VFX Artist Simulates PIXAR but with REAL Physics

[Music] have you ever wished you could strap a bunch of balloons to your house and then just fly away well in the movie up from pixar that's exactly what happens except it's an animated movie so it can ignore the laws of physics but what if it didn't how many balloons would you really need to lift the house from up [Music] the filmmakers at pixar are absolute masters of storytelling they will do anything to make sure that their stories are incredible even if that means sacrificing the laws of physics to achieve them but i mean that's understandable realism hasn't exactly been a priority for pixar what with all of the toys cars and fish that can talk so play nice pete doctor directed not only up but monsters inc inside out and more recently soul what can i say the guy knows how to make a great movie first thing they did when we pitched this film was like to calculate how many balloons would it actually take it's 26.5 million fyi we have about 10 000 so we cheated there's a great analysis on the film theory channel that estimates the house would require 31 million party balloons just to float that is a lot of balloons in fact the closest we ever came to that number in real life was back in 1986 when one and a half million balloons were released upon cleveland ohio as cool as it looks it was a bit of a disaster no one's ever attempted this sort of thing again but that's still only five percent of the balloons that would be needed to lift the house if only there was a way to show you a hundred percent [Music] 31 million balloons at this scale you don't even really see individual balloons anymore instead we're treated to a view of the wind currents the balloons ride because this is how you see wind all you need is just a really beefy computer however there's a problem using that many party balloons simply isn't feasible if we wanted to actually do this for real we'd want to take a page out of david blaine's book and use weather balloons but why do balloons go up it all started a couple thousand years ago with this dude named archimedes who figured out how buoyancy what do you say are archimedes archmeds yeah archimedes ah yurika you're right basically this dude archimedes figured out how buoyancy works any submersed object that is lighter than the fluid it pushes aside will float to the top this is most commonly understood with water but it applies to air as well because air is a fluid the idea behind archimedes principle is that whenever you displace a fluid it actually pushes back up by the same amount as the weight of that displaced fluid pretty cool huh so even though air is pretty lightweight a big enough volume of air can actually be pretty heavy if you could displace that with something lighter you produce an upwards lifting force and that is called buoyancy so what is lighter than air well the first thing you're probably all familiar with would be helium it has a density of 0.18 kilograms per cubic meter making it seven times lighter than air but helium still has weight too which is going to counteract how much it can lift hydrogen on the other hand is better it weighs less so it can lift more it's also like significantly easier and cheaper to produce than helium so like why don't we put hydrogen in our balloons show the world's largest airship heading for lakehurst new jersey filled with hydrogen a highly inflammable gas the airship was hailed by thousands who little dreamed it was their final glimpse of the hindenburg oh yeah right it's because hydrogen is incredibly dangerous which is unfortunate because we're kind of running out of helium it's produced as a byproduct of uranium decay over the course of millions of years combining with pockets of natural gas underground that's right to get helium we drill for it don't worry though for now we still have plenty of helium left but what if in the future there is a way to harness something even better nothing a vacuum is the lightest possible substance because it literally weighs nothing it is the absence of everything it's what outer space is made out of the problem is that a balloon only works by pressurizing the inside with a gas which inflates the balloon the structure comes from that inside pressure a vacuum on the other hand does the opposite so normal balloons wouldn't work it requires a strong and rigid structure and is therefore usually made out of like glass or metal so it's pretty heavy definitely too heavy to fly like a balloon so imagine a futuristic material that weighs next to nothing but is also incredibly strong some sort of maybe graphene or carbon nanotube type deal i don't know it's the future it's all kind of magic anyway if you could make a giant vacuum balloon you'd have the most effective lighter than air vehicle possible lifting the house from up would need a balloon 75 meters wide and to be clear this is the upper limit of theoretical balloon technology what's cool about this idea though is that if the material could be flexible or stiff on command you'd end up with something you could even deploy in the field think of the fulton recovery system from metal gear solid 5. in the game you can extract people by attaching a balloon that inflates and then flies away i think the idea is that they inflate with helium but the game already doesn't make sense so vacuum balloons would have totally worked and also would have been way cooler so even though this is fantasy lifting people with balloons is actually super doable for instance here's the amazing balloon stunt performed by david blaine ascension is the most ambitious performance of my life between the weight of his body and the framework and the electronics the balloons had to lift about 400 pounds although if he had access to a futuristic vacuum balloon it would only have to be 20 feet wide way more tactical but of course that wasn't his goal he was specifically going for the amazing image of a person flying through the sky by just holding on to some balloons it really is just an absolutely incredible visual and i think that's what makes the house from up so compelling because we can imagine a group of balloons just carrying us away so realistically speaking what would the house up look like like oh it looked like interestingly this has kind of already been done before jonathan trapp managed to get a real house up over 10 000 feet suspended from just balloons that's really impressive however the house was gutted to be as lightweight as possible so does it even still count as a house see here's the thing the old queen and style house from up is mega heavy film theory calculated that it weighs 570 000 pounds that is several times heavier than an average house now i'm no expert in estimating the weight of houses but this makes it heavier than the statue of liberty that is a chungu's house my friends and that might seem completely nuts until you realize that the hindenburg weighed 480 thousand pounds and it flew across the atlantic ocean before it exploded [Music] of course so to lift the house from up we need some very robust balloons specifically latex weather balloons meant for carrying experiments high into the atmosphere thanks to the help of diana the physics girl we know that a 2 meter wide balloon can lift about eight pounds in addition to the weight of the balloon itself we are of course oversimplifying a lot of factors here including how balloon lift actually changes depending on the temperature they lift more on a colder day and after crunching all of the numbers we end up with 80 000 weather balloons and this is what that looks like [Music] this just might be the closest you'll ever get to seeing the house from up flying with realistic physics to legitimately do it for real would simply be prohibitively expensive keep in mind that each balloon could also fit a person inside of it also in addition to lifting the house the balloons have to lift themselves too in fact the weight of just the balloons accounts for a third of the total flying weight it's a pretty incredible sight seeing all these balloons lifting a house but it's easy to see why pixar decided not to go this realistic route here having this many balloons and worrying so much about the physics really would have gotten in the way of this story because a movie is just that a story it doesn't owe reality anything it sets its own rules and in the rules of pixar a few thousand party balloons are all you need to fly away from your problems thank you so much for watching everyone this was a really fun video to throw together there's no sponsor on today's episode however we've got a website quarterdigital.com go check it out and subscribe to that because that is probably the best way to support more of these videos on top of that we've got a whole bunch of shows exclusively on the website they're all pretty cool we brought the vlogs back we even have son of a dungeon our own d d campaign using some really cool real-time tech of the whole game board it's awesome also we have our own version of a master class if you want to get into filmmaking or visual effects it's called functional filmmaking i even made an episode about how i make these types of science videos check it out on the website all those shows are coming soon i'm hoping to make a lot more of these videos this year i want to be on the moon i want to see how many solar panels power the world with your support maybe i'll get to make them this year thanks for watching and share the video

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 2,091,941

Rating: 4.9454079 out of 5

Keywords: vfx, cgi, vfx artists react, explains, reveals, simulation, pixar, up, toy story, animation, balloons, real, new, visual effects, movies, science, education, explained

Id: dZsp1tgXkUI

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021