VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 17

there's so much of this movie that is practical I love the light bleed onto the inside of the barrel there yeah there's a hidden cut in that whip pan oh I didn't even know hi everyone welcome back to another episode of visual effects artists react we have some great clips for you today and the janky is CG from the 90s you've ever seen that big Hollywood actors around well you know sometimes I just feel like 90s movies get a bad rap because you know it's like making fun of cavemen for not figuring out fire soon enough no I'm just like Oh Scorpion King doesn't the 2000s though oh okay it still sucks today Oh Clint yeah the ground looks great like the environments look great it's like the unsung heroes of these shots everything that's not the lion especially when you realize that everything is a hundred percent generated accepting a purse opening shot it's on the Sun rising they're clearly trying to make it look like it's live-action and no way is there anything cartoony about this when you're looking at a live-action lion you can't have the emotions that you would get out of a cartoon character and that's actually a big complaint a lot of people have all right let me see what we're dealing with here crazy thing about environments is they all follow rules its erosion it's different materials different rocks being run out by wind and water and sand and all that kind of stuff so when the modelers are making this environment they have to follow those rules for all this to make sense and these are things that subconsciously we can detect very very quickly like in Avatar they've always like floating islands with just waterfalls where's the water coming from I guess it's coming to clouds somehow you know I wonder how much of this stuff was modeled versus photo scanned because the more you can ground it in reality with like using virtual reality to actually hold the virtual camera or things like that I think that helps and so I would want to go all right let's find a rock or some areas that I could imagine this scene playing out on and we photoscan that so keep throwing out the word photo scans and what we mean by that is there's a way you can go about modeling really complex things that exist in real life and the way it works is basically you take a bunch of pictures surrounding an object and then the computer it basically figures out where these pictures are overlapping and where they are of the same detail and from all these perspectives it can kind of rebuild the model in 3d in fact this is how they made a lot of those really good looking environments and the star wars battlefront games a lot of that is just photo scanning and I bet you a bunch of them are in this movie so we're looking at the 1998 version of Godzilla there's been like 30 films looking at the first American reimagining of it but CG looks really good it does look really good this moment here there's so much of this movie that is practical whoa it's a great shot they actually rigged up this cab 50 feet up into the air and actually had the dude fall out of it but then they cut to this reverse shot here do you think this is a visual effect right here I think it's actually a miniature like a puppet waggling the truck around they did actually have a 1 to 6 scale giant Godzilla Wow 30 feet tall it's huge and a little rubber band dude attached to the cab of the truck they put it up in the sky and they filmed it for real we had different practical Godzilla's in this movie they had all like the babies they were like real practical suits they had animatronic versions of the real Godzilla but on all the big shots here he's walking around he's computer-generated and I realized the thing that makes this work most is they matched the lighting in the black levels yeah lawlessly there's different ways to convey depth but one of the ways you do it is with atmospheric perspective you see a lot of paintings where basically the further something back is the more haze they add to it the more they wash out the blacks so you can see in this shot the two legs of Godzilla are actually at two different black levels because they actually have atmospheric perspective in this shot because he is so big you're right the left leg which is close to the camera is not quite as faded it's actually a little darker and more contrasting it's like just a trick that you use to separate elements in your shot easily just like how you would do an out-of-focus background in a InFocus foreground this is actually a pretty advanced compositing shot right now and there's lots of different elements involved all of the cars that you see there including the one underneath Godzilla's foot are all filmed in Los Angeles against a green screen and what they did was they actually dropped a giant steel sheet I'm honestly kind of impressed by a lot of the compositing you see in 90s movies because it's better than a lot of the stuff you'd see today using modern technology have you guys seen or heard of lawn mower I have no idea what houses is movie stars pierce brosnan the movies basically about this crazy VR scientist this guy is basically his servant tries it out and becomes a genius by tapping into virtual worlds and becomes a super evil chrome boy you know they got pretty expressive faces though I was actually gonna say this there's a lot of emotions going on with that CG face yeah there's no skin like stretch it's just individual objects rotating and clipping with each other so would you say that they didn't stretch the pores Niko I would say actually no looking his face they definitely stretched the pores look at that yes this movie came out a year after Terminator 2 obviously it's not nearly as good as visual effects but we always think of like the best movies from the 90s as far as visual effects they're all made by like ILM they were the name in visual effects back then yeah all that software basically be custom-built so it wasn't like he just started going to the effects shop people take that for granted cause these days there are like dozens of visual effects houses they all can kind of do basically the same level of effects okay time out though time out though if you were alive and watched this movie around the time it came out let us know in the comments below what you thought of it yes I would be really interested in hearing that like was it cool or you just like this is dumb is Lord of war and this is notable because I had a really fascinating intro to the entire movie so this is our most requested clip from the last VFX RS react thank you for the suggestions if you guys would like to see us react to a movie or TV show that you are a big fan of please let us know we love getting specific shot recommendations as well anyways let's check it out there are over 550 million firearms and worldwide circulation they're feeling in a very dangerous than a neighborhood in South Africa right now like legitimately hmm look the productions like we shouldn't film there and the directors like I want to I think this cage is like yeah this is my favorite part the camera is like attached to the blue you think they actually had a camera in a box for that for like the guy to open up mm-hmm get the lighting yeah oh now we're looking at the mare lightly over the bullet love the light lead onto the inside of the barrel there yeah this terrorists aiming is done and his friends and the point made so this opening sequence it's one of the best movie openers I've ever seen it's so automatically OnPoint it kind of ruins the rest of the movie I think as they actually filmed that after they filmed the whole movie and they had no budget so they basically had to make this for nothing really yep Wow it's one of those like genius setups where like the way they previous it and the way they planned it let them go and execute this on a low budget okay so I want to talk about some of the tricks and they did this in the ways they approached us with simple techniques and make it super yeah I want to hear this bring it alright so this was all shot in 35 millimeter film so there's no digital cameras here all the cameras are huge with the actual film reels moving so when you go into tiny spaces it poses a problem as I move into the machine here we move into CG land and we transition the David Fincher look going through the coffee cup so now we followed a conveyor belt and the conveyor belt in the bullets are all CG and this actually is an emotion control rig it's just the DP pushing the camera down to dolly hell yeah so then the fingers grabbing this it's an element filmed up close like on a green screen but what they'd often have to do for that is it actually reprojected onto geometries make sure they pinch the bullet correctly and cache shadows and all stuff and they just comped you know the bullets in the foreground there's a probably hand animated jiggles on the bullets and stuff camera in a box straight up it's just a camera in a box here to get the light bleeds nice classic comp shot you know the boat and stuff in the backgrounds fake the guys in a green screen etc oh the boat was fake of course it is I just course don't even think about it I know you don't even think about this shot being actually really solid VFX shot alright so this sequence coming up here they will had to get the camera to roll on the ground but as I mentioned it's a 35-millimeter camera it can't actually get that low to the ground they just get the camera as low as it could they don't roll it they just slide it though so the rolling is done in editing yes they just rotated the video clip but they took that ground plane reprojected on just in geometry and then lowered the virtual camera even lower to the ground to let them get close to the ground but they pick up the bullet here posit so that's the real finger you know filming close-up real but they needed him to load it into the magazine so they reprojected these fingers basically onto hotdog shaped geometry so they could warp the fingers to make it do the action of pushing the bullet into the gun honestly in motion it looks pretty nice it does but you definitely see a live of weird warping on the tip of the finger right here at the end it's a great way to get around a little challenging moment to stitch all these shots together that basically takes us to the end so relatively simple CG good camerawork good stitching and good thematic storytelling to make an awesome intro what an incredible movie this was it's a good ass movie well this scene in particular is really great because it never cuts how is this camera moving wasn't there just somebody in that seat and the camera just moved right through them this whole thing is filmed on a very custom car rig which is why they're getting these shots here this is not green-screen they basically have a camera that's installed on the roof of the car that's freely moving on a mechanical system so the roof is CG the entire Texas actors they have to keep popping their chairs down while that camera that moves over to where that car so imagine you're doing a scene where like the love of your life is dying and you have to go and like recline just see it really quick and just be quiet for a moment while the camera moves in to spot you pop-up scene up turn it all back on back into the scene back into acting so hard to do like that's true professional acting right there [Applause] who's driving the car normally when you have a car like this and you have to have a driver the cars on a trailer of some sort and someone else is driving the trailer but we look through the front of the car and through the back and there's no trailer the car has an extended like seating area basically right in front of the front bumper we're guys just look down really low with a tiny steering wheel when you're shooting a giant sequence like this the probability of you hiding cuts is super high I watched through this scene and I've got my estimated hidden cut points 100% there's a hidden cut in that whip pan she's shot whip pan cut new shot we're out of the blood yes yeah we just straight up into a new shot here Clive Owen and all them have blood on their clothes that's all been dressed that's not from just a squib randomly going off they are all now in new costumes so here then keep playing this so we're on the single lane Forest Road right now correct so like the glass shatter that is a really OP clear transition point because there's no characters and it here's to see what happens to the road see now suddenly now there's markings on the road the other one at the end is definitely a hidden cut it's just like a flawless camera transition I don't remember how this could oh snap and now our handheld rig is there oh I didn't even know so fluid yeah it's gotta be the white um it's going through the the window there because the camera rig was inside the car it couldn't go outside through the window at all there's tons of hidden cuts in this that was the hardest thing for me to track down is any information on to like where these cuts were so it was really up to us to kind of pick them apart we are Wesley Wesley incorporated a lot of people don't know that Jake's middle name is Wesley hey guys Wesley and Wesley here back to tell you about today's episode sponsor Squarespace now you might be wondering what's the best way to get my website out into the world well tell them Wes you gotta log onto squarespace.com we just know that if you don't use Squarespace you're probably gonna be found guilty of a crime Squarespace is beautiful award-winning templates are 100% legal and you'll never get into trouble using them now in addition to these beautiful designer templates and 24/7 and Ward winning customer services they also allow simultaneous posts so if you post something on Facebook and Twitter and we guess you'll go via the other websites as well that's right so all you got to do is post it once on your 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finally Lord of the Rings vs The Hobbit that's going to be our Christmas treat for you also we're doing a Star Wars special the original Star Wars the ones that define modern visual effects and we've been doing a lot of research it's crazy what they did so I can't wait to tell you all about it so subscribe so you don't miss it

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,832,395

Rating: 4.961122 out of 5

Keywords: vfx artists react, CGI, shot breakdown, movies, visual effects, special effects, godzilla, the lion king, children of men, lord of war

Id: B4cSv3wE61M

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheBlackSwordsman97]

I think the effects still hold up well regardless of my thoughts on Godzilla 1998 (bad Godzilla movie, good not great remake of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms). Plus I think that Zilla and his babies are still much more expressive and lifelike (as lifelike as a giant Iguana Rhedosaurus Kaiju can be) than the new Lion King.

[u/DeputyRooster]

I thought the CG was pretty good for how bad the movie was

[u/Garrow_the_Khajiit]

The effects in the movie still hold up pretty well IMO, and the movie’s not THAT bad. But then I have a soft spot for Zilla because his son is one of my favorite Godzillas...

[u/Gojirawars_03]

Really? I always thought that CGI looked god-awful, especially when Jurassic Park predated it by 5 whole years!