I Spent 1 Year Trying to Make a Film in Unreal Engine... Here's What Happened

[Music] you know sam i just got some sweet news dude are you telling me you just got sweet news yeah i uh met someone who works on the avatar sequels production and she was like we all saw the avatar 2 video apparently someone shared it in like the production slack and they were like hey everybody get out of the way [Laughter] honestly the news that they have seen it is kind of embarrassing in fact i made it almost with the intention that no one would ever see it they liked it is this is this because it's so bad that it's funny we're just wanting to make sure that this is like positive supportive laughter not not you know i don't want to be cyber bullied by the avatar 2 crew basically yeah no pressure but like i'm pretty sure they all are gonna watch this next thing the avatar 2 crew is counting on me to prove myself hi i'm sam gorski creator of avatar 2. well that is until james cameron finishes his official version today i just learned that all eyes in hollywood are finally on me that means with my next motion capture project i'm gonna have to prove to the world that i know what i'm doing and if i can't well i promise to never wear a motion capture suit again and uninstall unreal engine from all computers in the studio never to be opened again and i mean that the stakes have never been higher it's 2021 that means it's been nearly one year of you guys having to endure my motion capture experiments that's right it's been a year since i learned unreal engine since i became obsessed with real-time virtual production and you've seen that journey video game characters react clint's vr meditation zone avatar 2 handsome squidward all of those videos have one thing in common they're janky they're full of problems and because of that jank well i'm not gonna lie i feel like i owe you a good video with motion capture and unreal engine if i can't deliver on that i should probably stop i don't know how much more you can take at this today as the proving grounds for whether or not my career ends we are going to shoot a video called the cut scene it's a video about a character who gets trapped in a cut scene where suddenly they become mortal it's that joke haha cutscene starts someone takes out a gun oh don't shoot despite you know taking a thousand bullets in the level before so that's the video concept nico and myself will act in it we're gonna have two motion capture suits we have my pc down here with all the stuff set up facial capture we have that finally down now every single element that we're going to be doing here today has been tested in the past the handsome squidward video was actually the first moment where we saw a glimpse of what a full smooth successful mocap performance could look like there's even some things we've learned since then to make it even better i think i got this figured out finally and if i don't my career is over so it doesn't matter okay now that all the eyes of hollywood are upon sam i i i'm a little concerned about his mental state you know this might bring on a lot of pressure onto him and if there's one thing i think he doesn't need it's any more eyes on him so i'm gonna call him right now oh boy hey jake perfect timing hey man so i i heard that all the eyes of hollywood are upon you yeah they are uh but it's no big deal do you really so you're feeling pretty good about it uh-huh i think i'm gonna blow them away well yeah sam but i mean there's definitely eyes that you don't want on you right like you know internet service providers hackers and so i just wanted to let you know about today's sponsor expressvpn sam expressvpn those guys are great i love them one thing that they can do for you is secure your internet privacy basically the vpn serves as an encryption to all of the data that goes from your computer out onto the internet and vice versa which just means that there's gonna be way less eyes upon you wow wow did you also know that expressvpn does content unblocking unblocking content i know after you've had a long day one thing you like to do is sit down and watch the old ball game oh yeah the ball game is usually where you can find me when i'm not here at my computer if you do not have a certain subscription to a certain cable network in los angeles you cannot watch the dodgers baseball team that's that's terrible well what you can do is with an expressvpn subscription you can tell platforms like mlb tv that you're you're viewing from uh you know say dallas and that'll that'll allow you to watch the dodgers even though you are local to la and you don't have said cable network subscription wow so you're telling me i can watch baseball in texas expressvpn allows you to do this in any sport on any platform wherever you're experiencing local blackouts i mean sam they're one of the fastest vpn services out there they've been rated number one vpn by platforms like techradar so head on over to expressvpn.com corridor crew that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com or crew and you can find out how you can get three months free go to expressvpn.com corridor crew thanks jake i mean sam i i can't wait to see everything you're working on thanks i'm glad to show you i'm happy to share it with you really appreciate that call see you later jake bye bye bye [Music] my role in this shoot is i'm going to be hanging out kind of man in the chair situation i got my audio set up to record audio of everybody and i got my official capture i got my motion capture peter was responsible for capturing the motion capture that was his job for the day he lost an entire day of footage yeah he's got a great track record which is why he's the trusted man for the job i us and so now he gave me another shot this is kind of my redemption story if you will so we're in our imaginations right now and we're going to imagine that we're cool guys in a warehouse basically we only have two actors that have to fill the role of like 12 characters all right scene 1a rambo three two one [Applause] [Music] cool so there's a tower it's got four sides and then moving along the edge a little bit to like line up a shot and then boom i didn't think about this i could just use an imaginary gun i suppose i can't i can't do anything here three two one action [Applause] nice try [Laughter] everything is going surprisingly well i mean there's a little bit of drink here and there but it's nothing that we can't reprocess and clean up later like it's just kind of like you're like gun cut it's like in real life we're like all right next shot's up on the hill everyone carries the gear up the hill here we're just like cut all right uh next take go and we're like oh cool we're in a whole new place we're literally different characters there's no like oh hey get the stuntman out of his trailer bring him down to set you know you're waiting 15 minutes for a guy to walk like no none of that happens here it's just literally the endurance of wearing mocap suits this mocap helmet is wildly uncomfortable this is painful in fact so you might notice like on the avatar set or other motion capture scenarios their face rigs don't look like this they don't have phones here they just have cameras that are either recording like infrared data people have like facial dots or stuff like that those rigs require way less gear way less weight they're not quite invisible but they are compared to this you know when you have to have a phone mounted in front of you that ends up being a lot of leverage and weight and so while it's a great way to capture your facial performance it's not the best one for when you have to like don an entire suit and then then actually do some you know big scene the phone ends up being a better device to get your facial performance afterwards instead of you know in the moment it's the ending scene the big scene with the big acting where nico gets to lie on his couch they say never work with babies and animals turns out we can just use computers to save that from everything issue nice and cozy there you go please tell me the story about how you killed all the bad guys again shot a lot of them with my big old gun until well one day i had to run away from it all but what happened to all the bad guys then i probably went on to chase other heroes your stories make me so sleepy oh oh good kid he's a good kid right there [Laughter] so we've done all our mocap nico and myself are all the characters in the video now we have to get it looking nice we have to render it out we have to do camera angles how do we get to that stage where we're rendering it there's a bunch of steps along that process they're hard to figure out as you're doing them but they're pretty simple in hindsight so this is what you get out of the motion capture suit you basically just get a like a random looking skeleton guy there's just the body movement there's no facial performance so the face is actually running and recording into a separate application iclone is the animation arm of the character creator world so you have your body but now you have your face and we get to combine the animations once you have this data thankfully it's pretty easy to hop between different types of characters in character creator there's a lot of options for creating full characters everything skin clothes whatever you can also go to the unreal marketplace and get a bunch of cool characters that are rigged there and you take all that data throw it on a body and then you get to watch it do its thing hey who's that that's nico that's the animation but let's see what it looks like in the actual scene boom now he's actually in the scene this is actually the most fun part once we've kind of like gotten through that stage and the animation's finally in here it's all fun afterwards like there's no more like technical crap we're dealing with here it's all like just the raw like filmmaking fun energy here [Music] yeah man did you sleep here last night yeah i'm almost done with the video i thought it was gonna be easy once i set up all the cameras and like rendered it out but that's when i realized i was just encountering the next wave of problems are you uh what do you got this robe on for but you still got the suit on did were you doing mo cap stuff or a little bit here and there none no i wasn't doing any mocap i just want to be prepared if someone tries to like forcibly get rid of the mocap suit and you know it'll be on my body i'll be protecting it so look i've spent the last year working on this stuff and investing so much time and energy and research into it that for it all to slip away because of some stupid promise i made i promise to never wear a motion capture suit again and uninstall unreal engine from all computers in the studio i got problems to share i thought once i put my cameras into the scene it was going to be smooth sailing once i started rendering those close-ups i saw all the little problems and had to go back through and tweak almost everything facial expressions eye lines hand movements positions etc there's a lot of work like this the issue here is that he's looking straight ahead and that's that makes sense in the moment because it's niko and myself acting off of each other we're you know generally the same height the problem is is that the character he's looking at is like a foot taller than him so i basically go in find the head bone and i literally just turn it up and then he's looking up at the taller character that's a really good example of the tiny tweaks that have to happen george lucas was one of the first people to pioneer tweaking someone's performance after it was filmed so i'm really just carrying his legacy by doing this so check it out you can see look at all these shots look at these dope shots just all these little shots here are individual clips that i've rendered out we have all the footage finally in resolve here at first i was like this is going to get really complicated because you have 12 angles with perfect continuity say you're not gonna shoot me with a bullet are you sure am oh yeah buddy do your best i can take hundreds the big constraint is the concept of perfect continuity in normal filmmaking you do a scene and you're like that was funny but i think the last line should be maybe a little more angry and so generally you'd just be like hey just give me the last line again but now i'm angry yeah okay anyway cool cut we just what we'll drop that in that's way harder to do when it's motion capture because organizing the files syncing everything inserting into the scene there's only one scene in this whole video that i'm blending two performances from and the way i have to do that is not by like splicing and making the decisions in the sequence itself but by constructing two full versions of the scene i'm redoing an entire sequence two times and rendering all the camera angles out and then in the edit i actually splice them together it's pretty difficult the amount of work required to get their adds up really quickly it's definitely faster in real life to do something like that but once again it comes back to this core concept here of this is like a stage play at this point we want the performance to be as good as possible in its entirety after the last month and a half of trying to get this video going i think it's finally at a point where it's watchable it's it's a little you know it's like it's a little weird here and there but from a storytelling perspective you know check it's dynamic enough to hold your attention and make you pay attention to the actual characters thank gosh we did it because i freaking crashed into every freaking roadblock with my truck the truck's damaged my metaphorical truck is definitely damaged but i have made it to the other side am i ready to show everyone this video yes and with a medium degree of confidence there's going to be some people out there who are going to try and rip the suit off my body but while wearing it i feel quite nimble and i'll be able to escape them displayed before us we have a motion capture suit here that i must give up if this isn't good we're throwing out the motion capture suits and uninstalling unreal yeah stepping stones are over look if this works this has a ton of promise and potential wouldn't it be cool to shoot a video wherever you want with actors that look however you want that would be amazing can sam pull it off man filming avatar 2 i had such high expectations and you know it was it was a fun watch this one i do have high expectations though and i don't know hopefully uh sam steps up to them so we'll see no pressure let me present to you a year of work and i hope you guys like it here it is three two one go all right let's do this [Music] foreign [Music] that was awesome sweet that was very awesome sweet it worked it worked that's a relief to hear so i'm not quite sure i understand is this a rough cut the animations are final exciting yeah the animation is final yeah what's wrong with that i don't want to say it's trash it's better than avatar too i don't know if it should be on the internet at all like it has its flaws but i think it's good i just don't think it's there yet and uh i mean i think we have to uninstall unreal no it's fine cool anyways i'm glad you guys uh checked out that video i'm really glad you guys saw the video so i'm gonna head out um you can yeah throw away my capsules i don't i don't want to be here when you i don't want to be here when you throw them away because i'll be too sad so i think i should head out so i don't actually [Applause] hey buddy you're gonna you're gonna have to rip it off my body if you want it back it's okay you can keep it on i just i just wanted to say i don't know why i said all that mean stuff it was kind of mean it was just like when they told me that they laughed at me on the set of avatar too i i did think the video was funny it made me laugh were you like laughing at the video or were you laughing at me i was laughing at the video i'm sorry except your apology you want to come back inside i'll be honest i actually really want to take this suit off it's like super hot those things are really tight yeah what you're working on what are we doing here oh boy i am working on some original corridor digital anime nft trading cards for you guys if you want to own a little piece of corridor cannon for those of you who are into nfts we are going to be dropping the anime collection which is our three anime videos baseball fidget spinners and anime self-driving cars but you know what the thing is like when you have single edition auctions it's not really accessible to a bunch of people because they're single editions so we've made all these really cool digital playing cards and they'll be like legendary editions they'll be rare editions combinations we got some sweet designs we've been passing ideas back and forth for days and we finally settled on something that looks super sweet so i'm excited for you guys to see it so this wednesday the 19th and maker's place these cars go live they're not all one of one there's actually ideas to actually make enough cars that they're accessible if people want them anyways i'm so excited for local xero to be coming out next we are going to be working on that it's going to be up on our website quarterdigital.com sam has realized the dream it's working we're getting unreal animation actually looking decent and like having characters work and moves correctly and it's a little janky but it's all set in the video game so it works right all right that's it so long everybody will see in the next video

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,567,951

Keywords: VFX Artists React, Behind the Scenes, Unreal Engine, How To, Breakdown, visual effects, Video Games, Cutscenes

Id: 2K7a_aMGA7Y

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021