VFX Artists React to STAR WARS bad and Great CGi

Star Wars the original Star Wars it was before computers but they really executed those techniques on a really clever way all painted oh no way I thought I saw some ocean thing there it's nothing to explain how they did it Ren I'm your biological father hello there welcome back to another episode of VFX artists react today we're going to be talking about Star Wars the original Star Wars because those three movies totally redefined visual effects in the cinema it was before computers so much of this stuff is like analog technology that it's almost mysterious pure magic to most visual effects arts today so we're gonna be breaking down how they work I don't you see that wait have you seen the original Star Wars I have seen the original so I'm so excited for this episode you guys ready he belts on computers are super important visual effects but when they made the original Star Wars the computers they had at the time what they can pump out was that little wireframe rendering of the Death Star that's the limit that's the highest of computer imaging at the time so all the crazy compositing and work that you see all done film no computers only models in blue screen and compositing and mattes using actual chemical processes it's nuts we're gonna explain how they did it elegant civilized lightsabers careful with that they that's a weapon little hidden jump cut here yeah I wouldn't say it's hidden it's pretty apparent they were little skinny it is and the blade practically disappears so the lightsabers they did a couple of different effects techniques and they're doing lightsabers and Star Wars in the original early Star Wars a new hope the way they did the lightsaber so they actually have what have a stick in a lightsaber right now is covered with a retro-reflective material basically the same thing you'd see out like a safety vest like when you're out riding your bike late at night so if they shine a light from near the camera that stick will basically reflect the light right back towards camera and it kind of glows once you had that glowing stick the other artist needs to take the film project it onto a big cell sheet like they use for animation and trace out a little spot for the lightsaber to enhance the blade with another little light pass the thing is there's some shots where they couldn't have a stick on set in the lightsaber for example here where Luke is battling the little droid but you can really see a jump around yeah so the artist is literally guessing as to how long the sword is and where it sits in the hilt and that's the reason why and be jiggling up and down oh yeah source noting this shot has two other very high-level VFX happening at the same time there's a little droid ball flying around which is a stop-motion element and there's also stop-motion elements on the chess table at the same time oh the chess table isn't this shot this is probably where the lightsabers looked best in the whole movie the glow looks great the actual core white beam looks good mm-hmm the fight is so janky yeah if you watch them the raw footage like the fight looks so raw the funny thing is like the lightsabers are actually kind of fragile there's a clip from Return of the Jedi where Luke is going ham on Darth Vader with just the raw lightsaber and you go flying up it just broke on him yeah once I got to later episodes of Star Wars basically rotoscope artists were doing the lightsabre effects and its entirety they weren't relying on a retro-reflective material on set to give you a bit of a glow they actually cut out the lightsaber so that it's just see-through film for those scenes and then they actually shine a really bright light through that little slit to expose the film itself and that's what you get with the nice roll off of the glow is actually double exposing the already exposed film with something really bright but talking about how the lightsabers were made here and how they actually used exposing film to their advantage it's how they did a lot of the breakthrough scenes in Star Wars so the Death Star trench 1 in a new hope is kind of like the most amazing climactic action scene of any film that decade this is what brought people back to the movie theatres a dozen times for all the spaceships they actually made real physical models and they shot them against the blue screen that makes sense you just you know you key out the blue right but back then it was a complicated process to actually key out that blue and that process all begins with how film reacts to light so when you film something you have basically three colors that make up what you see red green and blue if you put different filters and from the lens you can see what your red channel your green channel and your blue channel are looking like for a blue screen shot if you just take that shot through a blue filter on it and then project that onto black-and-white film the parts that were blue will appear white the parts that weren't blue will appear black once you have your blue pass that's been printed to black and white film you can then go and do just the red Channel now red is on the opposite side of the spectrum as blue so anything that had some red exposure all that will show up in the red pass and the blue pass so when you combine the two you take this black-and-white piece of film and now you can use this to block light so when you're projecting things onto a piece of film to expose that you can now use that black and white mask to what you expose one thing in the windows for example or the background and another thing in the foreground we're so used to thinking of things as being stacked to these days in the computer you have your layers you can't work that way with film because once you expose something onto film you can't just expose something on top of where you just expose something you'll get a double exposure and so that's why you need these black and white pieces of film because they actually block light from going through that little mat will make it so only the part where the X Wing is is getting light a little X wing shape to silhouette is blocking any light from hitting where the X Wing element was already exposed so it's not stacked it's actually everything's basically cut out and having be perfectly aligned with itself working with film like this is such a complicated process because you had to know exactly how everything was gonna lie down in the final product before you even started filming any of that [Music] so they film these miniature physical models against a blue screen but how they moved these models is what made this special because they didn't move the model specifically they moved the camera using a very special motion controlled camera rig called the Dykstra flex using a super rudimentary computer system basically they would program in exactly how the camera would move they were able to do that over and over again instead of having a ship fly towards camera or away from camera they would inverse that process the camera would pull away from it or move towards it to simulate a ship moving towards or away from camera that allowed for not only the ship's actually move in correlation to the camera but also to stack multiple ships next to each other they would only film one ship at a time but in a shot like this they are able to have Darth Vader out in front with two TIE fighters flying behind him and they were able to do that because he had the exact same camera motion over and over and over so you can actually see the motion blur and that's actually captured on camera so they pioneered an idea for Star Wars called go motion where when the camera is moving frame by frame by frame along these shots of the models when it does the exposure it's actually moving at the same time to give you motion blur and by adding motion blur they say that motion blur was their secret weapon it was their special sauce that made all this stuff suddenly look good we did tell you guys a long long time ago in an episode far far away that we would do an episode around classic Star Wars we've got a couple special episodes coming out very soon around the Lord of the Rings in The Hobbit subscribe for that they're actually coming out for real this time I am so excited now let's take a look at a scene that combines all the things we've been talking about and cranks it up to 11 [Music] the thing about a real asteroid belt is that they're never this is like way too dense for an actual asteroid belt but it is what you're gonna see Star Wars is fantasy not sci-fi look at all these moving elements yeah a guy getting hit the hand plate we had a hand-drawn lightning look at that hand animated shadow oh yeah that's right all the shadows were hand-painted and now it's an actual miniature set as opposed to a miniature prop so we're flying a camera through the set and then grabbing the elements of the ships afterwards dude that looks so good yeah it does holy cow it's like there's like 80 different things going on in all these shots so there's foreground asteroids which are individually filmed as you mentioned actual real physical asteroid props and there's like a middle layer which is like all painted asteroids and there's a background layer and another background layer where they're doing the same thing or something just went in painted rocks and so there then comping all that on film [Music] this shot here in the TIE fighter clips it's winged remember for every element you have the color print of it you have the mat of it you have the inverse map of it and then of course you have your background so 25 elements times like five things needed for each element [Music] so one of the last big techniques they used for this film were matte paintings it's an old-school technique but they really executed those techniques on a really clever way so the scene when the emperor shows up in return of the jetty this shot right here wait those aren't real people that's not real wait okay so clearly the people moving or that's real the magic of something like this is that they're combining a painting with real footage where's the seam the front row of troopers and some of those officers they're real everybody else is fake they actually so it's a fake army it's a fake army in fact they have cutouts so that the front guys are real but then there's human shaped silhouettes in the painting so this is an example how cool it can be but let's look at a shot that's actually way more simple in scope but it's actually clearly illustrates how this works they're not gonna spend all that money to make that that set would be insane you don't need to do that all you need is a large piece of glass a talented artist what they're actually doing is they created a stage and Alec Guinness is actually just walking along a platform maybe three or four feet above the ground and they basically just painted into the distance underneath it's and there's a hole in the glass that is a perfect little cutout to have the footage be revealed or projected from behind now the quality of your matte paintings intelligent tastes how real things look and it's worth pointing out that Star Wars has some of the best matte painting artists in the world Death Star painted the trees and then radar dish all painted that landing platform all painted oh no way dat is a real model but everything else around it is painted this shot except for a little platform all painting how much does that painting go for right I don't know I would love to have that painting this shot all painting except for the 8080 that's how they get you is they add people walking around the side exactly how the emperor coming down off the platform with a little droids sliding around all those things trick your mind and say oh yeah this is a full thing is this a whole shebang before watch hath you guys want to watch a video the guy and that the mama suit falling over all like hold up what about the Yeti he was trying to walk in snow on two and a half foot stilts with his mask on he was 11 feet tall he just gave up on life alright so he explained a bunch of crazy techniques they've used so far in Star Wars let's watch it all come together in an amazing tour de force of visual effects spectacularity this video binoculars so what they did isn't it a stop-motion animation of the 8080 walking and then projected that onto a film screen and then took a video camera and recorded the film screen panning up and down to get the binocular look Wow alright super cool the only at 380 80 models the two little ones in the background are literally just cardboard cutouts no way but they match them perfectly the lighting is exactly the same the perspective is the same but they're a cardboard cutout the feet are hidden for where it makes contact with the ground oh dude making your job easier because when it comes to stop-motion you need to anchor your stop-motion model to the like the floor to be able to animate it so trying to show the feet where all the bolts and pins are it's be a huge pain this shard here is insane that seriously looks like a drone racing shot watch what happens here the camera flies underneath the legs the 8080 Wow by the way noticing that 8080 is walking through the snow and leaving tracks I just realized that dig goes how did okay sorry continued the animator has a trapdoor that he opens and he moves the 8080 and he can't brush or touch any of the snow around the feet because the footprints need to be actual real footprints made by the motions so he has to be very very careful next the camera flies under the legs 8080 so what they're doing is the motion controlled camera rig okay and then when it gets close to the 8080 they just they lift it up and I level up and take the model out [Music] I thought I saw some ocean thing there you saw it the the snow pops into place like something happened between takes their pop there it was a big nudge of snow up on the on the surface that wasn't there a frame before [Music] that explodes all the debris yeah that's another cool thing about how they do all the explosions is that they shoot them in very slow motion because the tiny little explosion is like this ah done we're have big explosions like so you're able to emulate that sort of motion by filming it really fast to make it slow-mo I loved how like those little embers are going through the air like that well that's because they actually filmed that for real going through the air yeah it's on a cable as a little zip line they're just recording it against a blue screen dang that that gave you like the best looking simulation possible if they just film that statically you wouldn't have the atmospherics flying through it yeah that wind directions correct oh dude look at that that way that was definitely stop motion because you can see the stutter eNOS is the brief glimpse to the 80s see the chicken Walker as they called it [Music] [Laughter] it was a great idea to have a whole like space battle not in space because he gives you like visuals to see in the background other than just like a star field yeah The Hoff scene is an incredible demonstration of all this hard work coming together and really like some old-school techniques like just basic Ray Harryhausen style stop-motion but then combined with like a very inventive approach to shooting all of it and combining it with live-action can you imagine being Mark Hamill and yeah we filmed this took a while it was hard work like to do some groundbreaking stuff hopefully it works and then you show up to the movie theater and you see this here's like so as always we ask you to please leave a comment below if there's a TV show or movie or even just a scene that you'd like us to break down and react to but if you'd like to have direct control over what we react to the best way to do that is to support us on patreon because every patron it's a vote and one of the things that we'll be reacting to so that's a way to have direct access to us and there's a couple of patrons we would like to thank right now thank you Jack O'Connell Bobby Hansel shoutouts Harris Reggie Patrick Phillip Oxford we're thinking about you Ellen Oh Martha not a Canadian spy skanky snack but Bryan in chosen thank you guys for supporting us you guys like what we do here well I consider supporting us it means the world to us and helps us do what we do we do have a little bit of merch left because today and tomorrow are like literally the last days you can place an order and still get it by Christmas this year's core digital that's I didn't hear you cornered you told that store corridor digital that store [Music] you

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 3,180,329

Rating: 4.9577026 out of 5

Keywords: VFX, CGI, vfx artists react, Star Wars, trilogy, a new hope, empire strikes back, return of the jedi, shot breakdown, hollywood, the mandalorian, baby yoda

Id: Lh1Tz3zwhFU

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 14 2019