VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 19

so these are all miniature environments that were shot really golem his facial performance was entirely keyframe the water in the shot my mind there's a couple of big advances we made for this film thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video stick to the end to see how you can save 10% on your first purchase hey what's up welcome back to another episode of visual effects artists react today we have a very special guest you may have seen him in our previous episode talking about in-game we have Matt aching with us today Matt joins us from what a digital in today's episode I think we want to talk about some of the older movies that you have worked on and some of the advances that what a digital has made over the course of the last you know 25 years you started working at wedid there's basically just you and one other person doing the effects right yeah that's right so you're like as og what I've seen we're to be lots of different variations along the way go way back to the early days of the company the film project they really put us on the map was Lord of the Rings the work was in a lot of ways much more difficult because there was a lot more character work one of the things I found amusing from looking at the behind the scenes to lower the Rings was how much entertainment Peter derived from the turnovers when he would give you guys a really hard shot to figure out oh yeah sort of present these shots and just see how many dropped jaws you can get out of one of these turnovers I'm sure the roto artists most suffer psychological problems the thing I think about Peter is that he set up with a digital because he recognized very early on that it was going to be a really useful tool for him to make the kind of films that he liked to make they always had a big visual effects component he's never really felt like an outsider to us he's always been part of the process yeah what do you think was the biggest generational leap between Lord of the Rings Gollum and Hobbit gone Lord of the Rings Gollum his facial performance was entirely keyframed like we didn't have facial motion capture at all when it's Smeagol having a conversation with Gollum and he's going back and forth yeah that's all hand animated to match Andy Serkis performance yeah there's no automated tests Hydra no 32 different control they're just keyframing you know between zero and one the facial component would take a good two weeks to do for like maybe a two second shot you know typical to two and a half second one so there's a lot of painstaking work going on there really crafting it Andy will have been on set with these guys clambering around he's very athletic and he we painted him out of every every shot that golems in this is his own painting because he tends to poke out around the edges of Gollum and heed the motion capture on a motion-capture stage at a separate time that we incorporated into these plates it must've been really difficult for Andy and one of the Rings to kind of do this all this work on the motion capture stage when Elijah wasn't there and he was just basically you know working to an audio track but by the time we got to the Hobbit we were able to on sit motion capture simultaneous with a libation photography including the facial motion capture it was a much more active friendly approach the world premiere for the third Lord of the Rings film was actually in Wellington New Zealand where we are based we had a great party afterwards then I checked my own box and Peter had a King Kong meeting scheduled for 8 o'clock the next morning yeah let's keep going like half the party yeah sleep in the next day we were all bored with it we were to keep going as well nice King Kong was like a really fantastic project to work on as in the CGI and his movie looks like a movie from 10 years after its time I mean there's a couple of big advances we made for this film we got fur going that was one of the big challenges we hadn't really done fur to this level before and we were doing facial motion capture for the first episode Andy Serkis who did the reference performance become unlike save for Gollum here we're actually driving Kong's facial performance it was one of the biggest challenges you guys face for the sequence well this looking back on this what what occurs to me you know the time of King Kong we couldn't do the complex natural environment of an island based jungle we couldn't do that on the computer so these are all military environments that were shot really yeah with motion control camera moves these are some fast camera moves going on yeah no because we've got a motion control camera we can repeat the camera move on the miniature over and over again with multiple passes key light passes fill that passes fog passes Oh interesting you guys can alter those after the fact and because light is additive you know you can just take those passes and add them together in your cob it's just as simple as yep yep it's except we're getting whatever flexibility we can out of the setup so there's a lot of compositing work going into this yeah it's even just to get the environment before you put the creatures in so you have to do is casting a shadow from the CG characters onto this real environment trying to make them feel like they're really connected exactly we've laser scanned the miniature so we've got that as geometry that we are using as reference like when Kong's hanging off the cliff we need to know where the military is we're using the same meat-packing scanner yeah pretty much I've been there's particle-like simulations for interaction with leaves and some of that's a land-based and some of its simulation based I think we should talk about comms death so another spoiler Kondo sorry people one of the ways that we work really hard to make our characters seem alive is by the way we light their eyes we'll get make sure that we get a nice high light in the eyes and that's often a cheated light that we have to bring in we had this moment where calm dies and one of the ways that we let the audience know subtly that he has actually died is that we turn those all those light passes off and I think I think if you know that that's that's happening you actually get to see it it's like his eyes are drying out so that people are consciously aware of that but I think they emotionally will respond to what that what that means that's really fascinating I was getting excited when there's a an effect that's something that anybody could do and it brings like emotional power with it King Kong themselveses hair simulations and skins capture but there are questions in the eye disappearing that's the key to the short I think that's what really makes it yeah do any more like favorite characters like dying that you want those moments we could talk about Spidey bluffing out at the end of and put ourselves through enough already you want to see more of these videos consider subscribing that's the best way to make sure you don't miss out on an episode these are fun to do and I bet there's a shot that's inspired you or a shot that you like how is this done the particular scene that sticks in my mind is the Jurassic Park t-rex on the ride it still holds up you know it's just it's just amazing work so they're using a really clever shader to simulate the flow of water off the back of the t-rex here a shader it describes the interaction of light with the surface of an object whatever the material is so the fact that the surface of this t-rex looks like whit riptile skin that's the shader doing there I was doing my masters in computer graphics when Jurassic Park came out and I went to that with my wife and a good buddy and they were like oh that was that was cool that was fun I was like don't you realize what we just saw it's all change speaking of amazing visual effects do you have one that you want us to take a look at leave a comment down below we'll read it and maybe in the very next episode we'll take a look abbit are was the highest-grossing movie of all time until your most recent movie came out I think we did about 90% of the shots I helped in a pre-production context so it's so kind of building the world the jungle environments in Avatar where it was CG yeah and there were no miniatures shot for um for a litera doll so that represents a huge change and the way that in general filmmakers approach because it wasn't just us it was everybody was making that same transition at that time this shot right here I spoke about this another VFX artists react the water in the shot blew my mind I saw had never seen water like it before it was certainly of the bits water we're done I think we continue to get better at this stuff it's all done in CG the simulation includes foam passes includes a sense of aeration which has bubbles micro bubbles in the water so you get that kind of foaming and clouding of the water so you it's not just like a clear volume that really aids the sense of looking like real water so I do have one scene in particular from Avatar that kind of blew me away [Music] it's one thing to have like digital actors interacting with real actors but the Navi are are very tall they're way taller than two lenses so she is interacting with the real play photography of Jake solely here and maintaining correct eye lines putting things on his face this may be one of the scenes that we shot with the system we called Simon we have motion control happening on a separate stage but adjacent to the live-action stage at the same time as principal so Jim can actually see on a monitor he can see Zoe playing Neytiri she might have like a scaled-down version of Jake like as a dummy that she's holding you'll have grips or stunts he's you know moving Jake her out moving Sam around as Jake and he can kind of frame up on them both of them because he's got he's got a monitor that combines the CG and a theory that's being driven in real time by Zoe's performance it means that the shots can feel very natural as if he's actually there filming and he can give notes to both of them at the same time some of this is probably digital Jake as well yeah like his hand there's probably digital I think it would have to be yes you get that level of interaction are you guys currently working on the next avatar movies can you even talk about that I think I can I think I I can the first two sequels they're concentrating on those two now so avatar 2 and avatar 3 we're also working on the film's in pre-production kind of context at where the digital developing kind of revolutionary stuff actually which I don't think I can go into people should watch out for because there's some pretty amazing stuff for very high-end new stuff going on for these films [Music] you hi I'm Jake Watson will you be an angel for yourself every day thousands of people go without their own beautiful award-winning website losing friends clients and opportunities but thanks to today's sponsor Squarespace there's hope take my friend Ren over here before Squarespace he had no access to traffic overview web site analytics or anything else of that nature his web site was just sitting out there on the open Internet blind but now thanks to Squarespace he's looking at those analytics every day one of the most tragic stories I ever heard was about my friend Dean tried to build a website of his own but didn't have 24/7 award-winning customer service and as a result kept waiting days helped with Squarespace and their customer service he found out the answer within minutes did I mention their beautiful award-winning templates oh you see Griffin back there you probably see him back there he's always back there it's the guy with the long hair sadly one time he was out of town and he wanted to make a change to his website but he didn't have Squarespace so he couldn't just call one of his co-workers and ask him to make the change through squarespace's multiple contributors tool now being angel in your own life and let other friends clients and opportunities come to you with your own beautiful award-winning lips just go to squarespace.com slash corridor group and remember with Squarespace there's always hope for your webs don't worry buddy they're coming don't worry [Music] Matt it's been an absolute pleasure and absolute honor having you here with us thank you so much for coming on the show sharing some of your knowledge and your experiences with everyone and it's due to people like you that we have these amazing images that we get to look at on screen and these you know these stories that bring us to worlds that we otherwise never get to see thank you so much for taking the time to come out here to stop by our little studio and sit on our green leather couch I feel like we gained just a tiny fraction of some legitimacy by having you here like glad to contribute one of the things I love about this field and one of the reasons where I guess I'm still working in after 25 or 30 years is that it's constantly evolving and with us constantly evolving but also the field is constantly changing and we're developing new techniques and we kind of I like to think we're getting better at what we do and filmmakers are always telling us new challenges as well so it's constantly stimulating and interesting for me yeah

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Views: 2,318,610

Rating: 4.9494262 out of 5

Keywords: vfx, vfx artists react, CGI, hollywood, avengers endgame, react, visual effects, shot breakdown, weta digital, matt aitken, avatar, king kong, lord of the rings, peter jackson, gollum, jurassic park

Id: spgENnlHiWM

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Republican_Atheist]

Was about to submit this, surprised there isn't more discussion going on.

[u/Exostrike]

I really need to get a bluray player so I can watch watcher at 1080

[u/kalospkmn]

Aw man I'm so excited