VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 34

he's filtering the orange juice pulp with his ghost hand dude that is cool i want those this background 100 cg is actually a pretty groundbreaking movie in terms of visual effects this is literally the screen effect yeah screen effect thanks to vessi for sponsoring this video stick around to the end to see how you can save 25 off your new pair of shoes hey what's up everyone whoa we are all back here for visual effects artists react it is october and so the theme this year is halloween it's radical i know all right well let's just jump in guys i am the pumpkin king so what is this movie is it like a stop-motion film yes i know it's tim burton have you really never seen this i really have never seen this i'm going to consider stop-motion visual effects because a lot of stop-motion is used for visual effects there's a lot of visual trickery in stop-motion that's not your traditional digital effect that you're used to i mean those are some digital leaves am i right you're probably not actually i figured this reminds me of james and the giant peach pretty sure james the giant peach is the same director no way this is an awesome little intro oh that's cool that shot there reminded me of the wolf from neverending story that's a creepy movie yeah we should talk about that one soon dang dude the swamp scene [Music] i'd rather not cry on this episode so let's not this is all captured in camera right it's all just a bunch of photos stacked together one after another because all these little clay puppets and whatnot are being molded frame by frame pretty much the vast majority of what you're going to see is captured in camera there's some trickery here and there what year did this come out 1993. oh so this came out the same year as jurassic park hey look at that fire there wasn't a single digital effect in that frame hold up hold up how are they doing that though is that hand drawn animated or is that a computerized digital effect see if you guys can guess how they did the torches okay here's my guess they filmed the shot and then they just re-exposed the same film while looking at a fire that's close all right so i think they filmed a fire element and they just went frame by frame and overlaid it on top of the other film yes you basically got it so the way they did it you know you got all your people posed they're holding torches they'd have their one frame they went through the whole shot they just have the first frame they'd take a little piece of paper to act as a movie screen they'd stick it to the end of the torch they'd turn off all the lights and they'd project a little image of fire onto that little piece of paper like it's a little mini movie screen and then do one more exposure on the piece of film so you'd have a double exposure one of the entire scene then one of just a little image of fire this is literally the screen effect yeah screen effect [Applause] yeah so it's cool to see that they actually did the screen effect because these days in say after effects you'll have like your footage layer and then an element layer let's say you recorded flames against a black background but you just need the flames not the black background and the way to do it is you just set it to screen or add or some sort of transparency mode like that the way it works is basically every pixel within the footage gets applied in number so a black pixel is actually zero and a white pixel is 255 and so it just takes those numbers and adds them to the one below but if it's zero you can't add zero to anything so you just end up with the pixel that was below it your original footage but fire on the other hand is much brighter and because it's so much brighter it carries through it's insane how much easier it is for us now with after effects and photoshop to be able to do the things that would take hours for these guys back in the day which for us is just seconds [Music] and you have like the water there which is a effect added afterwards just it's another element that's been probably composited in this case digitally oh wait there's a mask line where he comes out of the water there it's not moving you can see yep it just holds static he just came out of a hole yeah it just came out the well there's no water in there yeah rising out of it and then how are they doing the drippy drops on them like that that's just like probably wax or glue just being moved down so that's stop motion yeah it has that stop-motion effect to it that is some master animation it just blows my mind too that these animators have the foresight to like get the perfect movement well they do have some tools that help them achieve that this is just when you're starting to have things like video and some computer frame playback so they would have a video capture of their last frame or the last couple frames and they could watch it on video and go back and forth and see the most recent frame to see if everything was moving correctly and then they wanted the movie to have like natural flowing camera motion so you have shots where the camera is moving through a set and animators are like how do we animate the puppets there's a camera right here that's like bigger than my body and so you know part of it is you'd be suspended above poking down into the set that's still not enough though they actually set up a motion control rig so motion control is basically where your camera is robotically controlled in its position so you can have it repeat the exact same movement or go to the same position so you'd have the camera doing move and they would motion control to leave the set come in oh make the adjustments and the camera motion controls back to the exact same spot where it was awesome dude that sounds so meticulous [Music] you guys have noticed how jack skellington's face like animates really smoothly one of the reasons for that is using something called replacement animation so a lot of stuff is just you're just bending things right for something like jack's face which has so much expression the eyebrows like built into his skull oh i know yeah so they're using replacement animation where it's just different head models that are swapping to yeah they've just sculpted all the head models beforehand and the hard thing about all that is that you have to sculpt every phoneme with all your expressions so they actually made the entire range of possible facial animations and just had all of those heads as a set yes and depending on the scene and depending on the dialogue they would pick and choose the correct head yes except the picking and choosing happened in a computer beforehand where they had the recorded takes and they had just the faces they went through and frame by frame figured out what head with which number they'd be using for each frame dude that is cool i want those my own i've got to know that you know it is this place that i have found what is this what's the very first vfx shot that you saw that blew your mind let us know in the comments listen cut the crap okay if you don't show yourself right now i'm gonna have you arrested for trespassing so two years later a movie came out called casper hey okay [Music] [Applause] hi i'm jasper it was actually the first movie to ever have a full cg main character that interacted with the other live-action actors in the movie it's also the first movie to have a cg character with full expressive emotion who thought casper would be like the defining cg character historical moment it's actually a pretty groundbreaking movie in terms of visual effects there's a lot of crazy stuff going on here let's just take a look [Music] look at this though look at this this is awesome that smug casper expression sunny side up kind of makes me yak no problem whoa look at that he's filtering the orange juice pulp with his ghost hand yeah look at the picture too it's all real yeah there's no fluid simulations happening there so the pitcher with the orange juice is obviously real the orange juice itself pulling out of the pitcher is obviously real but there is some sort of interaction happening with that hand there it's going through something so you can see some artifacts here that could help give us a clue as to how the shot was done when he stops pouring the orange juice just disappears from his hand in a single frame but the orange juice in the picture is still pouring the pitcher and the cup are separate elements so this would probably be a motion control setup where the camera is going to film this multiple times it's going to repeat the same exact movements you'll film your picture element once you'll film your cup element second and then probably get a clean plate without anything just in case you need it for casper could be yeah give me my meal [Applause] okay okay wait are those those are pieces of food cg they are cg food the artist who worked on this shot said it took him two months to finish this one shot the mesh on that food was so dense it required so much computer power that is one of the most impressive shots i've seen so far and i'm willing to bet almost no one blinked an eye at it that's hilarious that's so good yes but he's got no respect for us after all we've done for the little blower hey what the hell do you think you're doing look at that there though we're looking at real chunky food bits on the ground while casper is holding a cg dust pan with cg food on it cg food bits mixed in with real flu bits you can't tell the difference you know it's a good testament once again to understanding your lighting understanding your shaders understanding what you can do well and then shooting for that it also really helps there's a very cg character right next to it that's not supposed to look real you know in contrast next to the food and the pan and the broom look real yeah your mind wants to make it work it's like a magician good filmmaking see at the time the state-of-the-art cg stuff was like dinosaurs but here we have an actual character that's emoting for the first time yeah yeah we take it for granted that you can just animate a cg character like you still have to build the systems for doing so so yeah they built a facial capture rig to build out casper's main facial expressions and then you'd have animators go back in and specifically work on the lips and they said it would take anywhere from two weeks to three months to finish any one of these shots depending on how complicated the facial expressions were and also there's three other ghosts too in this movie the ghosts are obviously dated the animation's a little bit dated but i think the way they combined the cg characters and the live action it was groundbreaking for the time so the team that worked on this was ilm and they pretty much immediately rolled off of doing this film which they thought was really hard and they immediately went into working on this movie called flubber it's flubber flubber sounds like baby shampoo the scariest of movies lover traumatized me as a child we did it really i couldn't play with silly putty after that movie i saw the black and white version first actually there's a black and white version of flubber yeah it's actually arguably as good if not better than the remake remake yeah flavor is a remake you guys aren't aware the robin williams version of flubber is a remake yeah there's like flying cars and all stuff i did not know that i miss robin williams [Music] so this looks like a little abyss chrome tentacle thing yeah it's like the abyss but there's bubbles in it now it definitely looks like aloe vera and what's funny is that they actually like referenced a ton of different materials like hair gel toothpaste and just photographed it from a bunch of different angles as inspiration for what flubber should look like because slubber is never actually practical in this movie he is 100 cg every single time you see him okay and whoa oh my god oh my god that's a cool shot right yeah all right i want to talk about that shot really quick because that was not planned really oh he just he just did that so here's the thing about robin williams he is considered an improv master and so when he's just riffing around on set he just decided you know what what if i pretended to stretch it and then shove my face into it and there's vfx artists on set supervising everything but the director was like yes that was great they all have a heart attack they did because they didn't know what they were especially because the director was like yes we are definitely keeping that that was great good job robin williams and it took him three months to do that shot really that one shot let's try and describe you uh you're an elastomer um yeah the thing about animating flubber is that he takes the shape of multiple different objects so that was a huge animation challenge now this is the same team that was just coming off the back of casper where it's these amorphous physical objects that can take the shape of multiple things and they had to apply it to this sort of effect normally when you animate something like a t-rex you have a rigged system you know you have all these bones and lines that you can actually move and animate but with a little wiggly thing like this you can't really use that same sort of rigging system that you would use on other projects so they had to come up with a bunch of new stuff for this and combine that with the fact that you're having to render a transparent and reflective object [Music] there's a lot of cool stuff going on with this specific shot [Music] so that shot there where the camera is moving around this background 100 cg it's got to be no that that's practical those wide shots yeah that looks practical but even like the close-ups same set i mean that could be real i would at first assume that this is a cg background but it is nicely detailed they could have done it i don't know it was done for real really on a miniature set three times bigger than what it actually was so here's the problem they wanted to have these sweeping camera moves but the set it was too small for an actual camera to move around so they had to literally scale up the set three times and they actually animated the camera moves on a computer ahead of time and then translated that to a motion control device to move the camera through specifically how they planned that's so much work for something these days you would just do the entire set and see yeah these are yeah exactly these days it would just be 100 cg but they couldn't do that back then the level of fidelity with the cg background wasn't good enough for what they needed for this moment but here's the thing they still had to make a cg version of this set for all of the reflections yeah and the refraction through flubber everything that you're seeing that's through flubber yeah is cg oh my god it's not like the rendering out flubber that's slightly transparent and then just putting it on the background yeah what you're seeing that's refracting through flubber yeah is the digital recreation of this three times larger set oh my god that's great so meticulous so it took a lot of work and effort just to make that because it's one thing to have a velociraptor that's opaque and it's reflecting your scene but just the lights but if you were to have like a chromed out object now it's actually reflecting imagery from your scene but for it to also be transparent like flubber is here with little air bubbles in between that's also doing double refractions and stuff like that it requires so much effort to make that look photo real dude this is so detailed and this is just deep for this flubber dance number for no reason [Music] these guys work really hard every single day and they could use a little treat maybe a little chocolate chip cookie action so go ahead and subscribe if we get a thousand subscribers from this push right here these guys are getting chocolate chip cookies next episode that sounds really nice hey please subscribe i'd like some cookies i have been informed that we're about to look at a goof bird remember when we watched for a democrat i do remember when we watched birdemic look at this dude man i managed to go my whole life without watching this all the birds are like they're never tracked it's like clip art this is very clearly just super low budget filmmaking so it's just probably one director who's probably also operating the camera and telling the actors all right pretend birds are attacking you and fight them off and as an actor there's only so much you can do you're like okay you're just assuming that birds are going to be expertly applied later [Laughter] okay here's the thing i bet you it was a college student with his college buddies saying i am going to make a film and you guys are going to be in my film clint i would agree with you if this weren't shot in los angeles in fact this is like an la thing it's definitely like we're going to go and we're going to make a movie i think we're on the same page we're basically saying like it's serious you gotta at a certain point you can't make a feature film ironically isn't he like a middle-aged asian dude if he was intentionally trying to make this ironically it wouldn't have been good it became a cult classic because it's so bad but he wasn't trying to make it bad you know what good for him man i mean yeah hey he made the movie look we can be up front and say it's not a good movie that's okay as an artist you're gonna make bad stuff especially your first damn gang i can't shake them get them off my tail it's gonna be bad you know what if you wanna make movies your first one's not gonna be good either it's gonna suck so get it done and get it out make the second one i don't know about you but i've struggled to find like a good pair of shoes that i can just have on that are comfortable for a while until i had a pair of vessies bestie has a new pair of shoes that they brought all of their innovations to it's called the weekend shoot so i've been rocking the white weekend shoes for a while now it's really comfortable it's 100 waterproof so you can splash water all over it you can do that thing where you put ketchup on and it rolls right off don't actually try that because it's a waste of ketchup they're like sandproof they're sludge proof and they're super grippy so they're like slip proof what's also really neat about these shoes is that they're 100 vegan they're made out of this knitted material that keep your feet comfortable and they're breathable too so you know you can keep cool in the winter or warm in the summer wait dang it vesey has everything you're looking for in a new pair of shoes and i'm really enjoying my pair so if you want to slip your feet into a pair of these shoes go ahead and click that link in the description we'll save you 25 off your purchase but for now let's finish off this video that was fun i really enjoyed this episode some throwback movies here man watching flubber just jiggle around it's really satisfying kind of like those satisfying renders that you've maybe have seen on instagram or reddit you know what we actually did that we had a satisfying render challenge we made a video about it so go check it out if you haven't it's hilarious watching these guys panic as they try to make the most satisfying render they can it was actually very stressful i just got to judge it i didn't have to make them yeah you just got to be satisfied and reap the benefits or was i dissatisfied check out the video to find out so long everybody thanks for watching talk until next time does anyone still wave like this my daughter actually she goes like this

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 2,280,057

Rating: 4.958189 out of 5

Keywords: vfx artists react, VFX, CGI, react, shot breakdown, hollywood, movies, visual effects, behind the scenes, robin williams, flubber, casper, nightmare before christmas, tim burton

Id: gvzTX02-2VI

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

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