VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 43

oh it's so good it's really well done we got in contact with the vfx supervisor at scanline vfx you have the normal challenges of these gigantic creatures that you know need to convey like this massive scale fun fact scanlan vfx does more than stick shots i gotta know i gotta know is the stick real this episode is sponsored by skillshare stick around to the end to see how you can get 30 off your annual membership hey welcome back to another episode of visual effects artists react we're going to be joined by a special guest today we're going to talk about some crazy cg i'm sure a chunk of you have seen godzilla versus king kong most importantly we are going to get to the bottom of this puddle about the stick wait i'm a little out of the loop what's this stick so when you did the uh episode of freddie on the snyder cut there's a scene of steppenwolf walking through a puddle oh oh yeah that's a 3d polo right there oh yeah do you think people would be impressed by the cg character we've been talking about that but no we were talking about the stick that he steps on it and whether or not it's cg wow cool that's really interesting very excited very important sam it's the most important shot out of the entire four-hour movie okay sweet quick clarification about that we accidentally attributed that shot to wetta digital they did a lot of work on that movie but the actual company who did that sequence was scanline vfx and we got in contact with the vfx supervisor at that company and he's going to give us the real answer fun fact scanline vfx does more than stick shots they worked on a lot of godzilla versus king kong and many other films you've seen so i don't want to undermine them too much by just saying they dealt with this one stick look if that stick is cg they deserve an oscar best actor stick mr sticky oh if she's not dead you tell her to come down here you tell her to come down here walk right up to me and kiss me on them death becomes her it's about these two women that are basically immortal and bruce willis batman used to do a lot of comedy and was really good wait that's bruce willis yeah it is so ilm now they just did t2 or they're working on jurassic park and this comes out and this was like a very groundbreaking vfx movie i just want you to do one thing hell you brought this on yourself that was a sweet stunt that was a great water like what a wire pole yeah yeah today really shaped up and hurt did you ever notice how some days can start out well here it is oh what how did they do that just suddenly it's so good it's really well done that that's that's a well designed shot it's so well done how do you think they did this shot my guess is that that body is an animatronic body and they did two separate takes one with her actually going up into the frame and then leaving frame and they they merge those two shots together i think that's 100 true especially if you look at the motion of her hair it looks a little strange yeah it's a little funny looking yep nope you guys are exactly correct so it's actually a puppet let's pop it on wires and there's no head and they're sticking a blue screen element of goldie hahn as she does the action onto that shot the puppet actually just has a funnel for a neck and so they just pour the water into that then it comes out the stomach a very doable and approachable shot if you can match the lighting and you can match the you know film stock contrast it's a really doable shot yeah this doesn't require a huge amount of cgi skills this requires a lot of effort on the pre side of things you know the pre-production actually getting the model side of things a good camera crew a good onset visual effects supervisor to make sure the lighting matches up so in this shot meryl streep is just standing there with her head there her entire body's on a blue screen and this element here with her head back like that that's another element they've filmed separately and you can even see when she throws her head yeah you see like the the rough haircuts on the mat it's really basic effects and there's a little bit of like funkiness going on on the neck where an artist is going in there and basically like stretching out imagery to get the like the neck texture to like line up there's definitely some rendered skin there though where her neck actually lines up with her shoulders that's all cg islam this is like their first skin shader they have a bit where literally her whole head gets lifted up off of her neck and it's like her neck stretches yeah look at that neck look at that neck you also coke dude islam apparently uh this was the precursor to a lot of the shaders they developed for jurassic park it was literally their first skin shader it holds up really well like surprisingly so it's there's not a lot of visual effects from this era that truly hold up like this does time and time again the examples where we say this one holds up it's usually an ilm shot yeah ilm was like a beam masters through the 80s and 90s and it's only been in like the 2000s and later that other vfx warehouses started really matching their skills vfx warehouses [Laughter] i don't know what i said vfx warehouses yeah no it's okay it's a renaissance usually called houses not warehouses i know but you know whatever i've always called them warehouses because maybe it's because we work in a warehouse we're working in a warehouse we're a vfx warehouse any building is a warehouse i wish to ply my wares for yeah any house with whales there's a warehouse hey guys well brian thank you for uh taking the time and your busy schedule to virtually sit down with us and uh chat a little about visual effects here as you probably know we were gushing about the scene with steppenwolf walking through a puddle and stepping on a stick [Laughter] and we accidentally misattributed it to wedda when we should have been attributing that scene to stan line like who no who knows right like it's not like burned into the film you know do you know how long it took for the post-production side of that scene to take scarf scheduled for doing everything for zach's version was seven months about a month of it was de-archiving the old show and trying to resurrect it we were done with the beach torture before we were done with the project so i'd say five months is a good guess for about how long we spent on the beach torture okay that's pretty incredible like how fast you guys turned that around yeah the schedule for that you know was pretty crazy and it was pretty exhausting to do and like as we were finishing i was joking like with all my supervisors i'm like yo good now that we're almost done let's never do this again we're all arguing here over whether or not that stick was real and whether or not that puddle was real because it's like he's a cg character interacting with what looks to be real so obviously that can't be real you can fake it to a certain degree by having like boots walking through the water but what ends up happening i feel 99 of the time is that vfx studios end up just replacing all of it and doing their own simulations but this looks so real you don't even think twice about it the puddle is real although we did add some additional interactivity to it at one point in time there was a version of the puddle shot where we did a whole replacement but zach he liked the stride that rich the stuntman had done so the final version that's in zach's movie it's a combination of real puddle and cg puddle as well so at some point you're literally like fading between the cg render and the real footage as opposed to just replacing the entire puddle to keep a level consistency yeah yeah wow that's crazy i'm betting that the stick is real okay i gotta know i gotta know is the stick real sticks in the photography oh it is real it is real it's too good to be fake i mean it makes sense with the giant foot though like you can't just have a small foot you'd have to replace the whole foot no you simulate the larger foot with the initial ripple but the thing is it's not like huge stomps that are going to create godzilla waves you can still mask that off but like some of the mud comes up out of the puddle too i love the wet sand on that sequence and i constantly was talking about it with the effects supervisors so i think it's funny that we're talking about it you guys at scanline good job good job with your wet sand shout out for the wet sand physics i love the wet snack yes exactly please consider subscribing we'll never do that again all right the boat battle was rad this is such a master class in cg animation so many physics simulations happening all over the place the amount of water interaction in physics i believe that was a thing that scanline was kind of known for or like really helped them i guess kind of get their reputation in the industry i'd say that's a true statement like one of the things that scanline had going forward early on was their proprietary fluid dynamics solver called flowline and especially at the time you know that was pretty early on for doing the gigantic ocean simulation the company itself has a strong background in doing these large-scale simulations and destruction work this shot's so cool i love how they hold it and they stay locked and you get breathing right there and then goes back under i'd seen this scene in the trailer but i didn't realize that they're gonna have a whole bit where like he's literally stuck to the underside of the ship upside down in the water it adds like an extra sense of tension here what would you say was the biggest challenge about that entire sequence you know you have the normal challenges of these gigantic creatures that you know need to convey like this massive scale but the arena that they're fighting is also dynamic you know because like the ships aren't fixed they're on water that they can be on top of or blow they both end up on the carrier and like you know whether or not the carrier could support their weight you know like we but it also it's see-sawing and it's you know creating ripples that go out and gigantic splashes and then aerated mist in the air and they're both at that point they're both wet so they are also dripping water and you know at that scale you have to consider what are drips and what is missed at the same time that they're fighting they're destroying the aircraft carrier and the planes that are on top of it i love the detail how when they're fighting the actual ship rocks backwards as they lean on it is somebody hand animating the boat first and then basically taking motion capture and hand animation for kong and just kind of lining them up by hand and then starting to work physics simulations around that or is the boat itself like physically driven we would start off actually and just keyframe out animation for the creatures and the boat together and then we would do simulations around that we wouldn't drive the boat with buoyancy stimulation and stuff like that because now if the boat is being simulated from buoyant forces now that's going to affect the animations of godzilla and king kong as well causing you to have to go back and change those keyframes on those yeah it makes sense to kind of just to keep a level of consistency there yeah get stuck in a feedback loop yeah exactly we did the big three-way fight at the end between kong and godzilla and mecca in the big shot where becca grabs godzilla and drags along ground i think that we destroyed like four dozen buildings and all the buildings we built like with construction history so that they had you know concrete and metals glass and we put office furniture or apartment furniture inside any of the buildings where you would see it when the monsters go in the furniture comes out yeah i love how each shot is long enough where you can actually like take in what's happening i think like as you know a director slash editor and even a visual effects artist it allows you to really demonstrate your work a lot better because you're not going to catch a large scale simulation like this if your shot's only like a second or two long you have to watch it for like 10 seconds to like see the effect unfold now when you have a scene and you have skyscrapers collapsing in the ground getting torn up and office furniture getting blown out of the rooms in the in the skyscrapers how do you get all of these pieces to actually exist in one scene together i imagine at a certain point you are limited physically by how much memory a computer can have to hold all these different objects as much stuff that you can separate out you do like if the buildings aren't interacting with each other you don't have to simulate them together right like this little cluster buildings is one thing this other one another thing but to your point yes memory management's like a big problem whether it's all of these collapsing buildings you know you have kong with all these like brazilian hairs with debris on him and being clever about scene management and memory management it is the only way to get through it at this day and age we are reaching a point where there's incredibly complicated things happening on screen and there's so many different systems built to emulate things from real life you know water and fire and smoke and muscles and fur and all these kind of things in your opinion where does that line or that goal of trying to achieve photo realism diverge with the goal of trying to make a very cool painterly dynamic image where do you find like that split what exists for you i think the answer that question lies within the character of the film there's definitely other films and other directors that i've worked with who you know you've shown something like this is what it would look like they're like you know that like that's cool that that's what it would be but like i find that very boring this should be much more epic yeah you know and even pixar does that too it's like there's a mix between making something look real and also making it look good because sometimes real doesn't look good you know i certainly have my opinions about things and stuff but like like ultimately the work that i do and the work that our teams do it's in service of the filmmaker and the film that they're trying to make fascinating thank you for uh answering that question and uh thank you for taking some time at the end of your long work day to spend some time with us on this show and answer some questions about visual effects it's really cool to be able to talk to the the expert and the people behind the work you know versus us just kind of guessing on the couch here and saying that the wrong company did the work yes kudos to you and everybody else that's scanline for the amazing work you guys have been doing and we've talked about many of the different pieces you guys have worked on on this show and we will continue to do more so in the future all right well thank you guys all right so long brian thank you see you all right bye hey everyone we have really exciting news for the first time in over a year we have posted another great short film on the corridor channel this one's special though because it has a lot to do with things you've seen on this show things like virtual production unreal engine motion capture we've combined them all into our second full short done in unreal engine it's called the cut scene and you can watch it right now on the corridor channel i think it turned out really well and it represents over a year of trial and error and research and hard work to try and figure out this new form of filmmaking go check it out on the corridor channel right now we got links everywhere hidden all right let's do this what movies from the 80s and early 90s still hold up today with their visual effects let us know in the comments do you like to learn of course you do you're watching this channel we teach you all about things like visual effects stunts animation and a whole bunch of other stuff in between because we are always learning all the time as well and one of the ways that we learn is by doing tutorials and classes online now if you are looking to get into that there is a site that is specifically focused for teaching so there's no ads no algorithms nothing like that to worry about that place is skillshare you might think that here sits on a couch a man who does crazy visual effects with crazy physics simulations but what about making a pizza well skillshare has me covered with an excellent pizza making class so whether you're trying to just get better at something for a hobby like your guitar playing kind of sucks and you want to learn some new chords or you are trying to improve your skills for your career and you want to go out there and land a gig doing editing or illustration and so on and so forth well skillshare has you covered it's not the matrix yet you can't just download kung fu but you can get pretty close just takes watching a couple of videos and some practice so head over to skillshare.com to get started the link is in the description below first thousand people to click will get 30 off their annual membership and if you are already a member you can even use that link to get 30 off your next annual membership there so it works for anybody whether you are a new user or returning user all right back to the episode thanks again to brian for coming on the show i really want to have more guests on the show to kind of talk about the actual behind-the-scenes knowledge that goes into making these movies so subscribe for more guests yeah yeah the end theme

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,881,969

Keywords: King Kong, Godzilla, Kong v. Godzilla, Snyder Cut, Zack Snyder, Justice League, VFX Artists React, Behind the Scenes, Breakdown, Behind The Scenes

Id: hADX55r0jwE

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021

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