VFX Artists React to THE BOYS Bad & Great CGi

graphic warning ahead oh that last shot we are joined today by the overall visual effects supervisor for the boys it's so fun to see you guys reaction it's a whale exploding from a boat hitting it this was very very complicated to pull off for so many reasons you guys don't even know thanks to raycon for sponsoring this episode stick around in the end to see how you can save 15 off your order hey everybody welcome back to another episode of visual effects artists react we are joined today by a very special guest stephen fleet now stefan is the overall visual effects supervisor for the boys on amazon and it's a total honor and privilege to have you on the show thanks so much for joining us uh thank you guys i mean to me it's an honor it's honored to be with you guys thank you so much for having me stefan tell us a little bit more about what you do i figure out how we're going to shoot it technically and creatively and i'm there on set work with my team on set work with the directors everybody come back and i work with like seven to ten visual effects companies at any given time to get the show done it's definitely the best thing i've ever worked on in my life it's that golden triangle great people to work with great content and uh you know the money is not bad i gotta give everybody a big warning here if you haven't watched the boys spoil the heck out of it so you should get on it it's a great show are we going right into the whale literally one of the most notorious sequences from season two is that like a full cg water full cg that is a full cg water full cg environment um ilm london did all of this work wow really we really try and bury the cg as much as possible on the show so it's not noticeable as much as you can in this day and age and what's great is camera movement helps a lot with that it's like a magic trick like we're doing over look over here you know so the way the camera movement the splashes of water on the lens all this visual noise adds to a better shot the only thing that's not cg is part of chase crawford the deep so what happened was he was shot on a blue screen outdoors in a garage i insisted that we shoot it outdoors okay because i think if you're doing a daylight exterior even if you're doing green screen and trying to put place together you should really try and shoot outside because trying to get studio lights to recreate the sun it's just it's it's tough man it turns out light bulbs are not as bright as fusion exactly yeah exactly yeah there you go yeah you'll get some pushback sometimes because you start thinking about the logistics of how visual effects works in tv what's great about it is you can do a lot of indoors and they call that rain cover so all of a sudden if it's raining and they don't know what to shoot that day they're like oh let's go shoot some driving comps on the thing or whatever you know and we don't do driving comps on the show by the way that's a mandate for me and eric yeah it's all real driving all right i was about to say i was like i i look like real driving to me i think green screen and blue screen is way overrated and it's like you're gonna end up probably rotoing some of the green screen stuff out anyway back when i was an artist we would joke that like you know green screen is a great place holder for roto but especially with some of the stuff we get back where they would you know take the green screen and like fold it up like out of the back of the truck and just like roll it out and you're just like ugh try yeah so for the for the actual explosion here though like yeah it's a whale exploding from a boat hitting it i know so this is what's so great about this show if i were on most other shows we probably would have had like a tennis ball for the whale but no we built they built a whale set like they built a full-on whale set once they hit it and the boat goes into it in that profile shot that's the real set oh really yeah we added some blood and we added some water spray but that's actually doubles on a special rig that our special effects team who's awesome they pulled the boat in the pre-existing hole and had 150 gallons of fake blood there's gopros that we painted out on it we shot like it's all these different angles and stuff yeah yeah that shot right there really sells the real so the profile one and the one behind it are both real even the mouth opening up like that real yeah the mouth it was a it was an animatronic whale the tail and the mouth could move they did build this practical whale set to work as an exterior and an interior so when you see the stuff inside the whale it's the same set we did minimal visual effects work to to cover up a little add a little bit more wetness we made some of those organs pump i was about to say that that heart but a lot of that especially like all the blood on them all the guts around them that's all real man like our team you know our makeup guys and our costume guys are out there just dumping blood on our cast and poor jack who plays huey um it's a kind of a running joke that we just cover him in blood like all the time sometimes it's so important for the actors and the camera and everything to experience it it's just it's hard to explain it's like a different feeling oh [ __ ] diabolical hey listen if you have someone that you think you should be on the show leave a comment down below and we'll do our best to try to get them on the show uh ma'am your nose oh that last shot oh this is like oh it's she's still there she's still squirting out blood so fun to see you guys reaction the special effects team we developed this way back in season one when we blew up translucent they have what we call the blood lollipop and they'll bring a stick out and i have them place it right where the head was with an explosive that goes in all directions and they do a blood element for me on location they built a cg head and a brain and then they did a shatter on all of them so we have those elements every blood thing was a simulation and it's kind of sometimes you throw them out there and see what sticks you take five or six of them and stack them together to sort of dial up and down mist versus goop we also created what we call like the the necklace which is that meaty flap that comes oh the necklace [Laughter] we spent a lot of time in r d research and development on this one to come up with what we thought was a really cool impactful head explosion i was tipped off early that in the later episode like we're going to do a bunch more of it so my pitch to the visual effects companies the company called rocket science was let's spend the time here on this because i'm gonna get you guys a lot of this down the line so you put all of that work into that first headshot so that this scene could happen you have five minutes to make your openings i i love this shot because it takes that split moment of like yeah you get actual reaction time that's a great example of why special effects is really important because that's real we blended that in with the [Applause] it cg keeps going and going and going one of the key ingredients here i feel for these head shots are the fact that you do keep just like a couple frames of the original plate of their head splitting apart and i can see it it's only just like a couple frames but i can see it and how them two are literally just like standing in the middle of it going huh this is strange what an odd tuesday this is a great this is one of my um proudest accomplishments of season two from a supervision standpoint the thing about production especially even a big show like the boys you've got a time limit we had a limited amount of time in this space we knew we were gonna have to go fast you have a lot of people it gets very complicated really fast the way you got to plan it is you always you plan your your plan a your plan b then you're like c d e and f because things are going to go wrong and you're going to have to start like you know shooting from the hip if you will so i knew that the first couple booms or what i'm going to call hero or the most important visual effect shots they're going to hold the longest and anytime you hold on something for a longer period of time and visual effects it's got to look real you got to spend more time on set to make sure you get what you need but again way back in that first episode we pretty much figured out the the magnitude like how how far it's going to explode the amount of blood the necklace and all that stuff so they had a template basically and so what you see is a linear progression and we spent the most time on these first two shots and then as the day went we had less and less time i was like all right it's time to shoot from the hip but i had a plan i love coming to set prepared with ideas and backup ideas that's my favorite shot in the scene because we had no time to do it didn't have time to do plates or green screen all that stuff and like how do we get this done so i was like okay if we get her up against that flat wall and really just compose the one shot and have her duck down and keep on the wall for just enough frames to get a clean plate out of it we can roto her and build the head into it as one shot so there's only one plate here we didn't have time to do the blood lollipop or any of that stuff so this is just something giving you one shot this is like this is all you get is all material you get make something happen right but i knew you know i was there and they were cool enough to respect me and you know like say hey how do we do this the arterial squirt that was like the the button the little the cherry on top i i did that little squirt one time on the lord of the rings video like six years ago see there you go my favorite part about that shot though is like as she hits the ground her necklace as you called it like flaps yeah yeah like flapping someone on social media called it the head wedding which i thought was brilliant head wedding is great [Music] nick you asked me a hard question he asked me why people should subscribe to this channel and i think people should subscribe if they like watching the videos and want to see them on a regular basis so if you're not subscribed and you enjoy the videos please consider doing so so there's one more shot i want to look at from the boys and again graphic warning ahead if the exploding heads wasn't enough for you but you'll see what i mean holy [Music] when i saw this the first time i was just like i couldn't believe it this was very very complicated to pull off for so many reasons you guys don't even know we did not have time to film this scene when we were shooting this episode so we came back way later in toronto in november of 2019 to film this scene on what ended up being the coldest day in history in november in toronto it was something like negative seven degrees celsius and it had snowed the day before so what you're also seeing in addition to all these wonderful visual effects is a complete replacement of environments wow to get rid of snow uh pretty much breath removal yeah really everyone's breathing i've never even thought about this and cross my mind is a thing that one effects artists might have to do yep bless the bg talent and actors for this scene that had to stand out there pretending like they weren't freezing to death [Applause] so when he lands that's a typical example of how we do landing so it's digi double into real uh anthony's kind of got his uh shtick down for jumping up and down now we've developed that over the years but his cape flows down behind him so that had to have been a digital cape yeah yeah we do digital cape a lot on this show um because it helps with the performance and the blending of it so the eye lasers like part of me is like oh this is like the intro to the effects like it's the lightsaber tutorial are you guys elevating beyond that here or is it just one of those simple things like you know this is all it needs what we try and do with super powers especially super powers that exist in other properties what we really try to do is work off camera properties and a lot of shots we really interact with the lenses and the lens flaring as realistically as possible using optical flares uh that plug-in oh yeah thank you andrew kramer hey what's up andrew kramer here and then we spend a little bit of extra time trying to get the eyes to look a little more subsurfacy like it's underneath the eye not just topical but it's very important when it's light effects from me to have that relationship with human skin and and the direction of light that's it's really important to try and get that this one shot of him starting to swipe to people it's a lock off we added the camera shaking post it's it's plate work he's on a green screen and then we had our extras run we did that plate then we had 12 stunt people go out there and do pratfalls like falling like they're getting lasered and we moved them all over to the left so if you look over to the left you've actually got stunt people that then turn into digital people that if you frame through it or maybe a little too still actually right and then you get the cg blood that covers them up quickly so you don't see that much cg and then you think of things you can put on top so we made the sign and we cut through the top of it because one of the things with homelanders lasers is always how it affects the environment it's easy to say okay he's going to cut someone in half but then what about everything behind them yeah so the top shots in a sense were easier to figure out because we knew we were far away enough that the cg would hold up we have kind of a rule on the show where if they're this big we can go cg but if they're medium or closer we really try and avoid cg people as much as possible and then these are we had all of our extras lying in the ground and do a plate for us covered in blood and then we did matte painting work on top of it these shots were tough to pull off actually um and what ended up really kind of being the kiss for these was that little embers that fly in front of them is a inherent lack of movement to map paintings and it's difficult to get the motion in there so you try and add little flame pockets of flame and embers and things like that it was like this crowd shot's insane you're like i had to paint out their breath yes we did [Music] oh hey sorry i didn't hear you there thanks to today's sponsor raycon so i actually use these whenever i'm riding on a onewheel like commuting to work you know it takes an hour to get here so these are great for that because i don't have any wires along my neck to get caught in my backpack or whatever and they isolate the sound of the wind going across my ears that is critical raycon earbuds started about half the price of any other premium wireless earbuds on the market they sound just as amazing as other top audio brands you might know they give you six hours of play time they have seamless bluetooth pairing along with more bass and a more compact design for a comfortable noise isolating fit recons make a great holiday gift because it's something that they can use every day for work or play at home or on the go now is the time to get the best prices of the year on raycons but hurry because this offer is available only for a limited amount of time click the link in the description or go to byracon.com corridor crew to see how you can save 15 off of your order that is byracon.com corridor crew links in the description check it out i like them and i think you will too seven thank you so much for joining us on the show i want to shout out your instagram channel it's actually really interesting you have a lot of good behind the scenes photos on there among other things so guys go check out uh stefan steffenfleet on instagram we'll have a link down in the description below feel free to shoot him some questions if you want to maybe maybe no not sure just if i don't get to them right away just uh understand that i get a few but yes i would love it if you guys could um i uh i try and put up really cool content as much as i can for whatever i'm working on but are you telling me that once season three begins production we might see some sneak peeks on your instagram maybe i can't promise that uh maybe is enough i'll take it well thanks so much for being on the show thanks guys thank you very much

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 3,578,563

Keywords: vfx artists react, VFX, CGI, visual effects, shot breakdown, movies, the boys, amazon, exploding head, whale scene, Karl urban

Id: jYOpn1yJTKo

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020