Oh *laughter* This is everything I'd want in a film This was such a fun sequence to work on and let me tell you what is really great about this shot Welcome to another episode of VFX artist's react, we're gonna jump right in with one of the most famous visual effects shots on the Internet Alright, let's see it. Hey, what's up? Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dot net Wait Niko are you serious right now? This is a classic though. No no no this is, why are we even talking about this This is a great tutorial. no no seriously, why are we doing tutorials? I thought this was for like movies and what, not TV shows Maybe this is just bad. Honestly, why are we why are we doing this? What's going on guys? What do you uh, what are you doing? Oh, hey Andrew Oh I know what that is Hey, I think your renders done yeah, yeah, I think he's right this is pretty bad Hey, what's up Andrew Kramer here and welcome back to another very exciting episode of VFX artists react We have a very special guest today Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot dotnet One of the most legendary visual effects artists on the planet and he's gonna be sitting on the couch with us today Reacting to other movies and TV shows the visual effects whether they're great or bad or whatever We're gonna talk about we're gonna break 'em down. I'm very excited to check out the show in person. Let's jump in That shot when he busts into the Oval Office and gets everybody is just so good This is one of the coolest scenes pretty much ever How do you guys think they pull this off with like with? Having a guy be there then not be there then be somewhere else and not be there So I'm willing to bet Nightcrawler himself has never actually in any of these shots. Yeah, I think that probably makes most sense He's probably the green screen element another interesting way they could do this is with like stunt doubles So one guy does the shot here and the kick and then they cut over here That's a different stunt double, and that way you could sort of have that continuity of action Well, like take this couch shot, right? He you know flips the guy up if that is like a stunt man he could just do the effect and then just jump down behind the couch and hide and then you could paint it out just a Couple of frames. What do you think? They're doing for all those crazy like atmospheric smoky effects every time he teleports so it's probably like a really high particle simulation But it is really nice the way that the color of his jacket Sort of comes out in those those particles that are close to him you can see like when he Teleports, there's like a secondary animation that happens like the particles move or another simulation on top of the initial one Yeah, this was a really popular effect when it came out I remember people asking about hey, how do you do the Nightcrawler effect another thing? Actually that I realized that it's probably a CG tail that was just wondering about the tail that tail has a personality, especially when he grabs the knife and he gets shot its like (wren grunts) the best visual effects happen when you're practical elements and your your CG elements are tied together as well as possible if you have no Practical elements your visual effects don't look good Even if you need to do something with a green-screen Don't do everything with a green screen because you'll be able to get more believability if there's something really tangible in the shot Just watch and tell me if you guys notice something weird. Tell me if you guys to see anything weird you see it See it are we looking at the fire? It's hard to catch. Catch What. Is there a flicker? You could say that we're getting some frame frame duplications as you're going frame by frame. Oh Oh ( everyone gasps ) oops Yeah, that one made it into the final movie. No, way! Wait hold on but it's just the debris that's missing here Yeah, this couldn't have been on the VFX house. There's no way that you guys are misunderstanding Magneto's power So here's what can happen in a shot like this at the end of a movie Anybody who's worked on visual effects knows that when the movie is locked. It's just like a vague way of saying the movies not locked With so much crazy stuff going on It could have got shifted one frame. Or listen, renders fail and that one shot didn't get rendered. Mistakes happen. Everyone makes mistakes, we make tons of mistakes all the time that we're all human. Even the big-budget movies. We didn't even notice it It's not like we're out making houses or something dangerous. Oh Oh Yes (inhales with excitement) I know this shot. Okay, this the shot continues to blow my mind to this day. Wait, so there it is. There it is. Boom That's magic that's the magic right there. Remember taking the VHS of this while I was in high school And playing it back and just having my mind blown- just the cinematic importance of this shot What exactly happened here? So, we're looking at her run up the stairs and the camera is tracking with her, okay Yeah, and then at some point we're behind her, the camera is now behind her over the shoulder That's when visual effects shots are the best is when they are straight-up magic tricks and you just slap on Oh, wait, what look at the end of the shot. It's not just a throwaway my Some storytelling right there. How did they do this? This is a shot. I really dug into like the behind-the-scenes But how do you guys think they did if you don't know alright, so they probably had some sort of double Watch your hand reach out. It doesn't look like it's perfectly in sync. I think I see it I said I'm gonna throw this guess so right now it's just a shot of her cameras in front Camera guys running backwards filming her. Mm-hmm straight forward, right? So now what I think they're doing Is they have another shot that gotten they went up to the mirror like with green screen behind it and they're pulling back from that at roughly the same speed they were going down the hallway and all they're doing is then compositing the footage they have Into that spot and thankfully their motion is kind of lining up So that's just footage for reaching up the knob in this real-life version Now look at her pointer, for example her hand position in the mirror is different than her hand position in real life That's not an actual reflection of her that's just another element for reaching for it. So knowing how this shot was created You're exactly right. Yes There's no mirror in the shot at all Yes Green or blue? over where the mirror would be the most believable part of this entire shot is the smudge is on the actual mirror you can actually See, you know how mirrors have that little yeah edge That kind of creates a slight angle shift on the refraction So what they've done is they've done a distortion over the plate that's behind it So that it looks like it's behind that glass. You see how it's like. Yeah. I'm refracting that edge right there It's the best thing about visual effects. It's storytelling Visual effects coming together making something that is even better So, let me set this up, okay so Air Force One Harrison Ford present in the United States The airplane is running out of fuel and they need to get off the airplane as fast as possible before it crashes into the ocean Now, unfortunately, there's some problems And so of course I'll get off your plane The summersault here at the end It's tough. It's I would say the problem the water is not high resolution enough. It looks very misty very smoke like right here and it sort of sort of Miniaturizes the effect. I think the visual effects industry has gotten so good at water Splashes and huge scale of water simulations that when you see this sort of smoky looking water It's lacking any detail, but actually, the plane actually disappears a little bit so you can see the horizon. Oh You can see the sunset, but you can't see the airplane in there It doesn't help that the shots like two minutes long Yeah, they look at this stuff probably in the same way they look at their own shot and think the amount of time it will take to pull that off versus the other 20 shots that Have to get done and there's a definitely a balancing act to doing this. Oh Man alright, we're talking about that force awakens now, why might this specific shot be special to us Andrew? I and a team of hologram artists helped to work on the sequence. You see here. This was such a fun sequence to work on I worked on it with some really awesome people so this is my favorite part of the shot right there where it's like that tiny little thing and Expands out into this really high detail thing that fills the whole room We built it as a single element mainly because in the shot it has to come out and then it has to Expand if you see some of the planets have a little bit more density So we use like an additive material so that it feels a little bit more thick little hotspots that are out of focus Yeah, I'm loving that out-of-focus bokeh. They're anamorphic. Yes They used a lot of the original lenses when you film with an anamorphic lens, you're sort of Squeezing the image through a lens to fit onto a square piece of 35 millimeter film and then it's being projected Sort of at a two-to-one ratio and when it gets stretched out because of the way that it's filmed you get this sort of taller Looking bouquet element rather than a round Bouquet element you guys know that you can add depth of field and post using plugins and depth We want to have that nice little stretch so that it matches the rest of the film one of the things I got to give a shout out to is the Team doing the 3d match moving on all these shots Like look at this shot. What are you tracking? I'm tracking the oxygen The 3d tracking process involves analyzing 2d points across an entire sequence and then from those 2d points you sort of Recreate where the camera is based on how those points would be visible if it was really shot through a camera I usually do all the camera tracking here It's like okay, I'm gonna stay here for a day and just track dozens of points manually Nothing is more special than receiving a project with perfect 3d tracking data All I can say is I have a real appreciation for everybody else's brilliant visual effects work being analyzed by people frame by frame If you guys are wanting to see us react to any like clips or movies that you know Are your favorites or like good incredible shots or even into like shots and it looks so good Please leave a comment below it helps give us ideas and inspiration for it We can talk about in our videos and here's enough of that back to the clips But why is there a dinosaur in the temple After coming out of temple, if I'm honest, I don't quite remember it being as ridiculous The only thing I feel it really technically falls apart on is the comping of the people into those shots So this is what we would call like a 2d shadow that you would add on to sort of imply lighting nowadays, they'll actually have Objects on sets to block out the lights here. You can really tell that the Lighting's actually not changing on Adrien Brody at all. They're just moving like a shadow a mask around him Yeah to try to give the effect like it looks very very fake I'm just gonna go out here and say I'm not a big fan of this movie I think it exhibits a lot of the same problems that the Hobbit exhibits Peter Jackson It's a lot of time on moments that he gets been a lot of time on Overindulgent use of visual effects can be in its own way a form of bad visual effects I mean Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Rings trilogy and frankly. You know what? Yeah, I do whatever he wants. You can have a few Brontosauruses. It's okay Dude I love Independence day like for the longest time was like my favorite movie Hands down. same here. This is everything I want in a film. Jeff Goldblum. times up Good old crowds running. Yeah, that looks like real fire cuz it is real fire Did they just kill a bunch of extras what they actually did is they built a miniatures and they turned the whole thing sideways Lit the explosion underneath and fire rolls up through it, but you're filming it from that perspective So it feels the fires moving sideways God brilliant super cool is the exposure of the fire Correct for what we should be seeing on a street. No, they had to shoot that fire in slow motion They probably had to stuff down the aperture of the lens to get everything in focus So that makes us so that everything's really dark. So even though the fireball is incredibly bright it all shows up exposed But if you're shooting at night any sort of fire is gonna be so bright It's gonna clip the end result I think is worth it because you see like the really good detail of the fire itself It's definitely a stylistic choice Getting hit by debris, space debris look out. Oh no my spaceship If there's ever a movie to watch the theaters like this is it I watched this in the theater and it was amazing Fake and it looks so real, the spacesuits aren't real the spacesuits there are entirely CG and The actors are in like a kind of a fake spacesuit that has like tracking markers on it - I get the motion Right, but it's crazy how realistic it looks like the spacesuits do not look fake whatsoever in fact after The fact like I thought the spacesuits are real and they were just comped in like everything else around the most fake I didn't know just the faces were real and that was it. So even though this looks incredibly realistic Technically in outer space would not look nearly this good the ambient light in space There is no ambient light you have the harshest most direct Lighting you can possibly have because the only light that you're getting is from the Sun So anytime you're looking at like the dark side of any of the people here, you wouldn't really be able to see it You know a little bit of creative license. It just makes the shot a little bit more nice to look at Yes absolutely, to anyone who's ever like getting into visual effects And you don't know where to start literally go to Video Copilot dotnet slash tutorials and watch every video on the website Andrew Andrew's done something very special for Visual effects artists across the world that's sharing knowledge and techniques on how to do this stuff with your home computer What a positive wholesome message. This is a positive episode I thought we're gonna trash these movies. If you guys would love to check out Andrews work, of course he has YouTube channel Video Copilot But also Video Copilot net definitely go check it out If you guys like what you're seeing on this channel, please consider subscribing if you're not already You'll be notified of the next videos that come out and it helps us out in this whole game we call YouTube Mine, yeah What were you thinking man he was sitting right there the whole time
these guys gets better and better each new video. i love their energy and how they enjoy reviewing vfx
This was a pretty good watch. I liked how they broke down the “Contact” mirror scene. I’d like to see what they think of the less obvious and flashy CGI. Like the way David Fincher uses it. Mindhunter season 1 CGI