How Did District 9's VFX Look SO GOOD?

I'm gonna stick my neck out here and say that the visual effects of District 9 are up there in terms of filmmaking importance as other VFX Giants such as Terminator 2's liquid Terminator or the use of motion capture on Lord of the Rings is Golem despite the film's crippling low budget of only 30 million dollars this film was the first of its kind blending a multitude of filmmaking genres with a whole new ethos towards visual effects production in ethos that then became adopted into mainstream Hollywood and is now being used in major Blockbuster Productions to bring us some of the best looking CGI we've ever seen from its CG characters to its Weaponry District 9 excels in every visual metric and in this video we'll be breaking down exactly why this film looks so good what it did differently to every other film out there and how they used that to their advantage to make some of the most compelling visual effects ever of all time so get your cat food ready as we explore exactly why this film belongs in the visual effects Hall of Fame so normally the effects are very heavily planned down down to the tiniest most meticulous detail every single element has been researched rehearsed and monitored to make sure that as little as possible can go wrong this is because VFX just costs so much money to make and one tiny problem can throw off your production timeline by weeks so typically it's a really good thing that they're so well planned because this level of intense planning can lead to some really good looking VFX because everything in your post-production just runs smoothly and like clockwork but this also has a huge side effect because the VFX end up being placed on this pedestal they become so important to the filmmakers in the studios because they're so expensive to make and so many man hours have gone into planning them and filming them and just making them they end up having their value massively inflated to the point where they attain this synthetic feeling and I don't mean synthetic in the way that they're made on the computer I mean that in the way they're filmed and the way that they're framed and the way that they're presented to the audience when you see visual effects you can tell the filmmaker is really wanted us to see them and be aware of this huge piece of spectacle that hundreds of people worked very very hard to create and I mean this does make sense a lot of work goes into them but this attitude of high importance is not applied to any other element of the film not the actors not the sets not the music not the sound design nothing else is treated with this level of reverence or importance and this therefore causes the CGI to stand out as this kind of unnatural and therefore synthetic kind of thing because they can never just exist there always has to be some kind of cinematic nature and importance to them all of this at least was the attitude of District 9's director Neil blomkampf who purposely wanted to flip this entire approach to VFX on its head and do something completely different with them rather than treating VFX as something important his goal was to treat VFX as something more banal more boring and just sort of an everyday occurrence essentially they are just supposed to be another thing in the frame be it another person or how house or a car or even a rubbish bin just something unimportant and by doing this our brains would be more likely to accept them as real and I think blomkamp for himself said it best in this wired interview you you treat the effects no differently to anything else I think that when you start treating them as though they're visual effects and you put them on a golden kind of pedestal then they become important and the way that you think about them because they cost a lot of money starts it starts to make them feel synthetic you have to kind of just disregard them you know you have to treat them like every other sort of thing and then they begin to feel quite real so to achieve this banal effect you have to choose a visual style that would also complement it and make sense that the CGI was treated as some unimportant thing so he decided to make a lot of the film as though it were a documentary he described it as if a BBC camera crew had just showed up and filmed and particularly for the first half of the film this is exactly what we got we're introduced to the world of District 9 through shaky cam handheld documentary style footage and this footage seemingly cares way more about the film's main character than the literal aliens and Space Age Tech that instead just happens to exist in the background and feel normal and unlike any other film at the time the ECG aliens would often be cut off on the side of the frame or on the top of the frame or film From a Distance by the shaky camera work and it's just so natural because there's something so normal and mundane about this footage your brain doesn't have to stop and question anything like it just thinks Yep they're there they're filming them because there's nothing cinematic or manufactured about it this is kind of the same reason why like the TV show The Office feels so natural it's that sort of shaky cam down to earth Style mixed with a real focus on human engagement and this is a really good play by blomkamp because clearly this documentary style did absolute wonders for the film's VFX but this is also where the problems really started coming in because when it came time to actually make the VFX match this documentary style things pretty quickly became an absolute nightmare as we mentioned earlier usually visual effects are insanely well planned you'll have all this data free planned and ready to go and you'll know exactly where the camera is going to be what it's going to be looking at whether the camera will be moving where it will be moving how long the shot will last and you'll even record my new little details like how far away the camera is from certain objects and then how far that object is from something else just so you have like all the possible data you can ever have to load into the computer and get nice VFX everything that can be controlled will be controlled because each of these little steps Smooths out your CGI workflow and just generally results in nicer CGI but to achievous documentary style Blum campus doing the exact opposite of this because documentaries are not well planned in fact they're often chaotic and messy because they're usually just filming something that's happening live in real time and thus it's completely unpredictable so the cameraman is usually just following the action from location to location showing his absolute best to capture as much as possible in film so it was this chaotic style that Blom cramp had to recreate now of course when you're creating a fake documentary for a film things can be a little bit more organized than this because obviously it's all staged but in general the camera's movement is still very random and things are still very unpredictable because you need that loose documentary feeling they generally knew what they'd be doing in each shot but they weren't meticulously planned or set in stone so the entire thing was much more fluid and there was a lot more improv and freedom which means you don't get that rigid accurate control you usually get with the traditional filmmaking process so what did all this do when it came to actually making the VFX well firstly it played absolute Havoc when it came to adding in the aliens so to make things like the animation of the aliens a lot easier they had a human actor on set would be a stand-in actor for the aliens and this is usually quite useful because the human actor can give a baseline performance for the animators to work with and then the other actors in the scene also have something to bounce off and work with rather than just imagining what this CGI alien will be doing in the future so the general process is you film The Stand in human ax are on set and then later this human has to be removed from that footage and then the alien gets added in in his place which sounds easy enough but this is really where the problems started to begin so let's imagine you take a picture and in that picture there's a guy you really don't want to have in it anymore so you open up Photoshop and you erase the guy out and now your picture's saved yay no annoying guy but now there's just a big hole in the picture where the guy was because what's behind the guy was never captioned on camera so the computer doesn't know what should be standing behind the guy nowadays computers can figure it out but not in 2009 and this is a problem movies have to face all the time when you remove a standard actor from The Shot what goes in the background behind them well on a wealth plan movie there is a solution to this you film what is called a Clean Plate this is when you film the exact same shot twice one normal shot with the stand and actor in frame and then another clean shot without the accident so that way when you remove the actor from the normal shot you can use all the data from your clean shot to fill in the background because the clean shot captures all the date you need to fill the background and this is a great technique and when the VFX artists use all the time but it does have one major limitation and that is for this that need to work the two shots have to be the exact same if the camera movement is even slightly different between the two sets of footage then it just won't line up and you'll get this weird sliding effect because the two bits of footage are out of sync and this is the exact problem they had on District 9. because of the chaotic unpredictable handheld camera movement of the film it was genuinely impossible to film the exact same shot twice thus making it completely impossible to capture any sort of clean play so this meant that they could never capture any usable data for the areas behind the stand-in actors which meant that in order to fill the holes in their background the VFX artist had a painstakingly rebuild each of their backgrounds by hand slowly painting in what should have been there taking reference from other shots other takes or other frames in that same shot and they'd have to take that data into their shot make sure it all syncs up and there's no sliding and all the colors match and there's no unnatural deformation if you've had any experience with image manipulation software like Photoshop then you know how much of a nightmarish process this can be and doing this in Photoshop is just for one frame imagine if we have to do it for several seconds when there's 30 frames in one second it's just nightmarish but they had to do it so they removed the human rebuild the background by hand and then add the alien on top but the work didn't even stop there because this nightmarish unpredictability of the documentary style just bled out into all other areas of the film's visual effects for example the city aliens had to be designed to look good under all possible lighting conditions again usually you can plan this sort of stuff you'll typically know what sort of lighting you'll be shooting under and you can then optimize that for the look of your CG asset to look good in that environment for example a character like Davey Jones is optimized for being outside in the bright Caribbean Sun under those lighting conditions his wet skin reflects a lot of Light which really helps to avoid that rubbery CGI skin issue that was so common in the early 2000s but with District 9 the aliens had to be optimized for unpredictability in the same shot the camera could experience a multitude of lighting conditions from dingy indoor lighting to the hot Johannesburg Sun the prawns would have to be designed Antelope believable under both of these extreme conditions and this is just in addition to all the other General unpredictability with the VFX spawned by this documentary style perhaps some dirt was kicked up from the ground as a character was walking by and then that has to be mixed in with the prawns or perhaps because they were shooting in a documentary style they'd be using autofocus or other Auto features on their camera and all of these would need to be recreated in the VFX so the VFX still match the footage the VFX would just have to be controllable to such a degree that they would always work under all these different circumstances and it just adds another layer of difficulty to an already difficult process on an already very low budget and this brings us to sort of the other major issue with this documentary style and that is camera tracking so have you ever wondered why actors wear those weird gray motion capture suits or why green screens actually have all those little black dots all over well this is because it makes it easier to track them and then create a camera match of the camera's movement let me explain what that means let's say you record some random footage and in that footage there the camera moves up down left right backwards and forwards AKA in the X Y and Z axises and then let's say you want to add some CGI into that moving footage how does the CGI you add know that the camera is moving in the X Y and Z axis the answer is it doesn't and this means that your CGI will just slide around in the shot because it's staying still whilst the camera is moving so how do you fix this well one way is to hand animate the CG object to sync up with your footage this is actually an absolute nightmare because you have to recreate all the subtle movements the camera makes and it's just awful literally no one does this no not even major films with all the money in the world no one does this so the much more common approach is to track your footage this is where the computer calculates the camera's movement based on a series of factors in the footage and what it primarily looks at are the points of high contrast where it can easily determine the movement in that area and this is why green screens have those little black markers or why those weird gray suits have those patterns on them they provide points of high contrast which then gives the computer starting to identify and detect the movement of so really the computer is tracking based on the movement of things in the scene and it's actually this movement which determines the difficulty of the track because if the camera movement is quite calm but it's much easier to do than if you have a very wild and chaotic camera movement because the more chaos at the camera movement then the more the camera has to calculate and the more precise everything has to be with the tracking and it just gets a lot harder because it's a lot more variables but once you've successfully tracked your footage then you can sync up the movement of all your CG stuff so that it moves and sync with the real world camera and everything and everything just sits nicely in place of the scene and as the camera moves around it kind of moves with it and there's no sliding and it all works so this tracking process is literally essential to creating good VFX because if you can't track your footage then you'll never be able to successfully sync up the CGI to the camera and it's never going to look good and therefore on the normal movie you want to make this tracking process as easy as possible because it's literally Paramount so to make it easier you take simple shots for example where the camera movement is less crazy and thus less difficult to track you also take very clean footage where you can see your camera markers and it thus gives the computer science to actually track because there's a lot of contrast and you also even go a bit crazy with it and on set you can take measurements to determine the distance between certain objects so the computer knows how far away certain things are from each other and thus make a much cleaner camera match in a well-controlled and a well-planned film environment he tries to do all of these things so that your tracking process is just as simple and easy as possible but if you're filming a documentary environment all of this goes straight out the window the camera work is purposefully chaotic shaking from left to right for that documentary Vibe and all of this immediately makes the shot Messier and more difficult to track and the camera's movement is also completely unpredictable so you can't really place or depend on any tracking markers because you don't actually know if the camera is even going to be looking at them and then the camera's shaky nature creates a lot of blur in your footage which then Smooths out the contrast in your scene and makes it even harder to track just in general this whole process becomes a mess and this is probably why a chaotic documentary style and high grade VFX are a very very uncommon combination so this is usually the point in the video where I'd like to highlight some crazy technique or method that the VFX artists use to break the rules and pull off the impossible for district 9's camera tracking but this just wasn't the case there was no special method or technique they could use for this so they pulled off everything just through sheer Brute Force pouring insane amounts of man hours into successfully tracking each shot just so they could add all these custom CG elements to them and it's insanely impressive when you think about it because rather than the VFX art is breaking the rules to pull things off in this case it's the filmmakers breaking the traditional rules and the VFX artists are the ones having to push the Bulge up the mountain just to keep up with them so that's the general challenges they had to overcome with the film's documentary style and now this brings us to the other major challenge of District 9 having to create the film's vast arrays in District 9 a large theme of the movie is the mistreatment of the aliens you see throughout the movie as a metaphor for South African apartheid the aliens are pretty much treated like second-class citizens they're forced to live in a dingy shanty town and are just generally abused by the surrounding human population and much like the humans in the movie we as audiences are not supposed to connect with or feel remorse for these aliens straight away instead we first see them Through The Eyes of Vickers and the documentary team who treat them more as an otherwildly blight on this planet and therefore we're not supposed to like them very much so for a lot of this to work blomkampf knew the aliens to look very very alien because this would lay the foundation for the large divide that's driven between the human and the alien populations so immediately this plotline is kind of the opposite to a film like Avatar in which you're pretty much from the get-go supposed to relate to the film's aliens in Avatar there's no deception that the movie's aliens are any different to us really and this bleeds through into the way the Avatar aliens are designed so as humans our brains are most Adept at Reading other humans emotions so this is why you can't really tell what your dog is thinking or how your cat feels but in other humans we can detect all sorts from anger to sadness to Joy to happiness to laughter just from subtle ways that we raise our eyebrows or curl up our lips so the closest something is to a human the easier we can connect to it which is pretty much why the Avatar aliens are just big blue cat humans basically they have the exact same features to us lips eyes eyebrows the same bone structure the only thing that's really different is the nose which humans emote with the least anyway and these are all creative choices that make it so that we can immediately connect with them but with District 9 this is actually kind of a problem with having very alien looking aliens because although at the start of the movie we're not supposed to like the prawns very much across the course of the movie's run time we are actually supposed to start feeling very bad for the prawns I mean look at them they live in a dump they're experimented on it's just awful but when they have this design that's really far away from a human the these very alien looking aliens become harder and harder for us to identify with so the alien looking prawns also had to be designed in a way where we could still connect with them emotionally we as humans had to be able to interpret the same emotions from this very alien creature that we could interpret from any other human whilst the alien creature still remained looking very very alien so this is a very fine line to walk between alien looking and human looking so to achieve this goal the aliens went through a lot of different iterations as you can see on the screen now there were a lot of concepts for the look of the prawns with some being much more alien than others and others being much more human than others and they slowly refined this down into the final design which you see in the movie one which was actually based on something very distant from The Human Experience and one that we could never really feel fully connected to and that was bugs insects and Crustaceans then what they did was mold this creature to be able to remote in a way very similarly to a human you never really have any idea what its tentacles Express but you can perfectly read the emotions in their upper face and to do this they gave them a hard shell face that would deform exactly like ours they can frown they can be shocked they can squint they can be inquisitive and then to further enhance this they went down the Pixar route and they gave him these big sad eyes these big sad windows to the soul which do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting for the prawns and Via these big big eyes you can detect sadness anger excitement hope joy and fear and it's these emotions and they're very tragic imposed lives that really pull us in and this theme of first fearing the prawn and then slowly feeling more and more tragedy for the prawns is actually represented in all aspects of the prawns betrayal to begin with this they wanted each prawn to look different and began playing and having fun with their designs adding things to make each prawn distinctive from the next so maybe they'd add things like spikes or different skin color or different clothing before then moving on to more subtle details like War pain or skating because they were sort of stuck to their heads but what they did with this was very clever because towards the start of the movie where the prawns are seen more as a menace they typically only have very aggressive features such as spikes or be colored in like natural warning colors such as red orange or yellow and they'd also be adorned with war paint and be depicted doing more violent acts but as the film progresses we see a much softer side of the prawns they're often shown in much calmer colors such as shades of green and they'll have much smoother less spiky appearances somewhere human clothes and others have been forcibly branded with stickers and war paint which they sort of don't have the higher cognitive brain function to take off and all of this paints a much more sympathetic portrayal of the prawn and helps to get deeper and deeper into their struggles while it's also peppering your emotions with Gill because you pretty much regret how you initially felt towards them at the start of the movie and this is fantastic in itself but what I also really like about this is how it highlights the very simplistic ways that media can manipulate your emotions to feel a certain way the documentary very clearly wants it to feel a certain way about the prawns and arranges things in a way that guides your emotions more towards disliking and distrusting them and then as the film progresses and becomes less of a documentary and more of a cinematic experience you begin to get a much more neutral portrayal basically what I'm referring to is the problem we've had since the very birth of the documentary where you can edit the exact same footage in many different ways to make the audience feel many different things about the exact same thing and given that the film is an analogy for South African apartheid where this sort of stuff went on all the time I can only assume that this is a clever subtle message on the part of the filmmakers so we've looked at their portrayal and we've looked at their appearance but there is also one final Vector in which the prawns evoke an emotional response in us and that is by the way that they're animated so with the prawns being a completely digital creature they obviously need to be animated in order to be able to move around and stuff so for the foundation of the aliens animation they actually had an actor on set in one of those mocap suits like we said earlier this actor would play the role of the alien and would basically give the other actor someone to bounce off during the scene and when I say an actor I mean they literally only had one guy playing every single alien we see on screen which is actually quite amazing to think about because it means that most of this film is just the actor for vicus shartokopley bouncing lines off the actor for the prawn Jason cope who stood there in a tight gray outfit and presumably just making prawn clicking sounds which I overall imagine was very strange to watch so the performance from Jason Cooper's motion captured and then this laid the groundwork for the animators who went in and enhanced the entire thing which is always what happens by the way there seems to be this big misconception that most CGI performances are 100 motion captured with all the work coming from the actor and this really couldn't be further from the truth almost always animators have to go in and either clean up the motion capture work or they go in and add their own elements to the performance but either way with District 9 between cope and the animators they made some really awesome result which really brought a lot of subtle touches to the prawns some were portrayed as just rabid animals screaming at each other while they try and open up a fridge whilst others were portrayed as much more gentle and thoughtful what I really liked about this is it means that the prawns are more than just uh generic copy and pasted alien each one has their own personalities that you can observe and understand and this really infuses a new level of life to the film because all these fictional creatures suddenly feel like they have a soul to them a deeper level in which both we and they can connect and not to mention how this further enhanced the documentary Vibe of the whole thing it feels much more natural and much more like uh BBC animal documentary where you can see all the subtle details in the personalities of like the tigers or whatever they're filming because the prawns on some level are very animalistic and we can observe these Personalities in our own animals our own pets and stuff like that so this again feeds into the feeling of the CGI just sort of being there as we've discussed earlier because all these details are very subtle and they're never shoved in your face so they had Jason Kobe on set playing the aliens and he brought a lot of great emotion to this performance but this also created a bit of a problem because the animators had to find a way to transfer these complex emotions from the face of a human to the alien face for prawn but this is where they did something very very cool so let's say you're working on animating a human CGI face typically what you'd have is your CGI character and then to control them you'd have what is called a rig my character's face a rig is basically a bunch of handles which control the movement of the character's face and each handle is linked to a specific part of the face so for example one handle could open up the character's mouth when you pull the handle down or another could make their eyes look to the side when you pull the handle to the side or maybe another could make the character's eyebrows raise when you pull it up so you can push on them and pull on them and then they in turn will squash and stretch the character's face in a way that makes it look like the character is emoting this is a really fantastic system that's been refined like since Toy Story So for many years and it's pretty much standardized at this point for most projects so what the animation team did for the prawns is take this exact facial rig from a human model and remap it one to one onto the prawns faces this meant that under the surface the prawns emotions were now completely driven in the exact same way that humans emotions are and this is despite them having completely different features so now if you pulled up the handle that would normally raise a human's eyebrow it would create that exact same movement on the prawn and even though the prawn doesn't actually have any eyebrows for it to move around you've still got those secondary movements such as wrinkling the forehead and the slight widening of the eyes and this is genius because when we combine this with their more humanoid facial design it meant we could really understand the emotions of the prawns even though there's something so alien from us but this came with further issues because now the prawns were starting to look too human and despite all the glimpses of humanity you see in the prawns throughout the movie The prawn still had to be very Alien aliens and not the types of aliens we see in stuff like Avatar so this is where the final touches of the prawns came into play they wanted the prawns to have a lot of secondary animation that could be used to widen the gaps between their human and their alien sides so they gave them these tentacles on their chests which they called chesticles and they made it so that there was always a level of ambient animation to them and had them have their own little life of their own like whenever a Hume would come near them the chestica was a word reach out and then sort of pull back again in like a defensive fashion and then to finalize the alien look they would add these sort of ticks and razor sharp movements that only bugs could make and all this just came together to further drive home that alien nature and the Real Genius of this was that by making all these Super Alien features only the secondary elements secondary to the more human facial animation stuff it means they don't detract from any of the human elements of their performance and instead only emphasizes the alien side because the secondary elements are much less critical to a human performer moments than the obvious more primary human elements and all of this is how the artists perfectly walk the line between an alien that is too alien and an alien that is too human now this brings me to one of my favorite parts of District 9 and that is its Weaponry this film has some of the most creative and awesome weapon effects I've ever seen I love this explosion which has a lightning storm raging within it and all these brutal weapons that just blow people to bits or even how just all the weapons kick up dust every time they fire leaving these smoke trails in their wake it's just fantastic to look at and I always find myself coming back and checking this stuff out but what's really interesting about the weapons in this movie is they kind of actually break the movie's own rule because these weapon effects are actually kind of being put up on a pedestal there are multiple shots throughout the movie that are basically just dedicated to showing off these effects and going look at how cool these are in fact there's this whole test sequence in the middle of the movie that is just literally just play of the cool Weaponry so why is it that all of this still feels really natural and in tone with the rest of the movie why don't these weapon effects feel more out of place if they're being put up on a pedestal well I think something very clever has happened here despite how important they are to the plot the weapons are still treated like they're just another thing in this world so let's look at effects like these in other movies so typically creative combat effects like these would be a pretty huge deal in the movie usually in Sci-Fi movies everyone tends to just have the standard laser gun of some kind and then when there's a really special weapon that would usually be a very big moment in the film this could be seen most often in superhero movies when someone like Storm from the X-Men uses her powers whenever she calls down a thunderstorm the music swells and the camera cinematically films her with all this awe and majesty and it's supposed to be a very big moment but when District 9 does this despite having whole shots dedicated to showing off the effect it still feels super casual they're not depict with any reverence and it's certainly not a very big deal this is particularly present in the testing scene in the middle of the movie where because it's tied up and forced by the scientists to demonstrate the alien Tech because this is our first proper look at the Weaponry but we still see it through the eyes of the very grounded documentary and therefore it's not framed in a particularly interesting style and everyone around the weapons is being very professional or very calm because they're all scientists even though this is what they're all here for to test their weapons no one is very excited or in awe of these things they're just very proper and doing their jobs and taking notes and stuff in fact the only people who are actually excited by it are the money men in the other room watching it through a camera but you can tell not even they are impressed by the Weaponry themselves they're only really impressed by The Profit they're going to make from it and I think all of this just comes together to make the weapons feel unimportant and just another thing this can even be seen with the way they fight with them because the alien weapons all feel very disposable because when the camera is done using them they just get chucked away and they move on to the next thing and I think the scene with the mech suit really pulls this idea together so towards the end of the movie Lucas goes on a rampage using a robot prawn suit and fighting off all the mercenaries that are trying to kill him it's an awesome scene as Vic is charges straight at the mercs and tears them to shreds but he probably also could have been much more conservative with his use of the suit fighting and moving more tactically to save its strength for later but instead he burns straight through the suit pretty quickly and getting it pretty messed up and is actually almost infuriating because in a way you think well he's just wasting this suit you know his ticket out of here but this also adds to the sense of unimportant route that all of the Weaponry has because even the characters in the film don't care about them everything is just utilitarian to get them to the next stage which is nice because we're essentially then left to make our own minds up about these weapons as our emotions aren't being Twisted to feel any sort of way about it which is actually really cool because then it feels more natural and you can just make your own own interpretation of them upon seeing them rather than being made to feel a certain way by the filmmaker so to me the interpretation I have is whenever I see these weapons it feels like that point in the video game where you finally unlock the big gun and you can go on that massive Rampage until you run out of ammo and then you just move on to the next thing and I really really like this about this film that you can just interpret whatever you want from a lot of its elements and you know what makes all these elements we've discussed so far even more impressive the Fantastic looking aliens the awesome high-powered Weaponry or the unique documentary style and all the problems that brought with it well it's that District nine also has A True Underdog budget of only 30 million dollars which may sound like a lot of money to you and me but that is genuinely nothing in the filmmaking World considering everything we've mentioned if we break District 9 down into its core Parts it's essentially a buddy cop film between a human and a full CGI character which means you have a lot of screen time that needs CGI and this is just literally unheard of with any other the film of this budget especially in this time period I mean in the 2000s films with this much good looking CGI really were in the minority you only really had Pirates the Caribbean Lord of the Rings Transformers and then Avatar in 2009 and all of those had five times the budget that District 9 has so for a more accurate comparison let's look at two films that had a similar amount of VFX shots but two very different budgets District 9 had to deliver around 600 VFX shots on its 30 million dollar budget whereas 2014's Transformers age of Extinction had to deliver around 700 VFX shots on a much larger 200 million dollar budget so that's 170 million more dollars to pump into around the same amount of VFX shots so why is it that District 9 looks consistently as good if not much better than age of Extinction on just one-sixth of the budget well firstly we have to consider that there are a lot of factors that do eat away age of extreme budget and it would be unfair to compare the two without discussing these so firstly Transformers is a much more famous cast than District 9 and this gets expensive they had to pay for Mark Wahlberg and like the original actors for Megatron and Optimus from their G1 cartoon and all the other big names in the cast whereas with District 9 the lead actor Charlton Copley was actually just the high school friend of Neil blomco and wasn't at all a big name at the time and then we have another very expensive factor to consider and that is that age of extinctions filming locations were much more diverse and therefore more expensive than District 9. age of Extinction is a bit of a globe trotting Adventure whereas District 9 was actually filmed in one of johannesburg's worst ghettos where apparently just a few streets down the road there were like political riots going on and stuff so it was all a bit cheaper than shooting in the middle of Hong Kong then of course there's also the shooting star to consider the traditional filmmaking approach to age of Extinction is far more expensive than blomkamp's documentary approach Long Camp could improvise a lot of stuff and didn't need a whole team backing him up to to get the shoot from A to B because of the general looseness that you get with making a documentary but if you're shooting a more typical feature film it's a much slower moving machine that requires a lot of people to grease the wheels and get it moving so this ends up also being a lot more expensive and therefore cutting into your budget so while all of this should be taken into account when comparing the two films it's actually these low budget choices from District 9 that we should be looking at when determining why it was District 9 looks so good on its small budget because all these choices were purposely done by blomkamp and his team to keep the film's expenditure down as low as possible and that way they would have much more money left over to pump into the film CGI so basically they made sure every single dollar made it on screen by focusing on a much smaller more narrative driven scale in a unique and cheap location and then made sure to place emphasis on the visuals by choosing a cheaper video style and instead funneling those saved expenses into giving us amazing CGI and you know what even after all this money saving they still would have had a significantly smaller VFX budget than a Extinction so all of this is just a further Testament to how good the film looks because it clearly knows its limitations very very well and worked within all of that to its best Advantage so now we've come to the most important part of the video I've just gushed over basically every aspect of this movie's VFX but as brilliant as the film looks none of these things I've discussed are the primary reasons that I believe that this film deserves a place in the VFX Hall of Fame there's one final factor which cements District 9 as having some of the best VFX of the last 20 years and that is the impact that it had on the VFX industry moving forwards much like the liquid Terminator effects in Terminator 2. or the motion capture technology behind Gollum in Lord of the Rings in its own way District 9 propelled the visual effects industry forwards through its revolutionary use of banal and unimportant VFX as we've discussed earlier every film prior to District 9 placed their VFX up on a pedestal but if you track the films that came out after District 9 you can see a slow uptick in other films that adopting Blom Camp style things like gravity Blade Runner 2049 or 1917 are completely loaded with VFX but make no attempts to broadcast this to you they're very subtle they're very hidden and they're very very calm about it in fact the ultimate example of this can be seen with smart Hulk in Avengers end game who in my opinion is one of the best looking CGI characters we've ever had on screen and this is largely of course due to his amazing VFX work but it's also because everything in this scene is just so casual they're all just sat there candidly chatting in a diner despite the fact that one of the characters is a big green computer-generated monster and there's absolutely nothing special about it nothing cinematic nothing dramatic it's all incredibly natural to the point where you have to stop and think like oh yeah that guy's CGI and this is exactly what was started by District 9 and therefore this is why along with its Underdog budget fantastic looking aliens and more that I believe District 9 deserves a place in the visual effects Hall of Fame game so thanks for watching everyone I really hope you enjoyed it I'm sure there's much more to discuss with District 9's VFX and we probably only just scratched the film surface but what do you think about District 9 and are there any other movies you'd like me to discuss also if you want to read more about District 9 spfx I've left links in the description to basically everything I've referenced to make this video so please feel free to check those out and um otherwise yeah have a great day

Channel: CGY

Views: 1,988,015

Keywords: VFX, CGI, breakdown, analysis, review, squeal, news, update, coming soon, 2023, leak, cheap, easy, flop, amazing, good, awesome, Avatar, Avatar 2, avatar way of water, water, FX, how they made, how did they do, james cameron, Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Avatar 3, Avatar 4, Soulless, Cool, best VFX ever, behind the scenes, Weta, District 9, Weapons, Prawns, fookin prawns, South Africa, neill blomkamp, sharlto copley, Jason Cope, Sequel, District 10, District 12

Id: -YJwPXipJbo

Length: 36min 23sec (2183 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2023