We Remade the STAR WARS Trench Run in 1 Day

i think we can recreate the famous trench run scene from a new hope in a day our idea is to do it as easily and casually as possible while still having it look better than the original movie you guys better be careful because disney might be coming after you there is nothing i like better than looking at old visual effects and imagining all the sweat blood and tears that went into doing those old visual effects and then flippantly and casually recreating the same visual effects in a day we've done it with tron we've done it with terminator 2 and now we're going to do it with star wars specifically the trench run because back in the day when they made this trench for unseen it was a lot of work because there weren't really any computer effects in fact the only computer effect in the original star wars a new hope is the wireframe of the death star when they're discussing death star plans i think we can recreate the famous trench run scene from a new hope in a day particularly because of the help of fenner here i'm fenner rockliffe i'm a compositor primarily worked as kind of a cgi generalist down here visiting the quarter crew this week arguably federer does more professional stuff than we do he's working in things like nuke he's working at vfx houses he's worked on some tv shows so with a little bit of this like professional mix in with like the road we should be able to bang out a pretty cool death star transform scene our idea is to do it as easily and casually as possible while still having it look better than the original movie well let's take a look at the original trench run and break it down just a little bit here and we'll pick out a little sequence to do okay here we go this is an amazing shot this could be probably one of the most amazing shots from the french run we should we should do this shot yeah i think we have to do this shot now one thing i'm noticing also is the lasers don't cast any light these bright beams of plasma energy are not illuminating the trench at all it would be really cool to see them fly down the trench and see that glow yeah get some of that interactive lighting maybe this is a good ending point okay so this explosion that we're looking at here you can see the blue spill on it very clearly what they're doing is they're filming a model and an explosion on the blue screen and then keying out the blue but it's not a perfect key by any means what would be cool is to see an explosion that doesn't have blue screen fringing or transparent smoke possibly even casting light on the trench around it i think a big part of it too will be matching the look of those cg renders to the original footage oh yeah making it look more filmic i think that's something we want to achieve so let's go from swooping into the trench to the first fly wing being blown up yeah let's just take some creative liberties one of us is responsible for an x-wing one's responsible for the wildling i'll do the next thing yeah sounds good i might handle the y wing there break all right before i do the trench run using modern visual effects techniques i'm going to simulate doing it the way they had to do it in 1977. i'm still going to do it in a 3d program just so i don't have actual models or a dijkstra flex which is the computer controlled arm but all the other steps will be authentic to how they had to do it when they wanted to do these shots they had to do it all with models and they had to do it camera passes so imagine i'm at ilm and the model shop has just delivered to me an awesome star wars trench my gaffing team my grip team went ahead and set up some lights and i have a nice point light there it is whoa it's so bright i also have a soft box which is this big rectangle here it's a little dark i'd have to physically move my light to be in the right spot but here i can just slide this virtual light but same idea so i'm dennis mirren i'm like well what shot do i want i want to get a shot looking down on an x-wing as it flies down the trench and i want to push into it and then rotate behind it and so i got my first keyframe here i typed in my code at the dexter flex and we have the camera follow along and swoop down and once again they couldn't do real-time playback because the computer controlled arm did not move in real time it was basically stop motion it moved take a picture move take a picture move take a picture so after you program your motion you can just hit play and watch things through it'd be like that's cool that's what i like so i'm going to try to just not look at the animation i'm just going to try to dial it in by hand and then you have to film it on film you don't get to look at it on a computer screen you have to wait for the shots to expose and develop so let's pretend i now have to wait until tomorrow okay it's tomorrow [Music] let's see how it looks pretty cool so now notice that i have like sharp edges in my animation right it's like mark and it kind of locks in cinema 4d i can just tell it to smooth out and average out these motions they didn't have that they had to like manually punch in every single position right click spline right click spline done time to get another shot send it off to the film lab to be exposed another day has passed my trench is complete so perhaps in parallel somebody else is working on the x-wings well next thing's not the same size of the trench they haven't been built to scale this exiting model can be huge so i'm going to kind of do it how they did just a little less math and a little more artistic eye but one thing that's worth mentioning is they have to film all their models on a blue screen they'd have to stick it on a blue stick like this so if i wanted to simulate this x-wing flying by me i'd have the x-wing hold still and the camera would swoop in the x-ray could fly by so if the model holds it over the background appears to move it makes it look like the model's moving all right so i made my animation time to see if my shot's cool pretty freaking janky now i need to go into my dope sheet in the curve editor and start working with my plots did i screw it up who knows the director came back with notes he's like you know the x-wing leaves the bottom of the frame i want you to push it back just a little bit so i'm adding some new points here hopefully it worked out let's get the shot set in the film lab [Music] okay moving a little fast tracker has more notes slow it down but it's already locked into the trench run shot we got boss you approved that earlier i got one second to make that swoop can't change it okay cool ready to go wrong now we need to set the lighting so they couldn't just copy and paste their lighting setup from the trench to their exit models they could take notes they could try to replicate it but you couldn't just copy and paste it you could just save your 3d scene and open it with new lighting i have a directional light coming from the left in the trench shot and i have a soft box above so now i need to recreate that for this x-wing softbox is easy enough let's just put that over the x-wing now what about like the daylight well here's the question does the x-wing dip into the shadow of the trench it does so that directional light needs to be blocked off i'm going to have to turn it off entirely then i'm going to emulate the bounce light hitting the side of the trench and eliminating the side of that the x-wing from the side of the trench that's all illuminated and there we go and i have one on the side is it too bright hard to say this is where you gotta bust out your light meters and like okay here it's giving me a read of this much light on the trench gave me a read of this much light does it look right who knows that's the thing you have to kind of just guess take my trench shot is what i have on one film wheel and then i have this x-wing on another thumbnail so now i need to ferocious it i need to composite it so back in the day you would use a series of different filters to eventually print a piece of film that's black and white the background the blue being black and everything that is what you want to say being white or the inverse of that depending on what stage you're doing we're going to use basically color keying let's see how they pair up not that bad honestly notice the lighting feels somewhat disconnected between the two and you'll notice the exact same look in the original trench run shots where the models kind of feel like they're lit a little bit differently in the background and that's because they're not in the background it's because they're just two separate things have been filmed at separate times wait wait wait i'm not done yet you got some lasers let's just do it like they did get a draw freaking laser boom classic star wars laser let's just see that one laser in action there it is this is how they did it granted i'm doing the steps on the computer to simulate how they did it but you have an idea now of the steps they had to go through but nellie showed you the old school way of doing things let me show you the new school way of doing things this is the part where i get to show you all the cool things that modern technology enables us to do so the very first thing that we have in advantage over the guys at ilm for 1977 is there's a whole bunch of people that love star wars now and have already made all the models for us in 3d so i just went online and i got next model we found uh just a rough death star trench chunk that fender then added bits of grebels of geometry to so here we have the death star trench and this is actually just a bunch of little chunks here that we've copied and pasted i took that and i made a material for it that's a mixed material and this gives me a lot of surface variation i've also added some little windows and that's really nice especially when things on motionboard you get nice little light streaks after i've done this texture adjustment i have my trench so now i want to animate some x-wings all i need to do is place an object in the scene screw it from one end to the other and attach the x-wings to that you have to wait a whole day you do not have to wait a whole day and in fact you can do your animations whenever you want oh you see those white tubes flying by those are lasers i built a particle emitter that shoots lasers in fact i can aim that particle emitter wherever i want and i can make multiple versions of it so i can have multiple laser guns shooting turrets everywhere and one of the really cool things about having your lasers be a part of the physical scene that you are working on is that those lasers will cast light onto your objects directional lighting gives everything volume and shape and helps you feel the physicality of it it looks pretty freaking rad check this out the x-wing that's in the top left corner of this frame that x-wing is casting a shadow on the side of the death star i am showing you that those x-wings are in the same world as this trench and i'm showing you the scale of the x-wings i'm showing you how fast they're moving and how close they are to the wall flex flex on ilm in 1977. hey guys it's me jake here in my fighter jet here to tell you about cord or digital.com that's right if you like how we create videos here we have an entire show called crew cuts with over 80 episodes of vlog style content of us doing things like this every single day there's also the greatest dungeons and dragons show that we made through the website subscribers called son of a dungeon it's dropping in september whoa gotta keep these upright gotta keep steering this x-wing we also have an entire show called functional filmmaking it's an expedition into how we create things and what our philosophy and mindset is when we go into creating content and guess what know as you get 15 off all merchandise we have an amazing system called producer points which allows you to put your subscription dollars into shows that we want to make everything we do on youtube it'll always be here but if you want more head on over to cordaddigital.com two months free you get if you sign up for a year that's right i said it like yoda and i'll say it again two months free you get when you sign up for a year what am i where am i am i [Music] am in a green screen right now [Music] i gotta get back to work there's a whole bunch more things that we can do once we are done with our 3d render so let's go take a look at what fender's up to and have him tell us all about what makes nuke so wonderful so i've been pumping out cool renders you've been pumping out cool renders you've been taking those renders into nuke and really dressing them up with a whole bunch of additional looks and effects yeah this runner just came out of blender cycles right out of blender it actually looks pretty janky it just kind of looks like a motion blur mask and there's not a lot of contrast going on so this is where i find that nuke is really helpful as i render with like a multi-channel exr and then i have multiple aovs that i can adjust and kind of dial in the look afterwards you have your kind of beauty layer here and then i have my like ambient occlusion and the other nice thing is too is we can just isolate out our emissive passes here so i've got all the kind of lights that are within the trench and all of the different lasers as well and this is really helpful because then i can kind of do some cool post effects on the standard stuff like glows and then get a little bit more in depth and start to add some kind of like distortion and heat effects coming off of it so it makes it more than just the basic like cylinder laser kind of particle system that we set up and then a big thing that we're adding that really kind of helps sell that filmic cinematic look is doing a bit of like a lens dirt setup so i've got a couple different textures here and we're basically using these and driving them by a keyed version of like the luminance here we get a little bit of kind of that like natural fall off that you'd see through a camera lens and then sometimes if it's bright enough you're going to pick up an actual little bit of texture kind of grime on the lens i also like to just always kind of kiss in some additional stuff for a shot like this like lens barreling as if we're kind of like pinging the kind of edges of our camera's lens add some vignette to kind of draw the viewer's eye to where we want it to go then a bit of healthy dose of chromatic aberration it helps kind of give that contrast which again pretty subtle i also added a little bit of off-screen flaring and i can find that like you know that's something if you're shooting practically you're going to get that right you're going to have you don't have to even think about it yeah it's just going to happen i've got like a little bit of a lot applied here to make it look more filmic and then just kind of a healthy dose of lens distortion on the bottom there just to kind of play up a little bit of that pseudo-anamorphic look to it once we've got our 235 crop on there you go from something that didn't look very cinematic before [Music] yeah that's a huge difference and now because you basically have this node tree you can theoretically just swap your input image sequence to a different image sequence and all this math and filters and functions that you build will all still flow through and you'll end up basically with all these effects applied to a new piece of footage yeah just by simply retargeting the very first code maybe this isn't the correct way to do this but when we're doing this in like a week and trying to turn around a bunch of stuff it's just kind of like what can we do quickly that's going to get us to the finish line cool well then we'll get to have a really cool side-by-side comparison of the original shots in the trench run our shots that we did in just a few days and maybe even a little sequence where you could see our shots cut into the movie to see how they fit stay tuned to see our cool renders all right we are joined by sam and brendan from so chrissy media you ever heard of shock warfare has like a bajillion views on youtube well these are the guys that made it also dean resin star wars ultra fan though you might have to fight christian for the title to see who the real ultra fan is well i mean just watch back the node trivia challenge he was there he lost uh terribly i want to show you guys a project that fenner and i have been working on i'm curious to see what you guys think all right final results oh yeah we just kind of walked in here we don't know what to expect so let's see how this goes i'm really curious here switch to targeting [Music] keep your eyes open for those spiders you guys better be careful because disney might be coming after you it looks incredible like it absolutely looks incredible the glow on those lens flares who do the compositing for this uh right here yeah who am i dude that lens player right on the top that is like the cherry the spice right yeah spice i like the lens distortion bulge yeah it's subtle but it really like makes it work you see the reflection of like the death star trench on the canopy whereas you don't have that in the models because it filmed separately i think the biggest difference we're noticing is the originals there's no interactive lighting like even some of the shots where the y wings are in the trench they're fully lit they're not actually having any of the shadow from the trench it's so much more dynamic than the original shot are there lights on here like other little emissive zones okay they actually have it in the real trench also it's a really nice textural effect to the trench it's bouncing this way you're right brandon noticed there's a it's also softbox right here shiny soft light down into the trench that's the reflection of it right there okay yeah it's obviously it's not visible to the camera but it is visible the reflections but you can notice how like the lasers actually reflect off of artsy's head oh yeah which is really nice sweet with the green flares flying by on them and take a look to my fender shots here total upgrade like the glow from the engines on the y-wings i've added in some lights there and they're just kind of like parented to the actual models of the y-wings there so you actually get them like kind of lighting up the trench as they're flying through the shadows there i like the little subtle camera jitter too making it feel like this camera is just flying down the trench oh that looks very hairy no it's a lot more dynamic you actually have some rotation happening in there i gotta say these shots are like high budget tv quality shots like i agree with you you know disney like they got a thousand artists working on it for months but like you guys whipped up in a week what could go on hbo oh yeah that's flashing i will say the motion looks pretty accurate to the original star wars movies because then they have those models on like just a line and yeah it was wiggling this is the shot where you're like all right now we need like houdini on top of all this it's one thing to build the model and make it look nice but then to build the internals of it have it actually destroy itself yeah a whole nother crazy process i think when you throw some explosives in a model and just roll the camera you blow it up it's so much harder to get that same quality with cgi and you know it is lighting up the trench behind it smoke is flying off of it those are things that you can't really do with models yeah did you say you guys were gonna remaster the whole thing though did we just remaster the entire trench now i feel like been a couple years since they remastered the whole thing you know we're due for another remaster for george mason so the next video we practically recreate the trench run actually that would be pretty cool we thought we haven't thought about it let us know in the comments below if you want to try to practically redo the trench front or there's another old movie effect that you want us to try to reapproach in just a few days using modern technology and considers consider subscribing

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 2,563,094

Keywords: VFX, CGi, visual effects, vfx makeover, react, star wars, ILM, shot breakdown, tutorial, blender, c4d, Nuke, how to, new, make, a new hope, george lucas, empire strikes back

Id: K3b_S_qtBgc

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Stanakin__Skywalker]

I mean, it's pretty cool, but it does not look better than the original.