VFX Artists React to AVENGERS ENDGAME Bad & Great CGi

how are the Duggars in the shot there oh there are a couple of innovations in the way that we approached Ellis's facial work in that shockwave we had one version that was much bigger maybe you've discovered something that we didn't even intend to put in the movie hi welcome back to another very special episode of visual effects artists react today we are joined by matt aitken now matt is one of the visual effects supervisors at Wetty and it's an incredible honor to have him here on the show it's worked on a ton of movies are you thinking from avengers endgame all the way back to Lord of the Rings he was in our Lord of the Rings special and I'm the guy scanning the head with a really early laser scanner so cool tell us a little about what your role is what does it mean to be a visual effects supervisor my role is that I'm kind of the contact point between the team at where the digital you know producing the visual effects work on a given show and the people at the studio like I work with the team at Marvel on the Avengers films I'm providing you know the finished visual effects shots for them to go into their movie it's like when you go to the dentist and you have like the nurse that like works for a while your teeth and then the dentist comes in just like touches everything briefly at the very end is that you basically possibly so in-game was actually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects we're also nominated for the BAFTA which is the British Academy of Film and Television Awards so I get to fly my London go to the BAFTAs and then come back here next week for the Oscars visual effects were so star-studded Inderjit City [Laughter] [Applause] one of the scenes that you guys were responsible for in Avengers endgame was the climactic and battle scene yeah that was pretty much what we did I work started when they lost turns up in the eighth ship and destroys the Avengers compound and we go all the way through to totally doing the snap and his ultimate demise spoilers ahead everybody not everybody this is a pretty shocking moment movie it's like oh okay say and roll credits in a shockwave that giant explosion we worked on that a lot because they had to look like it was going to create this huge crater but at the same time it couldn't look like it just believable so we have our version that was much bigger they were like yeah that's great but nobody could survive and this is all CG fire was at all dynamics and simulation yep yeah for sure we shared the shot with ILM so the sittin point here it becomes an i-i'm shocked they did all this work here we did all that the outside stuff you should talk to them which I'd love to come in as well okay I applied for an internship Wow why didn't you hire me I'm always impressed by the level of consistency between all the different effects houses delivering the same character in different scenes worked on by completely different people yeah the team at Marvel they do a lot of work in terms of giving us each notes will show a version of Thanos and they're like aspects of it they'll take that shot and show it to Dedes and you know we'll share geometry and we'll share textures you know that completely different assets so there are two completely different 3d models of Thanos you know that are brought up to the exact same level of quality so you can't tell the difference between them well that's what we tried to achieve succeeded I didn't realize they're multiple different versions if you enjoyed the show and you want to keep watching well please consider subscribing so that it shows up in your subscription feed and you never miss it I thought by eliminating half of life the other half of thrive so when you have a character like fan OHS it was completely digital but obviously driven by a real actor what are the main steps between him acting and what we finally see in the movie we wear your suit that's market up so we'll get his body performance from there and we'll also dot up his face he'll be wearing a hit Downton camera rig they're filming the dots on his face as he performs often what we do is we all do motion capture that is happening at the same time as the live action photography so through infrared motion capture we can capture the suit dots without polluting the light that the director of photography is creating on the set understand how motion capture works and movies they just kind of assume that the motion is captured and then they're just applied to a 3d model and that's all you have to do so be amazing if a motion capture really plays to creating his movement but the number of times that we have raw motion capture data going on to tell us as zero we need to clean it up but we also need to just find sell-offs and the motion capture performance so some of these fight beats were injected josh i stuntman is performing the more dramatic movements and we're motion capturing the stunt ii but even then he's still not gonna move the same way as an eight-foot-tall muscle-bound right Saros would move so the fantastic animation supervisor on twitter sydney combo can't on where he would dial in what he would call the body mechanic of Pharos so he's getting the weight and maybe slowing down the movement a little that's something that will keyframe on top of the motion capture data as well when you're dealing with this much armor on a character can be really hard to animate all of it and have it move correctly and slide over itself it's not clipping yeah so some people pointed out to us and this one shot of this glove you can see it's finger bits clip through the dating a little bit I thought we missed it is that something I just nobody happened to see it until it was out in theaters yeah how much should we caught it at the time it just goes to show there's always a little bit more that you could do but ya know we're doing a lot of work on the armor you don't want to constrain what Josh is doing on set you want him to be able to perform and then you just have to make the amur work to that so there's a lot of sleight of hand going on bending of things that should be rigid it comes back to that thing of craft you know bringing an ASUS hands-on crafts approach to sculpt that suit enjoy very much we talked about Thanos his face for a moment sure dude the pores stretch there are a couple of innovations in the way that we approached their losses facial work up until infinity war we would go straight from the facial motion capture of Josh to the performance of Pharaohs what we started doing over infinity war was introducing this intermediary step which we call the actor popper we've got the footage of Josh from the head mounted cameras we've got a digital Josh and then we've got our digital thermals and we can see very clearly if it's deviating a little bit from what Josh was doing and then it's actually a reasonably straightforward process to migrate the animation curves from one puppet to the knees so what you're telling me is that there's a perfect digital double of josh brolin that you can drop into every fan of kind of a little bit like a Mission Impossible pull off the last what's harder in your opinion the mouth or the eyes I think people mainly look at the eyes that's often a criticism of digital performance if it's not working that people say that the eyes look did so we have to get the eyes rise and we spend a lot of time lighting the eyes so that they have a nice highlight so we'll put a special light and the scene and it's a little small area light but quite bright then the eyes will pick it up it'll have a very subtle effect over the rest of them [Music] so green-screen you guys are using a lot of green screen in this as well as rotoscoping yeah how are you eating such perfect edges in your green screen I mean they're good green screens that well lips and they're clean and then we've got a lot of really highly advanced techniques we're you know doing parts of the hair differently you know if we get something really gnarly you might have to match move in a digital version of the actor and replace the plate here with CG here Wow winter helmet comes off there is that CG here for a brief moment for the 20 tail to flip I think that's just a warp actually and I think she might have flicked her head that's that's the hell of the duck shot where how are the daggers in the shot right there Oh 17 frames them ladies and gentlemen and when the studio reviews they were like I want to be great to get how the duck of the movie somewhere so we had to migrate the set it you know they sent us so Howard the Duck Loomer head down for guardians to they gave him one of the ravaging guns just way too big from I just noticed that each of those portals have like a different color scheme inside of it and it represented the Infinity Gauntlet different colors yeah they were those heavy flow you've got what condo you got the blue of deep space maybe you've discovered something that we didn't even intend to put on the movie you guys want to see us react to any specific movies or TV shows please leave a comment in the description below let us know and we will take a look at it I don't think anyone's ever seen just so many like heroes on screen at a single time the filmmakers you know they've managed to balance all that stuff so that it's personal a lot of it as as these little beats you know that we get these character moments and we get you know the reunion of Tony and Spidey it's that's the stuff that makes it successful you know we we were just really there supporting these these fantastic character moments so out of this entire sequence that would have worked on what do you think was probably the most challenging single shot of the entire sequence there's a little shot called the whether it was the scary part of the cut for a long time for me but now I can enjoy it [Music] [Music] so many layers of complexity everything from clashing armies two-digit levels to animation to like real-life meeting CG at the same time for closure we started working on it really early on and it was one of the last shots to be finished so we had like a subchannel working on a head of Tony animation supervisor at Sony animation team who are building the elements of the shot populating the scene we're iterating the whole time so as soon as there's anything that's even half decent we'll pass that down the line to two Lighting's all that lighting work is going on at the same time as the animation work what's really nice about this is that the characters a rim lit by their Sun so you have to really coordinate where the light is so do you work up like a master lighting position going into a lot of this stuff one thing we do do which is what exactly what they do on sit or on location is don't worry about the any sort of consistency to the position of the Sun the kick the key light so they'll always put that behind the the character that they're filming the thing I like to show people that really explains that is a scene from the very end of the first Independence Day movie the Sun is always behind everybody yeah which you don't have to do it because if you were filming it from the other side they would just be completely burnt out so you're exposing for the shadows we try and adopt these principles because they're established some amela graphic principles that work so I know they for these scenes here they actually film on a practical set but do you end up having to replace any of the foreground elements yes sometimes we do there's a little bit of a set element behind these guys here which we kept because it was appropriate but we did this thing where we essentially lifted the actors off the seat and put them with a predominantly CG environment and that sounds like a lot of rotoscoping so you basically cut out each character and none of the background is real just the characters are real exactly yeah obviously Tony his suit CG so whenever we see her room by himself really the only thing we're keeping us is hid anyway this was the last shot that we delivered on the show oh wow and it was about two weeks before the premiere so it was getting it was coming down to the wire you know they had versions of the shop but they kept wanting it to change a bit so we were happy to keep working on it the thing that was really important in the end was showing that Tony is suffering all this damage it's ultimate it's going to kill him and so we had to know that he was making a huge sacrifice but also it couldn't be so flashy there that distracted away from his before we had some of those those arcs of energy probably went up into his face more and then it was like he just looked at that he didn't look at him right you really have to be with him in this moment he's got to be with them exactly so I feel like you guys had a big creative challenge here with iron man dying and that you need to show the wounds are fatal but you can't be so gory or grisly as to not make this a family film exactly and that was something we explored for a long time through concept art to start off with and it's a little bit similar to the snap we had to allow him to retain his dignity through this through this moment how much of this was a makeup versus digital it's entirely digital so he has no makeup on him on set it off exactly and that was a really good decision that they made to do it that way because if they had put prosthetics on him essentially they would have been locked in to that look yeah more flexibility by doing it digitally especially when you know you can achieve a photorealistic result yeah oh yeah this wood relies on that I read that most of the wounds are actually just two-dimensional tracks as opposed to fall 3d yeah exactly we match grouped as hid but we found that his facial performance was so subtle that we could just using like optical flow type techniques warp the digital prosthetic onto the movement of his face so we didn't have to try and match move his facial performance the other thing was for us we had to sit on the secret for six or eight months and it was like oh my god if this leaks in trouble well we can keep a secret here we've never had a leak touchwood we just have to get get down into it and they were totally on board with us and it was a total surprise for for audiences worldwide can you speak about anything coming up down the pipeline at weather well we're working on the Black Widow movie that's which opens soon we you know we have an ongoing relationship with with lavell and it's fantastic you know the work that they they get us engaged and as challenging and diverse and you know they're great films there's this this great kind of like storytelling that's going on with the MCU there it's just really exciting to be part of Wow well that's been a crazy episode they're getting all this information straight from the source whenever we're sitting here on the couch most of the time we're kind of just guessing so to actually hear a true professional like say exactly how you achieve some of these incredible results is really cool to hear I mean I've watched some of your stuff and you guys are pretty onto it so if you want to learn more about way to go check out their website you know Adam fxc onz there's articles on how some of these effects are done lots of great information so do not discount just going and checking out that website it's great to be here well thank you Matt I really appreciate it you're a ghost it's really spooky for a second there because we're in here hunting ghosts for our next quarter video but in the meantime tiny guns - just dropped on the corridor YouTube channel we got familiar with it that's where we put all of our short films so go check it out and this time you give us a reaction in the comments below go check it out youtube.com slash corridor

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 4,446,810

Rating: 4.9581861 out of 5

Keywords: vfx, vfx artists, CGI, visual effects, react, avengers, endgame, infinity war, thanos, hollywood, marvel, movies, black widow, captain america, iron man, black panther, weta digital, Matt Aitken

Id: 7SvLzKby0lg

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I think how it’s funny that there’s basically 30 seconds talking about Thanos’ gauntlet barely clipping through itself, and that’s all for the “bad CGI”. Still a great video and series though, love watching them

[u/spacednlost]

I love this series. Highly recommend.

[u/Whitechocolatekrispi]

These plus the stunt men react is such great content. Informative, entertaining and fun.

Everyone please subscribe. They deserve it.

[u/evanset6]

This channel might be my favorite on YT. Love their work.

I've always wondered... like, what do they "do"? Like, other than make great YT content, they seem to have a wealth of knowledge about the craft... do they work on any big movies or for big studios or anything?

[u/CahirOfNilfgaard]

cgi quality is great in both Infinity War&Endgame, but why are the colors still ugly/grey? is it the director's choice or Feige's, so that it would look "same" as the other MCU movies?

[u/mr_antman85]

This was honestly a great episode and even though I know that it been said all the time that movies are always being worked on up until release, to know that the ending battle was the first shot they had and was the last one they finished is crazy...the amount of work, time and energy. Just amazing. Also that Howard the Duck cameo...😂😂🤣

[u/buddy276]

i love these videos! when you see everything that goes into making these films, it makes you wish they won the oscar.