We Fixed The Worst VFX Shot Ever

there's one shot that holds the crown for the worst visual effects shot of all time the rock from The Mummy Returns now whether that's actually the worst VFX shot of all time there maybe not but it sure is goofy looking now we had an overwhelming response from you guys asking us to fix the shot and you would finally have a free day in the studio so we can gather my VFX Bros or sit down or talk about and see if we can fix the Scorpion King this movie is another honest attempt at recreating the charm that Indiana Jones had I know we did it mommy was successful oh here we go all right guys pretty good so far it's okay so far but so far it looks good animations great they're using that Jurassic Park kind of limited lighting [Music] see that doesn't look bad the animation for the Scorpion itself is excellent whoever at hand animated this book and frickin killed it and also the Lighting's really solid like the scorpions body itself blends really well at the scene and like the Q's doll the flames going off and that effects lighting I'm sparking like that all looks really good and they have this close-up shot of the rocks face and I think there's a great discovery that happened right then wherever you realized the human face is way more difficult than just having CG stuff in the scene the expressions don't seem to kind of like sync up at any one particular point causing the face they look a little unnatural yeah like one half his face smiles the other his face is frowning right here happy Rock angry rocking that's the thing and it's like the lips like a just before the eyes adjust they think oh if that's what it seemed like a little bit everything just feels like it's not quite synced up he's too dry but I guess you know if you're a scorpion entombed for thousands of years like you'd probably be good little crusty you got mummy dust all over them let's just pretend that there's been eternal flames burning for thousands of years while he's been entombed he'd be pretty too sweaty I mean if you look at the faces of the other characters in the scene you can tell that there's this level of like specular detail on all of them it's like maybe it's either like a sharpness or the specularity on their skin is shinier but it looks a little like waxy and plasticky compared to everyone else in the scene and the thing is like everyone else in the scene has the same skin tones they're in the same lighting conditions so there was like really really good references for what his face should look like when he paused here you can see like the little inconsistencies in the face when we look at the rocks face it's just kind of like it's all like yeah super smooth like a like an amputee and then also just look at the lighting mismatch there - look how hot that light is you know it's not even reflecting off the face another big thing I noticed so there's a lot of gate flare from this fire it shines and reflects onto the film or onto your camera sensor and that's what's happening here we're seeing this yellow streak coming in off the side now the Scorpion King has been composited on top of that when technically he should be underneath that Flair is that Flair is something it's happening at the sensor and so he is part of the scene that flare would be on top of him so we could fix that as well and that make him look like is more part of the shot Sam what are you gonna fix in this shot what are you gonna do I am gonna use some cool tricks to add a little bit of Rumble into the shots and maybe give the guy a little more weight and then I'm going to do a little bit of like 2d relighting to make them blend with the scene and probably do a little pass to bring out some highlights hopefully that works Peter what do you got those flames are getting no respect in the sensor I'm gonna extrapolate them and add some bloom to the edges you know have some optical flares really get that light going some imperfections that sort of thing like a Gordon Ramsay of optical flares I like it what do you got that ancient door it's not ancient enough so I'm gonna make sure that ash is from all the lost souls are falling off the door when he interacts with it no how you gonna fix the face that's a good question that is the main offender it's just the rock smug right there is ps2 cinematic just snarling at ya I got a plan to fix that so before Jove it is I definitely mention that we actually have something pretty big at stake here and we have this VFX artist react series if we can't pull this shot off no one's gonna take us seriously in our videos anymore that's the end of the series right we could be digging our own graves with this episode the effects artists dig their own CG grace all right somebody hi gentlemen you each have your tasks for the day let's do it one two three scorpion one two three [Music] the original shot is like butter smooth yet it's this big lumbering creature bonking stuff so I felt like it could be use a little bit of camera shake you know on the face here we see this white fire down in the corner here and we look at his skin up in this area people's skin aren't that matted you know if you've been underground in the cave for years with your oily skin and you haven't washed your face and maybe it's the desert in your hot it's gonna reflect white so basically what I did there is it's very very subtle what I'm doing is I'm taking the footage and I'm just extracting everything until it's just like the near whites of the scene I'm isolating that I'm just bringing those tones out a little bit more and then to make it look a little more natural bring a little even further extra detail and I'm actually using noise as my alpha man just to kind of simulate like the roughness and pores of human skin and I think it helps because constancy kind of has a little bit of extra shine on it right now compared to the other characters in the scene this matches better it would apps on you know sometimes in the world you see 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half the price of other premium wireless earbuds so if you guys are interested head on over to buy rake on Comm slash corridor crew and you'll get 20% off your purchase that's pretty good a percent it's not bad not bad at all so as you know it's my task to do the face this might seem like an impossible task it's like am I going to rebuild the rock and CG am I going to go and like find a bunch of pictures and do photogrammetry and rebuild a face do I have a secret rock 3d model that's the way too much work and I only have like a day to do this so here's like when you guys saw our Tom Cruise be big I should be able to do the same technique you take a real Dwayne Johnson I'm gonna put him on a CG Scorpion King I don't think anyone's done that before so the thing with the deep leg is you need to get a bunch of source material up the face now the rock right now it does not look like the rock from The Mummy Returns that's 2001 rock but you know what I got a good idea The Scorpion King movie exists and that's just the rock as a scorpion king for the entire movie I spent like two hours grabbin through the movie I extracted every single time it was the rock space it's just the most authentic Scorpion King experience and source material you could ever hope for with these elements of the rock from the Scorpion King I should be able to replicate his look very very accurately theoretically I think this is gonna work really well would you guys like to see the thing this is actually a thing that I've been thinking about a lot too which is what if we start to use real faces on CG characters or you're even better yet what if we train the deep fake algorithm to learn a CG face and then put it on a real person what does that gonna look like there's some really twisted stuff you can do I think this is the first step in discovering that first I'm just gonna play the original for you guys I'm so excited dude there's no way to work like with all the fire light inside of his head flashing like that dude all right so that's original here we go that's weird it's really tamed all the expressions it was it was that one expression he was like ruin it his lips like dude like this so much of the shot still screams like early 2000s CGI like that plasticky skin look but changing that face and improving that face improved the entire shot as a whole pretty substantially once again we're fixing this shot and not redoing it but I think the little changes we've made will still make a big difference all right guys time to the big reveal take a hold on before we do the big reveal this wants to say I feel like I made the shot perfect let me just show all you guys some little all of it yeah I redid the whole shot man dude that's really good refocus we can just go with that one we don't I guess we don't have to show the other one one of the JJ's in this play isn't the fire in front of space those pawns idea all right I want to see the actual final Alex sounds pretty good Wow I think the shininess paid off a lot this is the forehead shine the face is definitely much better the chest shine your technique works boom like this looks great yeah man like that's this is a huge difference right here me gets close up to the camera we still struggle with some of the limitations of the technology and having to do in a day I'm not trying to make excuses but definitely like he's busting through the door here the camera shake is really nice and getting some like grounding that's not overdone the dust on contact with the door like helps connect them to the world a little bit more let's not discount Peters flare over the arm here without a wall of yeah it's one of the things that's so natural like in normal looking that once it's in there you just don't notice it at all but when it's not in there it makes it look like the rock super CG well we have now I definitely is an improvement well that was a fun day spent in the studio I'd love to hear your thoughts on the shot and actually if you think there's another visual effect shot out there that we could try fixing I'd love to try more of these and if you want to see what those look like please consider subscribing we got a bunch more monkey experiments to do but just got the motion capture suit back and we have some pretty cool plans with that have you ever want to do an obstacle course for the obstacle course exists only in the computer so in real life you're doing weird things but you can't see what you're doing until you're looking at the computer so maybe you haven't wanted to do that but you will after you see us do it yeah subscribe to corridor crew and enjoy the rest of your time [Laughter]

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 10,409,520

Rating: 4.8603401 out of 5

Keywords: VFX, CGI, vfx artists, vfx Artists Reasct, the scorpion king, the mummy returns, The Rock, ILM, experiment

Id: KH1V6CHO1Jk

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Now comes the awkward part where I remind everyone that there have been five movies in the Scorpion King franchise), not counting The Mummy Returns.

[u/mushroomwig]

I think it's hilarious that they pirated a copy of The Mummy Returns for this video

The.Mummy.Returns.2001.1080p.BluRay.x264.AC3-ETRG.mp4

[u/Viazon]

Whenever I remember films from my childhood, in my head, the effects were always amazing. I saw this at the cinema when it came out. Even then, I could tell that this was terrible special effects.

[u/BattleHall]

At least they didn't try to fix the best scene in Scorpion King Mummy Returns (whoops):

https://youtu.be/6nX0100wUB0?t=92

[u/dametupata]

Never understood why the original filmmakers didn't use their crappy cgi Rock for medium and long shots and then cut to the real Rock for close ups. Just to merge the two and hide some of the fakery.

[u/mtx]

It’s looks a lot better but something is still off about his face.

I really like their criticism about the old footage though. I have a hard time explaining what’s wrong with stuff like this but these guys came up with some interesting explanations.

[u/is-this-a-nick]

I love that they used "Mummy.Returns.2001.1080p.BluRay.x264.ACE3-ETRG.mp4" for making their youtube content :D

[u/acosmichippo]

"fix" is a bit of an overstatement.

[u/ExtendedDeadline]

People are being too critical of this one. I thought they did excellent work in a day. The deepfake approach was interesting.. I think they could have done more post-training to age his face a bit.