VFX Artists React to THE PREQUELS Bad & Great CGi

music want to see some good VFX exploded before it touched it boom hello there hello that welcome to another episode of VFX artists react today the P equals oh boy what a time for Star Wars and George Lucas gave it his one last good hurrah and then got kind of depressed and sold the franchise to Disney you might be thing we're gonna be bashing on these movies because everyone loves to hate the prequels but here's the thing the prequels had some revolutionary visual effects shots and I want to see whether or not they still stack up today so let's look at some shots alright here we go now this is podracing this scene got me so hyped this was a sick scene yeah this looks good this is so good it's really good like the 3d rendering here is out of this world this is the same kid from jingle all the way I don't know I think it's the same kid okay I think I'm pretty sure it is I'm willing to bet you ten dollars it's Jamie it's Jamie dude they did projection mapping for or a lot of this pod racing scene it was like literally two guys did 70% of all the backgrounds for this entire scene Wow and they basically just took a lot of pictures of you know arches and stuff like that and they projected it on to 3d models and that allowed them to have very realistic looking environments that you're able to put the camera anywhere you want to another really cool thing about this is the motion blur this is a full physically accurate motion blur render and the reason you can tell is because the ground is blurred but the shadows are not blurred you see the moving and over like the bumps this one I got and they get motion blur from that motion but the shadows are technically moving at the same speed as the camera so there's no directional motion blur around the shadows whereas you're getting directional motion blur on the ground that they're on top of so it's such a great example of people achieving good looking motion blur in CG which is very hard to do dude that shot looks so good the Mirage they had the Mirage the Mirage effect is basically the heat of the ground gets hot enough that it actually starts kind of acting like a reflective mirror and it's such a hard thing to simulate you just gotta have be an artist about even now here's not a shade or you can just turn on from Mirage effect that looks so good yeah I do they spend a lot of time on the sequence that's for sure that isn't that is a crowd manipulation shot though you can kind of see it's a little like odd looking it's the same people copied and pasted exactly let's see if you can find the same costumes you got you got Road person with a belt and that kind of straight I've got duplicated whoa love these crash whoa that was I think that's all computer-generated like a bit crowing yeah it crumbles the father exploded before it touched it we go back boom how do you think they did that then do you think that was an actual filmed element of an explosion that was tracked in no I don't see trails god it looks so good though those pieces man ok that's the thing the motion of everything makes sense it hits that I start spinning that way then hits the ground and starts spinning the other way that's crazy okay welcome to the jar jar binks [Laughter] this is music want to see some good VFX did you expect us to react violently against the jar jar binks part of this episode guess what Jar Jar Binks is actually pretty well done as far as visual effects go Jar Jar Binks is kind of a master class for 1999 this was the first time you ever had a fully computer-generated character interacting with real actors having mannerisms they had motion capture for the first time and then they had to go and give him a Caribbean accent he's embarrassing yeah people haven't done a full CG main character before us so like how we're gonna do this guy well we have a costume why don't we just replace his head there's shots of the guy in the costume it's really strange looking I've never seen that before he's got like cool shades on I'm surprised how realistic his arms kind of look I think that covered up his eyes the actors didn't look at his eyes they looked at the mask I think you're absolutely right yeah imagine like Jar Jar Binks is up here in the actors like yeah how you doing like why are you looking at his neck Ian McGregor is doing a good job looking him in the eyes he's looking a little higher there yeah when you have a guy in a costume it's still human proportions like for example our forearms are made a certain size so that we can touch our shoulders if you want Jar Drive want key proportions you can't get that with a person in a costume the end of just having the same proportions as a regular human being is related a test can you tell which ones which no looking at the proportions of the arms now those look like real arms playing this is digital well like the movement is a much more cartoony in the second tape yeah there's like this Jar Jar Binks is just a straight up cartoon and it kind of represents George Lucas no longer taking the world seriously as far as like CG work goes though it was like so hard to do especially back in 1999 so you guys might think that all these effect shots require millions of dollars and huge teams advanced technicians but that's not always the case look at this beautiful scene look at those super intense water simulations of the waterfall these vehicles are super intense water simulations where the waterfalls you think those took huge computers many many months to calculate those incredible waterfalls I have a feeling that it's not the case but I'm gonna play along you I think there are simulations that took hundreds of hours guess what these are waterfalls that you could create at home because all they're doing for these waterfalls is pouring salt salt salt down a black screen that's so cool you're getting the realistic motion of water so because it's white it's actually making it look like it's just like the really turned up foam of a waterfall Matt yeah that's kind of visual effects is when it's creative negotiations person hears that idea of okay on the big screen in the theater it was rough look at these zooms wait are those are those digital zooms actually in the movie yeah okay watch this that's a CG parent check it out okay what's unloading CG pair right into her fork no no and then sucks a chunk off the pair of your mouth can you imagine trying to eat nothing they like will make it look good later like all right I mean look at that distortion through the actual vase yeah water there that's good some set designer decided to give everything buddy like glass plates and like glass vases and I'm sure that the FX coach is like oh my god they're dealing with green screen - yeah it's just green screen City in the back or blue screen whatever is probably blue screen look at this and you're gonna you're having a key that vase right there yeah that's rough dude you can see a hint of the blue in the vase so tough that's tough what a nightmare are there any more shots of these two hanging out like maybe in a field [Music] so this is like equivalent to like the Legolas elephant scene from Lord of the Rings frolicking in the field with the giant tick bugs you're in for so long that night dude like this physics he's he's standing on that thing this ball comes up right here Wow just I do remember thinking that was very wonky when I saw it for the first time it's still so Augie it's really look at the way he doesn't backflip off that thing you just like they just lived him up they rotate the blue-screen element he's literally standing on the front of it as it's rocking around like a bowl they look like they're filled with blood like giant ticks they do I guess I just eat a lot of grass all forward slings are out front but all of its weight in the back techne a thing to eat just be like but scooting across the field like a dog oh this is the Yoda fight of course it's the fire it's when Yoda was fighting Saruman it's very similar to the Gandalf fight to open eyes yeah so far the only thing that is real that we've seen so far is Saruman here his name that saw her leave when this happened in the theaters I was blown away yeah it was the coolest moment yeah of the entire movie for me Christopher Lee is he's just fighting the air he's doing a great job of it what a fantastic actor an interesting thing to note is that Yodas lightsaber casts light unto him but Christopher Lee's lightsaber doesn't cast any light onto him the reason you can see it on Yoda is because he's a 3d model and he has a 3d model lightsaber so they can cast light from that 3d model bytes they were on to the 3d model right there yeah yeah you can see it really well there but they had to be careful because they can't cast any light on Christopher Lee so they have to keep the light really subtle on Yoda so it doesn't stand out that Christopher Lee is just standing in blackness holding a red lightsaber lightsabers are done usually just by drawing it on the frame afterwards so the person is just fighting with a stick and then you can use something like After Effects or Photoshop or whatever you just draw basically a glowing laser and the laser is actually just a white strip with a colored glow on the edges but the thing is because it's something you just paint on afterwards there's no lighting actually affecting the environment technically a lightsaber super-bright it's bright white it's blowing out the camera but they should be like blinding everybody dude this was my favorite this is such a good fight Darth Maul is so sick favorite of them all of them all what a move what a tactical new this whole fight oh my god I nearly lost a man this whole fights so intense I feel like the opinion of this movie kind of like evolves over time people hate it people love that people hate it again people love it again whoa whoa whoa did you see that what look at that you see the dimming of that lightsaber oh yeah yeah yeah dude is that a masking issue is that like a king it's like what I don't I don't know what's happening right there really strange man I must just be a blending thing you just straight up holding like a toy lightsaber it looks like it's gotta be clip really that's so weird the the white level is brought down what if it's just like I think it is a color thing and they're just lowering the brightness of it but you can't lower something that's 8-bit cuz the date is not there it's been clipped so you just lower it to like a gray yeah it's definitely color grading thing we're seeing there on the background is the film them on a blue screen and you got like individual hairs and pulls of fabric and motion blur and all that kind of stuff and some guys sitting there being like screw it blur it smooth it send it out if you ever feel bad about your keying just know what this is a theatrical release right here now the thing is no one cared because there's a sick ass fight scene happening at the penultimate moment in the movie yeah oh and then the movie solo basically said that Darth Maul is still alive nothing like taking hard-earned story points and just sorry I'm supposed to just react to visual effects I'll keep it just the visual effects you know I should mention that one of the reasons were even reacting these prequels right now is because of the comments you guys left if you want us to react to certain VFX shots that you couldn't figure out how they're done or you think they're just mind blowing the awesome or whatever it is please leave a comment don't hesitate alright that's yeah back back back to the reacting so I'm never being a big fans full fine this sequence was awesome yeah I love the sequence and this is all computer-generated nothing in this shot right here is real the background might be model I'll bring it down bring it down boys move this right here oh that's cool this right here was nuts especially the first time sitting in theaters okay this looks like something out of the newest trilogy to be honest so every what I said earlier about the lightsaber is usually being painted on yeah the same goes for lasers in the movie they're lasers and lightsabers the exact same effect but this is 100% CG so they're able to have lights as part of the the lasers moving through the scene and so for the first time you see the environment lit up from the lasers flying through you see the soldiers getting lit up you see the bad guys getting lit up you see the silhouettes changing its lights move through it in the way the dust and dirt moves is extremely realistic check that out check that red light coming through the crowd there this is looted by the people in the foreground who haven't been hit by the light yet yeah this is awesome up to this point in terms of computer graphics nothing like this had ever been done because you didn't have full battlefield scenes like this they're 100% CG and you didn't have smoke that was 100% CG you didn't have atmosphere that's 1% CG so this is the first time all that came together in a shot and you're seeing lasers here in a way that you have never seen lasers before in cinema it is a bit jarring going from that awesome laser shot to this with a thoughtful Yoda did you know that they didn't build a single clone trooper helmet for this entire really every single helmet was fake the filmmakers at the time thought okay we can get away with doing this we don't have to build that and everyone reacted negatively did that because it you could feel that it wasn't tangible I mean the reason this stuff looks fake is just the lighting simulation isn't up to us yeah shadow from Yoda's hair on his head isn't quite there the hairs just kind of floating on his heads like no shadow the the subsurface scattering on his ears there's no grunge pass on the reflection on his chest plate there's no like yeah same for Yoda too like he just kind of seems like a toy here and the ambient light is very very flat that's something that I think most people don't really appreciate has been developed a lot over the last couple decades is rendering of light another thing that they did in these movies have these super chromed out spaceships they wanted to show off all the really cool reflections whoa he wasn't even tracked in look at the background to do the whole shots three times there is retiming artifacts there look at that right there look at the right side there that whatever that little black stick coming out like that panel is now if you go forwards a frame see how it there's double imaging and you go forwards the frame again and now it's back to a single image and you go forwards again double image so I think what's happening here is the guy falling is going too slow they need to read time it so he hits the ground faster but they didn't record it in slow motion so what they're basically doing is creating a morph for those extra frames that don't exist but you're getting artifacts because that arguably we're just catching it to something really scrutinizing whoa whoo whoa look at that guy you see inside of his head so obviously there's not a human head inside of that robot it's not a costume but now he's walking around the scene it looks pretty good it moves really nicely do you think they computer-generated c-3po here I don't think that's a 3d model it is not a 3d no no this wait right you know why because it looks so good do you know what they did he's a puppet and there's an actual person attached to the back of him operating him no just like I'm doing this but like the sticks are coming off of me and moving the guy in front of me yeah Wow that's a heart that's the way to do it and you can actually see in the final shot here they have to do a light wrap around him that fuzzy like bloomed out highlight around his shoulder is because there's a person occluding the background in that shot that they had to remove and then add them back into that shot so actually the whole background is probably a separately filmed clean plate what yeah it's not Star Wars these guys have been hard at work oh my god me Rena been cranking really hard on this have you ever wanted to see the Boston Dynamics robot to turn on the scientists well that's that's kind of what we did using motion capture technology fully CG characters we would love if you guys went and checked it out on youtube.com slash corridor digital we're very proud of it there's actually a core video on this channel that you can check out kind of detailing all the hard work we put into it and all the pain we suffered to get there you guys have any movies or TV shows that you're like well how do they do those V effects to type up a little comment also if you are not subscribed to de corredor crew channel well what the heck are you waiting for and here's a hint for what's gonna be in our next video I know you'll have to find out

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 5,374,082

Rating: 4.9049201 out of 5

Keywords: VFX Artists React, react, vfx breakdown, CGI, Star Wars, Prequels, Attack of the clones, revenge of the sith, The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar Binks

Id: xbAV4dO8gvM

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SWPrequelFan81566]

For any snide they throw, please cut them a break. These people still have enormous respect for the PT's VFX, and in all honesty all the things they say are 100% backed up by experience. This helped inform my own take on the CGI of the PT (which, for the record, is mixed), but please let's not throw salt at them for having to express the occasional anti-Prequel line here and there.

TL;DR: These people know more about CGI than Plinkett. If they are negative at points, respect 'em. At least they're not being intellectually dishonest.

[u/VaccumBoots]

I thought they were being very fair actually. They really kept their biases to themselves. It's interesting to hear about it from people who know what they're talking about. It's interesting that according to them, the Anakin and Padme scene where she eats the pear was "a disaster", but then the scene of the clones vs droids "looks like something from the new trilogy to be honest" - when they're from the same movie. I appreciate the nuance.