even the rendering is just like he's just a character there in the scene um yeah yeah but i kind of i kind of missed that i miss i missed the the the 80s and 90s and stuff where there was always a trick to it where and so i was like oh we set up a mirror here and then like for he raises his hand and it's like an inflatable bladder or whatever and i feel like the fact that cg is just like such an obvious catch-all for for everything now um but it's it's i guess it's good for us because we know cg like i'm thinking specifically of you like being able to do that stuff gives you such an advantage over the next generation of filmmakers who know purely filmmaking and they have to have a friend that hopefully knows 3d or they have to pay someone uh i don't know like i see it as a as a it's a plus for us right that's true um yeah i think i want all indie filmmakers now or at least all applicable ones to have an understanding of uh motion tracking and i guess some sort of like if people understood that you can track the camera and just stick a thing back there i feel like that would change so many so many things i mean people know that but like i wish i don't know like that that's that was i did a tutorial series uh last year literally just because like it's information i wanted out there like look you can key a thing you can track a thing this is how you can do a digital extension if you can just build a tiny corner of a set and so you can film everything normal film your whole conversation but then take 20 steps back and digitally fill in like the rest of it and just know on the set or like why is your shooting that like that's just going to be a thing you can do no problem um i think that that literally does liberate you in terms of like being able to tell a bunch of a bunch of things you normally wouldn't um that was that one you did of the uh the sci-fi of course the sci-fi uh the girl in the room and then you sort of step out and it's like outside the building and you're looking through the windows was it that one yeah yeah yeah that one was yeah motion tracking but then i was like here let's project that onto a thing and stick a window kind of in front of it um yeah which that was the actual point of the tutorial was just trying to put that idea out there of like look you can use half a room and have the other half of the room whatever's in the foreground you don't need a green screen or anything you can just stick cg stuff there and recontextualize the space the space that you're in um which means you don't have to do any of the king pipeline you just need a back wall that works like from an art standpoint um yeah yeah yeah and i i have to keep reminding myself that these images that you've got or whatever that they're not just demos for a tutorial uh which look beautiful but therefore something dynamo uh so what is dynamo dynamo is yeah it's it's the the passion project i've been working on since forever um i always i'm always working on it i work on it hours every day for the past decade um decade oh yeah yeah even when i was working on on tears of steel i would go home and i'd keep working on on dynamo and what's wild to me is that in the past like six seven years i've released 15 minutes of stuff like that's what all of the years have gone into and it's not even like that great of like 15 minutes um because i keep so first i i've made like two hours worth of stuff and i just kept filming i was like oh this scene you can always recontextualize stuff you can take a lackluster scene but then recontextualize it to show like but he has like a gun in his pants the whole time lackluster scene you're like oh is his pants gun gonna explode um so i kept doing that but i was doing it all in parallel which means i never had anything finished to like upload and eventually i was just sitting on a massive pile of stuff most of which was like five years old and so i decided okay well i don't want to do all of the post work it would take years worth of posts to get this all ready to upload and now a lot of it's old and we just kind of filmed it in like random crawl spaces and things and it kind of looks it um let's throw that out let's kind of start over and so i spent a couple years starting in like 2015 re making kind of a parallel show that would fit in with all of that um but like using stuff i'm interested in now technology available now and like friends that still live in town as opposed to like whoever happened to be my housemate back in 2010 or whatever um but then so we and we made like 45 minutes of that but then i decided i wanted to open it with a really solid episode so for the past three years i've just let myself go absolutely nuts um making this making this opening episode like every shot is a completely new cg scene like it's just shot after shot after shot it's a i'm i'm very proud of it it's uh it's definitely a lot of work like it's very evidently a lot of work when you watch it you go okay yeah uh that doesn't necessarily translate into being into being good but it sounds like the making of the the film might be a filament of it so i mean it sounds like like almost like i'm getting like remnants of like the lighthouse of like somebody obsessed over something to the detriment of the rest of their life and it's just the only thing they know it's yeah there was oh geez um when i had the sound team on the hook i told the sound team hey okay i think i'm i'm just about ready to send this to you uh and they're like all right we're we're ready and i was like cool all right i think it's just one more day of of pushing through on this and so i kind of put myself in this self-imposed crunch and i just kept doing that day after day updating thing after thing after thing for like three and a half months from like december through like um sometime like a month ago i was just grinding and it was a seattle winter with the dark and the rain and the quarantine and all of that and so my mental health just plummeted but i was just fixated on like the the sunk cost fallacy or whatever like well i just have to finish this episode so i can release it and then uh everybody can see what all my like my suffering was for it was very interesting during that that three months what was worth it uh i mean well first who knows if it was but um so the process the process of of filming is very the script is like a page i had like a minute of scripted stuff and the final episode is like 20 minutes long and that's because i just didn't put any limits on myself in like what i kept adding so i kept being like well it'd be better if i kind of had an establishing shot here or made a a cutaway b-roll thing that's you know full digital or whatever and i just kept doing that and um with no with no breaks at all and i don't think it was a bad thing i think it's kind of in terms of like paying your dues like it it could um like i'm glad i put all that work into this thing and now i have this thing to show even if it like the process of doing it wasn't wasn't the most healthy uh my fear for a long time was that it would just look very self-indulgent and just kind of be like a like a cg reel and it's like okay wow okay you'll get a job somewhere um right but the uh the end result actually is it feels kind of like just a passive experience like a little bit like you're uh it's about this girl and she isn't like a superhero or anything she's just kind of like living life and you're just kind of like exploring this this kind of day in her life in a way which is very much media that that i want to kind like um the anti we have to save the world thing and more just like even tiny victories for everyone you know is important to to them if you take the time to kind of get on their level um so just like like pure world building just kind of like oh yeah there's a lot of random ass world building in this one um well i mean it if it's as beautiful as the shots that you've shown i mean i'm i'm down for that that sounds pretty cool i'm i'm very excited to put it out um when can we expect it and can well actually date yes yes so i have a very talented friend um who's uh drawing up a poster for it and i asked the sound team yesterday hey do you have any idea can i put a release date on there and they said end of april for uh is our goal mid-may for sure in some way that's exciting um so what day did you put on the poster well i haven't haven't finished the poster yet um it's looking cool that's great okay all right well the internet community will hold you accountable for that i don't know just just wait may 16th when it's they'll just be like where is it [Laughter] the thing is like even with everything lined up to like there's no reason i couldn't have it released then i'm still like i've thought that so many times for years i thought i'm just like three weeks out from from having it done and so i'm like oh who knows well the the first uh oh gosh what was it one of the early interviews i did with colin levy was when he was making skywatch and in it it i think it was recorded in like start of like middle 2017 and i asked him like so when can we expect skywatch and he was like yeah like by the end of the year and we actually like released it uh i don't know the interview like a year later it still wasn't out and so we were like well like we couldn't just say it's like the end of the year like it could be the end of that year but then it was like another like year and a bit after that so yeah yeah it's it seems to be like a known problem uh that what is it yeah you your expectation of how long things are gonna take especially when you're doing something that you haven't done yet like knowing all the steps that it takes you know the the editing the final color grading and like the revisions it takes of all those little things you got like oh it actually yeah months and months add-on colin is is amazing like his his level of of quality his quality control is absolutely amazing he's also like basically the only person uh in the world that i guess that's weird to say but um when i meet people i don't normally think like oh yeah that's you're kind of like me like your brain you have the same kind of drives think overlap but like he's he's done blender for a lot he's mostly he's like obsessed with writing but like also is uh dove into learning all like the other technical stuff he's like hard on himself um he's i don't know he overthinks emails um like like me um to the degree where i'm like colin is kind of on that same that same existence type you and him directed i mean we didn't even mention that but tears of steel you directed colin also directed sintel um and the what was that other one called oh that won that recent one that was really good agent 327 oh yes yes that was brilliant um but anyways you you directed tears of steel so what year was that 2012. yeah and that was the one for the folks who don't know famous there was the shot on the canal with the girl who was talking to oh she had a robot hand and she's talking to a boyfriend i guess and so it was kind of like a breakup story or something spoilers uh yeah yeah it was cool that was really cool that was the funnest that was definitely like the funnest year of my life just like living with all those talented people and like going and working on on stuff and learning so much all the time uh because it's just like the best minds are just everywhere walking around in that building and i'd be like doing something like you can just hit that one button and it does all of that and like that's amazing that's true and like working with ton ton is i like i know we know that like he's he's the guy but i feel like he still doesn't even get like enough credit for like i've used a lot of software but very little of it has like tan's effectively like blunder's conscience at this point like i feel like his big role in the um at the blender institute um and i don't know what i know he's been trying to take a step back for uh for a few years and is his uh his health scare um thank god he's all right uh yeah kind of accelerated that but so i don't know i don't know how he's how he's active but mostly it's just in making sure that like gosh darn it no blender's gonna stay open source all of those things yeah you know that we've said for the past 20 years um yeah i think that's that's so cool uh yeah we had a lot of differences of opinion on tears of steel but like when it comes to tons uh uh sense of sense of morality or whatever i almost trust his more than more than mine um that's true wow yeah and his story was about like oh god like he he used to like early days was like really big into the investment like startup world so blender was funded got 20 million dollars in funding or something and you know first-class business flights to meetings and blah blah blah and then just like the dot-com bubble just crashed it and then it was like well let's we've got this blender project over the side which is worthless and you can't do anything with it so then he crowdfunded the money to save blender and basically make it open source so they raised like 30 000 or something like that like a very early crowdfunding project this was back in i don't know 90 something 97 maybe anyway it was in the interview but yeah and then they like just made it open source they bought it off the company and then released it open source crazy yeah i didn't expect that because uh yeah he was he was the full like corporate capitalist route and then that crashed and failed and then he's like no socialism you know i don't know whatever he said um anyways that's sort of getting off the track there um i'm curious with your uh you know your journey and uh wealth of knowledge um filmmaking a lot of young people out there today with the new ipads or whatever you can edit films on and all the tutorials and technologies available today has been never been a better time to be a filmmaker what advice would you have for a young 16 17 year old who wants to be a filmmaker the heck oh man i i get so old man so quick the first the first question i guess i'd have is what does filmmaking mean to to a 16 year old these days um we've reached so much saturation like like our our tick tock videos those those are definitely filmmaking but then there's also like the marvel movies you know 10 bazillion dollars that's also filmmaking but i feel like those those are completely disparate different goals and oh yeah yeah yeah let's let's cut out the uh tick tock stars um but yeah i know what you mean uh let's say filmmaking as in they want to follow kind of what you and colin have done right like made a short film or a series or they want to be able to just tell stories make movies shows whatever it might be well and that's where i'm wondering like is that how how have those mediums changed um i mean i'm just like over the course of my lifetime it used to be if you want to do movies you had to move to la that's where all the infrastructure was and then you go we got home video cameras we could do all the cg from from home and you could just rent like with a red camera you could shoot stuff that like maybe it was filmed nobody nobody knew um no apparently people could tell but seeing that revolution happening and then like like iphones you know like you can shoot stuff um that whole thing is is very very exciting and what's weird to me i i don't know maybe maybe it's just where the way the algorithms sort or whatever i i feel like there was a period like nine years ago and maybe it was just because it was in my i was in my early 20s but everybody was working had their own web series um everybody's working on their own short film or whatever um there was a period where like i had like 10 different friends all working on their own website i don't have a single friend i haven't heard of anybody trying to do a web series in years i'm the only i'm the only one that's not true there's a few people who've like released uh like little cg shorts or whatever yeah but again it's always oriented around the social media thing it's like it's a minute long so you can see it on on tick tock and twitter and instagram and all of that stuff and so it fits into the uh the sitting on the toilet time frame yeah yeah that's right whereas you've got a 45 minutes of footage that's a yeah and that's what that's what's depressing too is like knowing you know someone's scrolling through facebook and they're just trying to find stuff to you know uh make them angry and then just in the middle of that there's there's my video and they're like here let's click on that and i don't even mind that they're watching you know like something i spent three years of my life on like a little screen like that's honestly it'll condense it down it just looks more dense that's fine um but like nobody's gonna watch a 20-minute video like like that um yeah yeah which is where i'm glad we're impressed they're watching this actually they're up to uh yeah 40 minute mark they're doing what 40 minutes whoa time flies yeah wild um sorry sorry i'm babbling about all this stuff uh just digital internet distribution stuff um before now how do you hope dynamo to be consumed is it going to be a web series like episode episodic or released on a streaming platform do you see when i do it i just want to stick it up on on youtube i guess um like that seems the most uh i don't know the way everything has its own streaming platform right now is like i'm kind of just like i get it i get it that's what you can do now you can get money by having people give you i pay so many things like five bucks a month these days um so i'm just like just stick it stick on youtube you can go watch it on on youtube yeah no i mean it it's the the youtube route is the uh what do you call it the the it's like the marketing route the free the free route it's available to everyone and so in order to make money you have to have another revenue uh avenue of which to make i mean in my case it's polygon you get free tutorials but you have this business that generates money so the tutorials on blender google will always be free because it hits the widest market and therefore it benefits both of us in your case you've got a wonderful patreon which pays some bills um but yeah anyway i can't remember where we're going but uh so so youtube that's gonna be cool so just upload the whole series to youtube that's great well and then that's where i'm like oh wouldn't it be great if there were if there were a series because i already know like i can see the madness looking at me in the face like you just spent three years making an episode like is that just why do you believe it would ever be different and then before that you released you know a 15-minute episode a few years ago for the first time in like half a decade like unless if i change something that's never going to be that's never going to be different i'm just going to keep working on a bunch of stuff and then be like this isn't very good um start over and so what i'm really really trying to work on now is like all right how can i kind of front load all that effort than normally is in you know the years of post and so that i can just get as much in camera uh i still have all the digital extension uh tricks and stuff i can do because what i want to do i have this like special this special nirvana of like um you photo scan all the sets you photo scan the actors i have like a rococo mocap suit um uh i've got a you know a good graphics card it everything can render fast like i just want to bring that mesh it together all the live action stuff and the digital stuff you can copy and paste real life if you want to do a digital extension you can just take the practical set and like flip it around and track the camera and uh and just make all of that so it isn't it isn't a giant project and i think um right now every shot has to go through a pipeline you gotta you know import it track it wrote it do whatever do all of that um actually what's weird is um oh and but if you can do it real time you can have actual live camera tracking and all of that and like you get rid of all those steps and you just end up with footage um what's weird is that two minute shot of her on the elevator was uh i had that whole thing set up in like half an hour i just like just tracked it it's all just one camera move and so just tracked it keyed it did a garbage mat around her um stuck it back in the scene lined up some geometry with you know the tracking markers and it was like it was like half an hour for two minutes um which means whereas if i yeah i i don't know that was just the thing i wanted to keep in mind of like it's the setup that takes all the time it doesn't actually has nothing to do with the length of the shot it's getting everything all lined up and so i'm trying to keep that in mind do those big long shots they're kind of impressive but they also let people uh get immersed in the scene they let they let the thing breathe and um yeah are you attracted to like the the visuals or is it like the storytelling that's that you're passionate about um i i love the storytelling i think i'm like embarrassed to say a lot of times the thing i'm most excited about is the the environment um i feel like that's not a very good storyteller thing to do but um but i feel like films don't necessarily just have to be a a medium for cramming as much plot in your face as much as possible um like so many movies are coming out these days it's just it's like all the characters can do is react to stuff and there's no anticipation there's no build up there's no anything because it's just like and now this thing and now we have to run over here and it exploded did you george tennant i did not see tennant no okay that's that to like the 10th degree like yeah it's a lot it's a lot it's everything's happening at once and i eventually you just sit back and go well i have no idea what's going on i'm just going to watch some pictures and just you know like that's a bummer nolan used to have a uh oh no these films are fantastic this one felt like it was it was a little too ambitious time travel in my opinion i don't know but what i think like even more than story what people are reacting to is like the experience of watching the film um it's the reason most people's like comfort films or the films they watch over and over are slightly more passive films that they can just kind of exist in uh films showing people's lives are like slowly growing up or whatever um or like all of the the miyazaki's where so much of it is based around the the minutia of of living um yeah that's true yeah the uh yeah miyazaki is that like the spirited away guy right yeah yeah yeah those films are yeah just so beautiful to watch um because yeah like i was thinking about i'm like you know yeah a movie has to have something to like a story if you have to care about the characters you're not gonna keep watching and yet when i think about like those films spirited away and everything like i almost didn't i mean spirited away you do actually care but some of the other ones you're just in it to watch the pretty pictures and it's still a pleasant experience so it can sometimes be just pretty pictures i guess well i love i love the stories for i i think i think miyazaki's like absolutely absolutely wild um yeah but but yeah there are some films where i'll just have them on because it's like yeah this is just this is kind of nice um so i'm hoping it kind of fits into that domain a little bit there's still stuff happening there's a lot of exposition happening ideally without even people particularly noticing but you're still absorbing that information and so you feel as if things are kind of moving and progressing it just isn't like somebody standing there being like hey here's all all of this stuff that you should know um yeah so i feel like it's just kind of ideally kind of subtly folding that narrative just into the world um yeah yeah yeah got it i absolutely uh another question i was curious i mean very similar to the previous one about like sort of beginner filmmakers but i'm very curious around like uh learning curriculums and uh yeah let's just say you you you had a young person today who was wanted wanted to get into filmmaking via fax etc what sort of learning curriculum would they give them if they wanted to like become employable after like a year like what sort of things could they experiment or teach themselves or projects to engage in employable employable doing like vfx stuff vfx yeah yeah the uh i mean there's definitely there's there's the areas where people are always looking to hire um like market or uh product product marketing and stuff if you can render a nice cell phone i feel like there's always gigs out there uh product vis category yeah i was thinking more like vfx like uh like making like tv shows or movies let's say oh gotcha um i'm trying to think so i i only just i just did freelance for like 15 years basically and let's see uh yeah being a generous generalist definitely helped um which just means you familiarize yourself a little bit with like motion tracking and and keying and rendering if you're doing the the full 3d side of things um yeah i i don't know i guess i i don't know i want to say like learn all of it you know just do all of it but i guess what if you only have a year just trying to specialize in something um if you are the motion tracking person i would think that that would see the difficulty though is if you are the emotion tracking person how do people know that you're the motion tracking person um like how would people like oh we really need motion tracking we got to go to this person and to do that you'd have to like just focus on making some really cool demos i guess there has to be something to make people think of you when they need motion tracking like a yeah just like a hot demo reel yeah just like motion track shots and you call yourself you put your name dash motion tracker you send that in as a a as a demo reel that could work and so and honestly throwing stuff throwing stuff on on instagram if you put cool demo things on and so people will people will absolutely find you um probably don't want to work for most of them seriously you probably don't but um [Laughter] sometimes they gotta get some really odd odd requests oh yeah nobody you know i mean that's a whole other giant conversation but like nobody knows how much work anything is and so they're like hey i i saved up a hundred bucks can you make me uh an animation like this one you did i'm like that was six months of my life and they're like yeah yeah so can you do it i'm like no no it's gonna cost me 100 yeah and usually it's you know it's it's very uh i always like the the joke that goes around of like the person on uh without just paying you 100 bucks is like what am i going to get for this it's like a billion emails and the person who's paying you like 50 000 bucks like hey here's the money um yeah and it's it's true uh often times yeah working corporate gigs is um a lot of times very boring but they know how to pay and they know how to keep things on a schedule and they know how to tell you sometimes what they want from from the get-go um yeah honestly being one of the biggest things i have to do being a visual effects like person doing client work is interpret what like a lot of times they'll look at something like that doesn't that doesn't look real and it's like yeah no obviously it doesn't it doesn't look real but do you know why it doesn't look real and you have to be able to be the person who can like look at it and see like is it the black level is black level just a short hand for like the color space is actually super wonky which for me that is always what it is color space and so yeah developing that eye but that kind of gets into like composition and all of that like how can you teach it is it because people have been looking at pictures their entire lives and either they've started this mental inventory of like or you know the sense of like what works or or they haven't and if they're like 25 or whatever and they haven't already don't already have a sense of i have no idea i'm sure you could i guess there's just a part of me that thinks if that were a part of them they were passionate about they probably would have already been learning [Laughter] right right yeah um and you talking about your yes some of your vfx experiences i didn't realize this until we started messaging on twitter but you you also did the vfx for was it that's the sci-fi film was it prospect prospect yeah that film was awesome i loved that film that you saw it oh it was beautiful the story was just it was great it's exactly what i thought a uh yeah kind of like a it was low budget right like not you know oh yeah yeah like it was exactly what you'd hope a low budget sci-fi film would be like limited characters limited sets or varieties of sets and just kind of like but story focused really good acting really good story um what did you do on that i did i did the vfx for that um which included mostly like 2 000 shots of dust flirting through there it's on an alien planet and they always have to wear these helmets the whole time um and actually it has a pedro pedro pascal pescal pascal i don't know where the emphasis is on his last name but he's the guy who plays the mandalorian and so that's like two shows in a row where he never takes his helmet off this was right before that like he went from shooting prospect um straight over to i think mandolin he was actually he's been in a bunch of stuff he's he is the mandalorian he's the character yeah he is the mandalorian yeah well okay i haven't seen the show yet i gotta watch it but yeah uh anyway sorry so the vfx so you were one person on that production yeah i had um it's one of those things where it's like i was close enough that i could almost say you know it was 100 me but um i did have i did have a bit of help from uh my friend nate and uh and caitlin actually did so she helped me with some tracking um and i think there was was there also a team of 3d artists or people doing the 3d no i know oh i'm gonna be so embarrassed if there was i think it was all me because i i remember i actually said it in a old podcast or something like that and then people are like no andrew you got it wrong there was you missed out all the other 3d artists that worked on it or something and i was like oh i don't know maybe he just did you know what no you're you're right so the the ending there's uh uh it was actually it was it was a very wonderful gig um there was a little bit of a nightmare towards the end just because i was one person and they were working with a post house and the post house had like everything to the frame had to be exact and every deliverable and i was delivering 2 000 dust shots and all the other vfx shots um originally when i got the footage it was one pixel too short like the export they sent me so i matched everything in that so we had to re-export all of that in terms of they sent me in the wrong color space so i had to tweet the black level for every every asset then it turns out the um uh there were some dead pixels in some of the assets i got so i had to hand paint out re-deliver all of those well like getting all of the uh the file names absolutely like perfect and i kept like just missing like to export one of these files i had to check and set up all of these different preferences and things like that and just like one thing everyone swallowed the off when i'm delivering like 20 30 shots every you know day i was making mistakes all over the place and that's just where normally if you're a company you know vfx company you have a person to handle that but like i'm the person getting the notes trying to implement them and i just i stretched myself too thin and so um the ending of it was was a little bit intense and so at the very end yeah there there was another uh vfx house again i was so far underwater i can't even tell you who they were uh um which i i'm very sorry uh they're in the credits uh but they added little twinkling lights and um broken glass and stuff stuff that i i didn't take on um jeez i can't believe it sounds like a nightmare of an ending you haven't it was that's insane everybody was really i really don't like letting people down and i was feeling as if i was very much letting people down um but fortunately like the people i was working with they were like hey you know what actually we're just gonna swing by your house uh and just like we'll have a drive we just copied over onto the drive we'll just check everything you know we'll just kind of be methodical about it and uh we'll we'll ship it off and they did that and i was like that's so like they were having to kind of baby me a little bit just because like i i didn't know where else to draw resources from and um yeah and like i was working all day every day and you just start to kind of make mistakes when you're dealing with that many moving moving pieces i i have a brain i very much like to have a thing and i hyper focus on it and i'm like all right this is going to be my life for a minute and as soon as like i'm like all right here's like 20 things it's like it's an oil slick um yeah yeah yeah oh dude that's crazy well actually oh sorry go ahead oh i just wanted to tell you like they uh they live in seattle the guys who made that where rent is like insane so they didn't have any extra rooms to store their stuff so i actually have a room in the church just full of like all of the props from the movie like this is the key this is like a a cast pewter whoa like if you shouldn't um i've got all the in fact i i photo skin i put them on like photo scan them like have little characters in dynamo or just like random he's in random um oh that's awesome very cool they're those guys are great um and they spent they spent the low budget in the best possible way they just rented like a warehouse for six months and filled it with like artists who were just spending all day every day inventing their own fonts and oh really oh yeah they designed all their sets in cad and then they used a laser cutter just to like cut it out so they put together like a puzzle and so like the way if i build a set i'm like i'm in a room i'll split up some walls here's a table we'll make it like a computer thing but if you go into like any uh any actual like spaceship or you know a submarine or whatever everything's mounted to the ceiling and all of that and it's like the the shape of the hole is defining the shape of the room so they were actually able to get all of that in their designs like in their spaceship you're lying basically flat and all the controls are up above you um all right and it was just so it was so cool and and being uh we had all these meetings we'd actually work through the physics of how everything would work the the space station's spinning and so we made like visualizations of how the light angles would pass um that is a uh what's the word consistency between takes chronologically yeah that's a continuity nightmare having a sunlight that kind of like moves through a window every like 30 seconds yeah that was that was wild oh dude fun project i mean great movie i highly recommend a prospect everyone go watch it um yeah i think that's a good place to uh to end it and i know you said you didn't want to promote your patreon but i think it's great uh promote your patreon and your channel oh i'll promote it um yeah all of the stuff about um trying to just use open source software and just kind of cheap cheap techniques and photo scanning and mixing and matching live action and doing all that um i'm i'm very into it and i'm trying to throw as much information and kind of examples and assets and stuff over there on the on the patreon as i as i can if uh three bucks a month if you wanna three bucks come along with that what a steal that's what it could be yeah and your channel ian hubert is that that's your channel yes if you type ian hubert youtube into google it'll get you it'll get it to me there was a swimmer guy named ian hubert but i i won nice and we're going to see dynamo uploaded by mid-may may april no may 15th at the last day maybe awesome so 16th we'll all come knocking ah no um thanks ian it was great to talk with you and uh i'm talking with you too man we'll talk to you soon bye you

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 187,020

Keywords: blender, vfx, podcast, career, led volume, dynamo

Id: kjVT9Qk9OeM

Length: 60min 15sec (3615 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021