Wren from Corridor gives VFX advice

visual effects look so much more real when you are able to combine it with with real life elements you know like being able to do a real explosion and then comp in fake explosions around it they suddenly look way more real because the real explosion is carrying so much weight if you spend any amount of time online then you more than likely have already seen a video by corridor digital because their videos tend to get shared like crazy on social media but basically they're a youtube channel uh that creates short films with a surprisingly high production value um so they're typically related to like video games so they'll do like a short film called gta but in real life um and basically their films are always different they're always unique and they're there's always a lot of challenges related to the visual effects so i'm always interested in like how they're able to like produce like rapidly produce these high budget you know short films um so the guy behind most of these visual effects is this guy called ren that's his name called ren um who basically he he started making visual effects like tests and experiments in his bedroom but by learning from a whole bunch of tutorials he was able to eventually get a job at corridor digital and for the last several years has been making all of their visual effects in their short films um and he's now basically like a professional problem solver like how to how to achieve a specific effect on like a shoestring budget on a tight deadline um which is really he knows a lot about visual effects so uh so i sat down with him for an hour and we talked about like how he got started in visual effects um his advice for those that are looking to get into it today like where should they start how should they learn um as well as tips on like how to make a low budget short film look high budget so his tips on that um and as well as that he gave me a tour of his office of corridor digital in uh in los angeles which is very cool but before we get to that a quick message from our sister company and sponsor of this video polygon whom corridor digital actually used in their latest video they did a self-driving cars video and they used our road textures which turned out very nicely so polygon offers a library of high quality textures and materials so things like photo scan grounds wood marble tiles thousands and thousands right um and they're all expertly crafted uh with 3d artists in mind um and with the new blender add-on that we've just released um you basically can get a complete material in blender in just a couple of quick clicks which is very cool so discover the difference that a high quality texture can make to your next render by signing up for a free account at polygon and downloading some of our free textures there and now on to the studio tour [Music] all right this is our cordon digital studio check it out we got a carbon fiber logo who has that we do nice yeah so this is where we all work we try to work at least most of the time sometimes it's a little distracting to have people throwing cards or shooting arrows this is a video game that has never worked nico apparently bought this for like 200 bucks he's like oh yeah it totally works i've never once seen it work in five years so nice we recently had a card throwing expert come by and teach us how to throw cards and he left us with these foam boards to continue practicing but this one we're just keeping as a trophy because all of these that he did he was throwing him from up there on the banister across the room to the wall right here just like no we have a vlog channel we put our new video every other day on the sam and eco channel and the guys who work on that work right here so they do all the shooting and all the editing while everyone else kind of just you know is on camera whether we're doing something with work related to the quarter channel or you know just antics like throwing cards at a wall yeah you know and so they'll shoot it all they'll edit it all they they like to uh have their corner here right and of course there's uh nerf guns for any time someone comes by and went into battle you gotta be prepared this is nico's desk he doesn't really use it that much he kind of mostly works in the back room on a laptop this is my workstation so this is where i do all like the rendering and stuff i've got a computer here with four gtx 1080 cards in it what because i use i use octane render i'm sorry i do not use blender is there many late nights spent at these desks sometimes not as much anymore we've gotten a lot better at being able to manage our our time effectively so we're not having to do all-nighters one time so i was doing a video called mario skate and we were leading up to the release of it and i was going to be gone for an entire week so i had to get this thing done before i left and so i finished that video with four all-nighters in a row i think i got maybe about five or six hours of sleep over the course of five days whoa it was brutal i pretty much spent the entire next week sleeping yeah yeah you can't continue that much longer yeah that was that was a hard video [Music] so yeah this is the back room we do all of our meetings and stuff in here it's kind of just a quiet getaway so sam and nico like to lock themselves in here sometimes when you know it's all crazy out there especially with it being such an open space they they like to come back here to to either just focus or or have a meaning so if we go this way we got our minecraft room so we actually painted these walls for a video we did about four years ago called superheroes versus gaming heroes and it opens with this minecraft character like literally just toiling away at a wall so we painted this for it we wanted to do it practically and we've left it there ever since so now we just have this generic minecraft wall we should talk about the guns yes so here in america we like our guns all of these guns are completely fake we've used them in a video at some point or another uh it's it's so we've just kind of accumulated them over the years so we did a thing with ea called the division it was a big video game that was released and we did like a full-on 40-minute film for it and so we needed to get a whole bunch of guns for that film and so we've just kind of had them laying around ever since then and some of our largest videos have been you know gun battle-based you know stuff like uh battlefield yeah the battlefield franchise yeah yeah so they're all airsoft guns meaning that they fire uh like fake bbs essentially so none of them are real right and most of them actually don't even work anymore they're all broken um holy crap right yeah they they have heft to them they're actually you know most of them are made out of metal they feel heavy they feel like real guns so what's great for using uh bb guns like this is that you can fill them with the gas that fires the bb but yeah so like the magazine here you can fill it with this gas which will fire the bbs but it'll also make this chamber here like blow back like this which is great when you're doing a short film using fake guns because you're going to put a fake muzzle flash over it anyway so having this like fly back like this helps add to the realism of like that's an actual real gun being fired back here we got props any sort of props you might want we got we got nerf guns we got dead bodies we got remote controlled cars we got helmets of every variety we got armor we got all kinds of glasses wigs uh fake blood and that's pretty much our studio we don't really spend too much time back here unless we're starting to you know work on a new project the workshop is right there i like spending time in there anytime we need to build new props or anything that you know we'd rather just not buy or we can perhaps repurpose we're going there we got you know classic workshop tools which we want to check out [Music] so we've been in this specific studio studio four for about four and a half years now coming up on five right yeah so we've been in here since 2013 yeah and of course corridor has been around since 2010 yeah so wow where are you before that what was the offices before that the offices before this were actually in siemens apartment which was like literally on the other side of this wall right here what yeah so they were working out of their apartment i worked out of their apartment for a year and a half or so and then this place opened up and it's like well let's just get it they don't still live here so yeah so sam recently moved out but nico still is there really yeah so he's the last one him and his wife ivy wow yeah no way and over here over here we have our fan art wall basically our address is publicly available you can find it online and people have been sending us artwork of us of random things letters and whatnot and so every time we get a new piece of art we just kind of throw it on the wall like this one's particularly cool it's us etched in like laser engraved into wood yeah it's pretty neat yeah is it like would that be done with a like a printer yeah like a cnc laser sort of printer wow that's really cool [Music] wren hi uh when you go to a party someone asks you what do you do what do you normally tell them it depends what kind of party uh usually i say youtuber because i make videos for youtube and that's the easiest way to say it i guess and it usually is enough to spark conversation like oh really you make videos on youtube how do you make money it's like oh yeah this this line of reasoning again uh people still don't realize you can make money on youtube it's weird but yeah uh and beyond that i just say i'm a visual effects artist right yeah at corridor digital at corridor yeah yeah okay so explain um well first of all your backstory what were you always interested in effects or creative arts i always had a flare for the creative but like very technical creative stuff as visual effects is and i never i never realized that vfx was the way i wanted to go until i started dabbling in it and actually starting to make my own little experiments using visual effects and after effects and stuff like that that was when i realized oh yeah this is what i want to do but before that i had already been doing it i just didn't realize that's what i was doing i was just using like a you know off-the-shelf video editor using a camera that my dad had and just doing things like layering different layers of video tracks and cropping it in a certain way so you can like do the cloning effect all right yeah cool people on screen at the same time yeah um that was and yeah i mean i i wasn't one when growing up like watching films like one day i'm going to be a filmmaker right i want to learn how to do that it's like that was never really my thing i enjoyed movies who didn't and yeah i don't know huh is yeah do you remember what your first uh first short was about that cloning effect or yeah this is so bad i don't even like want to look at it ever again it's funny uh basically i just put a a camera on my desk and i just i i was in my bedroom and i just filmed me standing there and then i filmed me standing behind me and going boo and scaring me and then i went running off i was so proud of that not gonna lie i was i was so proud of that video yeah because i thought this was like this is changing the world and it's like this is the most basic of basic video edits and how old were you then i was 18. okay right and you so what did you do straight after school after high school so after high school i went to college i was getting a degree in mechanical engineering and i finished it i got the degree i went through all of college through all the heartache of studying and taking math classes and all that stuff to pretty much two months before graduating realized i don't want to be an engineer i want to make videos for youtube so at that point i might as well just finish the the degree so i did but immediately right after graduating started focusing on trying to make you know short films put them on youtube hopefully they get views and slowly but surely i started getting enough of a following that sam nico here at corridor took notice of me and we eventually ended up meeting up and have been working together ever since no way so you had your own channel at the start yeah okay in fact my own channel has like 180 000 subscribers that's decent it's pretty good i'm really proud of that i mean i haven't uploaded pretty much anything to it in years uh i upload like maybe one or two videos a year to that channel yeah so but it's still mine you know it's still like i'm it's still the the youtube channel that belongs to me i can upload anything i want to it yeah i just don't because it's it's better for me to upload stuff to the corridor and sam and eco channels so do you remember which video it was that got their attention and you got in contact with that yeah it was a it was a skyrim time lapse video okay like skyrim had just come out and i spent probably i think about 95 hours in a single week playing this game and by the end of that week i was like what am i doing with my life oh god i need to do something and i remember this mods for the game were just starting to come out so i was able to sell like beauty mods and i using command controls like the console commands i was able to uh slow down time or slow down the movement of the camera and stuff like that and i just i started doing like weird camera moves and assembled this huge time lapse video and that was like one of the first videos of mine that like really like just got a lot of views in a short amount of time yeah and nico from corridor saw and he was like wow that was really cool and yeah and and what what happened he uh he emailed you and well i mean i emailed them like i was the one trying to get in contact with them uh because they were the hot shots at the time so yeah i just i eventually ended up moving here to los angeles and i was just trying to do freelance and work where were you before i was in portland oregon yeah so north of here yeah yeah about a thousand miles or so yeah yeah yeah that's where i went to school uh that's where i where i consider myself to be from and but now i live here in la yeah so yeah so i pretty much just packed up everything i had into my car drove down to l.a realized once i got here i didn't have any plan i was like oh god what do i do i slept in the whole foods parking lot the first night i got here before getting no way yeah really and this is so i'm actually partnered with full screen uh you know the mcn company that partners youtube channels and whatnot so i was partnering with them and at the time they only had like 10 employees so they let me just crash on their couch until i found an apartment really yeah it was really great nice that's cool yeah so i i pretty much just worked on my own doing freelance stuff for a few months before uh finally working with sam and nico they yeah nico asked me he's like hey do you want to shoot behind the scenes content for us and i was like yes when do i start he's like great um in a couple weeks would that be fun i was like sure i'll be there like no hesitation was like yeah that's exactly what i would like to do do you think there's an opportunity for visual effects artists out there that are capable to start their own successful channel five years ago i would say yes today i you know it hurts me to say this but no because i don't want i don't want to like i don't want to put a damper on someone's enthusiasm if you want to do it absolutely go for it yeah but it's it's really hard to kind of break through the noise in today's age of like youtube um you know trying to make a name for yourself uh when you have none it's it's not that it can't be done it's just harder to do than it was five years ago and especially for making short form content you know one to two minutes long because you know you spent a whole month working on it because as a vfx artist you go by frames you don't go by seconds or minutes you go by the number of frames in a shot and so if you spend you know a day working on 73 frames in a shot and the next day working on a 100 frames for a shot a month can easily go by before it totals up to like a couple minutes worth of content and and with youtube prioritizing content that is longer form uh more frequent uploads that sort of content kind of goes away and that's kind of why you're actually starting to see a lot of vfx channels or channels that have a lot of vfx in them are starting to not really upload as much anymore because there's not as much monetary incentive which is really really unfortunate that's my favorite kind of content it's like a good solid one to two minute short film on youtube it's digestible you're like okay that was fun to watch and you move on with your life maybe share it with your friends but people don't really do it anymore because you know there's only so far you can do something without any return before you're just like i'm done wasting thousands of dollars yeah right right hmm so back in the day it was easier to make money yeah yeah youtube changed their whole algorithm on how they how they divvy out ad revenue and it's it's harder these days to do it it's still possible we certainly still do it but we're one of you know just a small handful of channels that still do it yeah yeah hmm interesting yeah yeah so i guess a lot of people want to know what the relationship between coral digital and freddie is oh yeah because freddy's the one that's so yeah freddy freddy and brandon were the the guys to start it all really they they weren't the ones to start youtube channels doing weekly content and stuff like that but they were the first ones to make serialized short films with high production value you know they got a reputation for being the vfx guys or the gun guys for instance but really they focus on more than just putting visual effects and they had good cinematography they had good choreography they had good editing they had good sound design they had all the whole package that you would normally see in in more professional situations like tv shows or movies yeah but they did it on like you know a fraction of a fraction of the same budget yeah right they were able to do it for pretty much for free other than their time and cost of the equipment that they owned yeah and what was the question oh what what's this relationship to chris so yeah so they they started it all you know they were a huge inspiration for me when i started uh and then same thing for sam and nico they all lived together they worked in the same studio and so they freddie brandon started making videos and sam and i were like hey actually you know what you guys are onto something we're going to try that too and so they started putting out their own youtube videos and they yeah so back in the day they were the only two youtube channels who are able to put out quality content visual quality content you know ever meanwhile everyone else was just you know recording with a handycam of themselves or you know random sketches with their friends where you know the the writing might be really good but the camera angles might not be solid the editing might be kind of wonky visual quality of the image itself might be lackluster right so they work together eventually freddie and brandon ended up splitting there isn't any bad blood between them or anything like that brandon actually works next door we're pretty good friends with him and yeah freddie wanted to do more long-form content brandon want to make games so they're like all right this is a this is a time to kind of go our separate ways yeah so freddie has the rocket jump channel and they still put out videos they still work on a long form shows like on hulu they had a hulu show they just came out with dimension 404 another hulu show of course they had video game high school for several years whereas corridor we we stayed focused on making corridor videos you know um you know the short films and yeah so i mean we're all still friends anytime we see each other we hang out and have fun yeah uh but yeah i mean does that answer the question yeah it's like yeah i mean we're friends we we don't really work together anymore uh i mean brandon and sam and nico work together still because they have their gaming channel that they work on but right yeah the node yeah node exactly what do they do they just record videos playing games yeah you know the pride and joy of youtube these days is video game videos you know just watching us play play a video game and it's fun it's not really my cup of tea watching that sort of content but i i understand it you know like i get why people like it because they're they're able to hang out it's not about the game it's about the people playing the game right so it's more for like the viewers to be able to hang out with those people while like sitting on a couch with your friends playing a game yeah that's right well it's their turn to play yeah that's right yeah so it's interesting that that uh that whole i don't know what you call like a content strategy uh it it's hard to know whether or not you can be a success in that because it's largely based on your personality yeah and uh you know you see i mean everybody wants to be the next gaming youtuber um and very few will you know i mean very few will actually be the thing that they want to be you got to have the right gumption the right motivation right that was that was a depressing thing to say uh i mean anyone can can do it but it's way harder to actually do it than just as evident by the number of people actually doing it versus the people who want to do it right yes yeah i mean i couldn't do it i don't think i have the right personality to be an on-screen or sorry i don't i don't think i have the right sort of personalities to do gaming videos and have people watch that i'm i think i'm a little too nerdy for that sort of thing not that nerdy is a bad thing but like i i'd probably get too obsessed with like random details that no one cares about except for me i'm like dude did you see the battery in this video game [Laughter] right yeah i don't know huh where do you think that that um that comes from the the motivation to because you taught yourself um um after effects yeah what other programs you use uh 3ds max and of course tons of plugins for both so like for compositing i use after effects for editing premiere pro and for 3d sort of generated stuff that's all 3ds max for me right yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] yes posting this on a blender heavily blended channel i looked into using blender way back in the day but the user interface just confused me way too much and so i was like honestly the main reason why i ended up choosing 3ds max is because that was exactly the program that sam and nico were using right and so when i ended up working with them i was able to get help from them like any time i had a problem it's like i don't know how to get past this before i would spend hours scouring the internet you know making forum posts asking for help all that sort of thing but when you have an expert sitting behind you who can answer your question in less than 20 seconds it's really helpful so i ended up kind of getting more and more entrenched in using 3ds max and within that i used plug-ins like fume effects rayfire in the last couple years i've been using a rendering program called octane which i'm in love with i think it's great yeah have you tried any others no not really honestly i kind of i didn't really know how to do 3d rendering before even using octane i so that was your first sort of it was it was kind of like my second my first introduction was using a plugin called element 3d by video copilot which is just a plugin inside of after effects and i mean it doesn't do nearly as much as what a dedicated 3d program can do but you can import 3d models and set up lighting track it into a shot it was enough for me to kind of like dip my toes and what it's like doing 3d rendering and kind of just understanding the entire theory behind like rendered images and especially like passes you know you diffuse past specular pass all that sort of stuff what different types of maps are it kind of taught me the foundation of that just by using it in element 3d so right yeah eventually i got some points like okay i want to be able to render this stuff on my own and i started trying to use mental ray i tried using v-ray and i just i didn't i didn't get it at all like the whole like texture thing in in 3ds max was confusing but recently in the last few years they went to a node-based texture the map editor the texture the yeah the map editor yeah and it's so it's all node-based and that makes so much more sense to me that suddenly things started clicking i started getting a lot better at being able to render stuff i feel like i'm still learning i don't consider myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination but yeah it's slowly but surely i'm getting there yeah how did you um yeah how did you learn was it tutorials tutorials man yeah just i i'm a firm believer that you could learn anything online yeah like if there's something you want to learn more about there's probably a whole youtube series on how to learn that one thing and if not beyond that there's you know articles written articles of how to do this stuff um i'm a believer that you can learn anything online but there's there's like two different categories of things that you can learn right there's the theory and then there's the technical side of things um i'm of i firmly believe that technical stuff you have to teach yourself you know using how to use a program uh fumbling your way through all the user interface and all that stuff you gotta learn that through experience you can't be taught that you can have someone walk through it you can have someone answer questions for you when you get stuck but the only way you learn is by doing it yourself and and making mistakes yourself struggling through it and then persevering and then finally succeeding with the effect you're trying to make that's how you learn but the the theory side of things that's something that needs to be taught you can learn so much but you can learn bad habits without realizing it you know it's like oh this is how it works for me so that's just how i've always done it but then you have a professional comes in and is like uh maybe gives a lecture on like you know film theory of like how how colors work and all that stuff that's the sort of thing that you actually need help being taught and learned uh by reading and absorbing rather than teaching yourself because you could easily teach yourself the wrong thing right yeah that's true yeah there's a there's some artists like i don't know it's almost like some people are against tutorials and then others like only use tutorials but they're like oh i never use a tutorial and i think well you're missing out i mean i i can kind of understand that reasoning because the tutorial can sometimes lead to you just making carbon copies of what the tutorial yeah is and that's that's i used to get people sending me their demo reels and i when i can recognize a tutorial in your demo reel i'm automatically clicking i'm like nope don't like copying a tutorial and doing it is great i highly recommend doing it but it's not something to share you know i mean you can share it to a little on your facebook and like you can share with your friends and if you're proud of it sure go ahead and share it it's not that big of a deal but when you get to a point where you're actually like looking for work and you want to have respect if they recognize a tutorial in that demo reel they're going to be like all that your demo reel has showed me is that you know how to follow the steps and instructions of someone else you haven't shown me that you know how to figure out something from scratch on your own yeah so but the other side of the problem is that if you only just know how to do stuff that you've taught yourself just through experience then you may be missing out on certain features of of the program you might be missing out on certain tips and tricks because professionals of all kinds they come up with their own tips and tricks for how to do certain things and when they share that that is valuable information that you should you should definitely take any chance you get yeah um you know it could speed up your workflow and i think overall people accept that they're they're willing to accept help they're willing to watch this tutorial here and there i don't really watch tutorials that much anymore because the programs i use i have a good enough grasp on them that i can probably figure out what i need to do without using a tutorial but anytime i'm booting up a new program i've never touched before the first thing i do is i watch a few tutorials i just spend half an hour i just watch a few videos just to kind of get like okay what do these buttons do now i know what those buttons do what are these options and and settings do and you kind of get a good grip on where to start your experimenting i don't expect that to take me from beginning to end on on using something but it's enough i always use tutorials on starting absolutely yeah or if or if someone has a tutorial on how to do something cool and new on like a new effect or something i didn't know how to do before i'm like oh yeah how did you do that i'll just kind of watch the tutorial okay i think i know how to do it now yeah uh i don't really follow it hand in hand like i used to back in the day right yeah yeah yeah i think it's important to have that balance of of like i'm gonna follow this tutorial strictly so that i can learn the workflow of like right yeah the effects like i i really want to do the the blender tutorial you just finished the whole series for the anvil i think i feel like that's a good beginning to end process of of getting my hands wet with blender yeah i'm like okay yeah i might do that we'll see it's hard to like spare time for for learning new programs anymore yeah so uh yeah talking about the the visual effects okay so what's the workflow of corridor digital like from an idea for a short film because that's what i've always been impressed with is the like the rapid production of these these things so that's that's the hardest part is coming up with ideas for videos because anyone can come up with an idea that has a ton of vfx in it and it's like that's not the hard part the hard part is picking and choosing your fights meaning where do we put the vfx shots because every shot can't be a vfx shot otherwise you're going to spend two months working on this video and even if it does get 10 million views it's not going to pay for two months worth of time for five people you know even if they're paying minimum wage that still adds up to thousands and thousands of dollars that a youtube video even with 10 million views isn't really going to make back yeah yeah so it's all about trying to find your moments where is a big moment so if you actually go look through most of the chord or videos there's usually three big moments in each one um most most of the shots don't have any vfx and it'll kind of lead up to this big reveal where there's this big vfx shot like this guy crumbling made out of stone he crumbles to the ground it's like this big painting shot and it's like that's the shot that you can spend a couple days working on because you only have maybe five or ten shots in the entire video so over time you just start kind of learning what effects you can do quickly what effects take more time and you and you learn to kind of design your short film around that you know you don't have a cg character in every single shot if you do have a cg character he's in maybe a couple of the shots not often yeah yeah we don't always follow that very well sometimes we'll do a video where every shots of vfx shot like a couple years ago i worked on a video called mario skate where's essentially me dressed up as luigi riding an electric skateboard through the city of los angeles just along streets and whatnot we filmed it at 60 frames per second on a gopro on one of those gopro gimbals it was actually brand new at the time not many people had these gimbals now they're everywhere right so yeah it was a really cool concept and i threw tons of vfx at that video um and it was at 60 frames per second which is two and a half times longer the typical length of a normal video so even though the time is the same the number of frames is 250 percent bigger and trying to motion track fish side gopro footage is it was a challenge on top of putting just pretty much every single shot was a vfx shot i spent five straight weeks working on that video and at the end of it it was like when it came time to like really like crunching i it was like a week and a half of working probably 14 hour days every single day and then the final four or five days it was just nothing all-nighters every single day i was sleeping in here oh my god really like here yeah like in the room down below us i would i would literally just go in there lay down on the couch get an hour nap and wake back up go grab a red bull and then keep at it oh that's bruce this is like i knew the number of shots i had left to do and i knew the amount of time i had left to do them in yeah is just not a favorable condition oh my goodness but fortunately i had an entire week off after that point because i was going on vacation which is why i was like cranking to do this that's why i was cranking to get it done because i was going on vacation and it had to go up while i was gone is there a strict like deadline process here [Applause] yes and no so because of the nature of youtube you're your own boss you can upload whenever you want and a lot of our viewers don't really realize that's not really the case for us because we have to be strict on ourselves otherwise a video might take three weeks and then suddenly four weeks to finish then you start getting the habit of you know spending three or four weeks or getting into the habit of delaying a video to take more time right and the margins on youtube videos are very small so you have to be really strict with how much time and money you spend on each video so the more time you spend on it is more money and so you have to be really strict we cannot spend more than five days we're doing all the vfx for this entire video so you try to be as fast as you can but you get to a point where we're like alright we start having we you have to start cutting corners you have to start figuring okay what can we get by that the youtube viewer isn't gonna care about is that you know you start lowering your standards i guess you know this shot there's some things i'm not quite happy with it but you got it 90 of the way there and the final 10 takes just as much time as the other 90 percent just to really polish it make it look good and we try to do that as much as we can but sometimes it's like now the viewer's not going to care that that feather isn't quite as nice on that dust element you know simple stuff like that yeah um and then sometimes we'll just straight up not do the effect shots like this shot we intended to have this cool thing in the shot but we don't have time to do that shot anymore so it's just gonna be that oh right absolutely fake shot because it was gonna be a bonus to it you know it didn't the shot was able to convey the information and and push the story along without that the vfx element so at the end of the day it's not necessary it would have been nice to have it but yeah yeah so that's that's how we do we like we try to focus on having like two three maybe four different big vfx shots that we can put a lot of effort into and then everything else is just just edited footage put together so that way we can turn it around really fast because the more vfx shots you have the longer it's going to take for instance recently we did a a playerunknown battlegrounds video which is a popular video game right now we did a whole short film based on that and it had 40 vfx shots granted most of them were things like muzzle flashes and bullet hits and stuff like that but you know at the end of the day 40 shots is a large number to do when it's just like you and a couple other people trying to get it done in a few days yeah right especially at a especially when trying to do it at a standard of quality that you know our audience has come to expect right yeah so it's a trade-off yeah so i want to talk about your your sort of um something that i think is really important to your success is that yeah like you mentioned sort of offhanded like yeah taught myself you know after effects you know whatever um were there any any factors that you think contribute because some people just don't they don't do that right they feel like for example what's your opinion on college for art degrees for art i think it's good okay you know art is very subjective and it it helps being taught subjective things like what makes this painting a good painting you know what what separates these splats of paint dots on it on a page versus these splats of paint dots on a page why is this thing worth two hundred thousand dollars and this thing gets thrown in the trash it's all subjective opinion and but at there's also a good amount of objective quality to that you know and there's a lot of guidance so if you're going to school for an art degree or for a film degree that there's a lot of value there but if you're going to school for like uh learning how to do technical things like after effects or a 3d program college might not be the best place for that there are technical schools that maybe are a good fit like a friend of mine named connor he went to school at what's the name of the big uh vfx school here in la uh i can't think of the name but like any number of big vf like norman right norman school of vfx yeah you know you that is a very famous school for teaching people how to use programs which is great you know i i just from my point of view because that's my experience i taught everything myself because you learned by experience i don't i don't think it's necessary right it may be good i'm not saying it's bad if you want to do that you want to get better by going to a school and learning from professionals and you know cranking through it and going through the coursework that's what you want to do i think that's okay i just don't think it's necessary but then again i'm also outside of the realm of the industry you know it's very different you know with the industry you got to take those steps you got to get the degree before they even consider hiring you yeah but if you're doing freelance let's say your goal is to just do freelance visual effects you take on a project here and there and you work on it the only thing they care about is your demo reel they don't care about where you went to school they don't care about how much you know they just want to know about what you can do for them and they can discern that by looking at your demo reel like oh yeah he knows how to do smoke simulations obviously he knows how to composite fairly well sure he'll be good enough for this job hire him yeah right uh oh he's 16 and has been doing this since he was nine years old apparently we can't hire him because he's not old enough to be hired for this job like right you know stuff like that i went to college but i got a degree in engineering which is pretty much the exact opposite of an art degree but i don't think i'd be able to do what i do now without that degree really because it taught me how to work hard and it taught me how to learn hmm which is is weird it's like i mean engineering in and of itself is a degree in problem solving yeah and and learning it's like i literally got a degree in how to learn because there's all this stuff that i learned that i don't know anymore but i learned it at some point i used to know how to do vector calculus i couldn't for the life of me do vector calculus now but at some point i was able to and the the work required to learn that and actually like get through the whole process of being able to do that and then turn around and do it for the next class and then do it for the next semester over and over again yeah it kind of instills in you this ability to kind of like push through um you know challenges and work around problems and kind of really figure out and vfx is is honestly a perfect application of that sort of thinking because vfx at its core is all about problem solving you have this shot your problem is you need to put this this car in the shot and you don't have a car to film you have to be able to make it from scratch and cg what are the steps involved and you're just like all right step one track the shot step two get a model a car step three tracking another shot step four uh render it out you know it's like there's all these steps and it's yeah so you can easily learn that on your own but for me i i do not regret in the least getting an engineering degree even though i don't use the diploma at all that's really unique i think yeah but i mean the same could be said for any degree like all it takes is just working hard it could be a really hard job for all i care it's like being able to learn how to work hard and problem solve are really really important skills i think any person doing any work should have yeah it's good that they taught that and you could say a lot of people today they say that that's the reason that college isn't good um because of the fact that it doesn't teach you problem solving and grit and all that other stuff i remember having a class where my my professor kind of went up to the front of the class and was like 80 of what you learn in college you will forget the moment you leave because it's like if you don't use it you lose it yeah you know like oh i used to know spanish but i don't speak spanish anymore so i don't know it in it at all anymore right yeah sort of thing i didn't i was never that good in spanish i took high school spanish and i thought i was pretty good at it from that right yeah but i haven't but i haven't spoken spanish really at all since then so i barely know it you know it's the same thing for you know anything really you stop using it you lose it over time and that's the same with pretty much every class i learned in college i know like the overarching like concepts here and there some it's surprising some of the things that do stick with you versus what doesn't um but at the end of the day what you end up taking away from something like that is how did i get there yeah what did i take away from that it's the same thing with a tutorial you watch a tutorial about how to do gosh what what's an after effects tutorial that i can use as an example uh i'm just going to say something simple muzzle flashes okay the simplest most basic and common after effects tutorial out there how to do a muzzle flash and you watch the tutorial it's not about doing the muzzle flash it's about all the steps to get you to that point it's about the buttons you press the tools you use that's what the tutorial is about it's this tutorial might be about muzzle flashes on on the surface level but really it's about using the pen tool to mask out solids to use as environmental glow on the objects around where the muzzle flash is going to light up you know that's what the tutorial is about is teaching you how to use the masking tool how to use a certain effect like the levels effect in after effects that's what those tutorials are actually about but everyone thinks that they're about making a muzzle flash or putting a hole in the wall or tracking a 3d camera right it's not about the end product it's about the the process the steps to get you there yeah and so whenever i watch the tutorial i i focus on okay what are the steps involved in doing this okay you're using this this type of effect you're using this tool why why not use the other tool that's right next to it that looks to do a very similar thing so in the tutorial if you can explain i'm using this one instead of this one because it allows me to do this this really kind of esoteric thing among this model for instance if you're modeling something that's why i choose this one you're like oh great now i know i don't care about what you're making but i know that you just did that so i'm gonna that's gonna stick with me yeah i i totally agree um jumping a little bit what do you think is um [Music] because you've got so much experience making the effects and and um putting together these rapid short films what do you think are some things that that make a because you you can watch some some films and you can tell it's low budget what are some of the telltale signs that you think are low budget bad sound first off okay yes our v our videos are you know very very visual uh our visuals are very important to us but if we have bad audio it doesn't matter how good your visuals are because they're going to hear just crappy audio like whether it's like just really tinny or there's no bass or it's echoey or any number of reasons that can make your audio bad yeah that is just a glaring fault like audio is literally half of the video right and yeah and you can kind of get by with bad video as long as you have good audio if you have great audio you can have a crappy video right image quality wise yeah yeah so that's the first thing that i like to say is like all right to that sort of question is like you know what are the telltale signs of you know a an amateur video yeah right bad audio bad audio and is that fixable with with microphones like proper is that why they why it's bad yeah if you're shooting a short film on a dslr and you don't have a microphone plugged into your dslr you're just getting on board audio what are you doing i mean it works it can work but you need to have good audio yeah beyond that it's it's you know a lot of people like to say oh get good cameras get good lenses i'm gonna spend all my money on the next camera but the problem is that that camera's gonna be out of date in less than a year literally less than a year i mean about a year but less than yeah that camera is going to be no longer the best camera out there and then give it another three years and it's not even acceptable anymore you know it's one of those things i remember so when i was part of the youtube nextup program they gave me a couple thousand dollars to you know help my channel and i was like i'm gonna buy an fs100 a sony fs100 which was a really good camera and it was like a three thousand dollar camera and i was gonna have to put up some of my own money to like buy this thing and i was like i need a good camera to make good quality videos and after working here for a while i realized i could rent a camera if i really need it and i don't have to have a good camera so i end up investing that money into building a computer instead because that's where you spend most of your time as a vfx artist is at the computer yeah right so i just invested in making sure my computer was fast enough to keep up with me and i was good so from a visual standpoint people say oh a better camera will mean a better video yeah which to a certain degree is not wrong i just think it's kind of misdirected i think what is more important than having a good quality sensor or good glass is having good lighting right these lights you guys good job on the lighting here like you can shoot this on a pretty crappy camera and it'll still look pretty solid because the lights are set up properly right which is something that you really only learn from film school by the way uh right i mean you can learn it from experience working on set like i don't know much about lighting at all right uh other than what i've learned working with guys who do yeah yeah which is a good place to learn yeah but yeah so that one that was one of the first things i invested in was just a lighting kit you know just like three soft boxes that you can put at various parts of your uh set to light up the scene properly and that goes so far in making your image look better that when i see people just shooting with natural lighting inside i'm just like yeah it's like okay i will i will uh watch this video and kind of get through it but you immediately have decreased expectations right you know so yeah bad sound uh bad lighting and bad visual effects i think kind of goes without saying if you have bad visual effects that will bring down the video as well yeah yeah uh unless that's part of the video like if the video like part of the the style of that video is to have bad vfx there's lots of great videos out there that they're purposely just having like really like sharp keyframes on stuff just because that that's part of the character of the video right like that glitch one you guys did right the video game character glitch yeah yeah the glitch yeah yeah that was funny although that was a little different because we we actually still tried hard to make even the glitchiness look good all right of course yeah yeah it wasn't yeah i mean i mean that's kind of this i don't know huh yes i think i think it's also easy to uh um point to the cameras because it's so easily identifiable with a doll sign it's like well dollars more dollars equals better whereas what's hard to answer is what you're talking about like what is good lighting it's like you can't just say buy that specific brand of light because it's not all about that it's where you position it and that like it took aj 20 minutes to set all this up that was a lot of fiddling and this this this this this and that and that you can't really you know convey to someone very quickly like oh if you want to make your film better you've got to read this book you've got to do this this this you know and people who are serious about learning that they they get it you know they it takes them some time before they finally do get it but there there comes a point where they they finally understand like oh if i want to make my shots look better i have to light it properly it's not just about lighting me it's also about lighting the background the right way uh shaping the light making sure the angle of the light is right that's stuff that they eventually learn that they need to learn by watching you know some of our videos or some of like other film like film riot videos uh educational based videos for filmmaking yeah yeah you learn a lot of stuff from there um and then so once you know okay i need to work on that then you can take that knowledge and apply that to your own research like researching what makes a good studio light why do we have to put the lights at a certain angle behind me to get the right sort of edge light across my head right yeah you can be told that but i think you really need to learn why yeah before it really clicks why you got to do that yeah that's good to know i know we don't have a lot of time left um i wanted to ask your opinions of what what was of all the shorts you guys have done what was one of the most uh difficult or the most painful experiences oh god uh which ones weren't i did a video last year called real mario galaxy okay and that was a are you familiar with the little planet effect with you basically take a 360 image and depending on how you warp it you position the sky to be on the outside and the ground to be in the middle and it creates this illusion that makes the ground look like a planet yeah and i was like that's a really cool effect because i just got a new 360 camera and i was like this is a really cool thing to do so i want to make this whole video about it and uh we eventually settled on doing it in the mario universe because it was an existing ip those get better views than original ips and mario galaxy which is about a game of like running across different planets seemed like the perfect fit so i did that and it turned out to be way harder than i anticipated first off just trying to coordinate mentally the various things like there's one shot in that video where there's two different planets that collide and people jump back and forth between those planets and you have to like act between the two people on each of those planets but in reality those are completely different locations so you have to like get the timing down to be like okay i'm going to walk this way for 10 seconds stop look up like this even though the ground is that way like do this and then jump and then hopefully when you get to the next set you can do it well enough that it matches up and that was a big challenge we had to reshoot a couple times and it took me like probably like three days just to like choreograph everything to get it just right to be able to shoot have i have a habit of going a little bit too ambitious on projects sometimes and biting off too much to chew yeah that mario skate video i mentioned was a challenge because that was just a tremendous amount of work i'd say those videos were probably the two most challenging videos for me there are other videos that were pretty difficult but not super difficult other videos that are hard but i'm still able to go home in a normal time we're not having to work overtime stuff like that but as far as like videos that required over time those are a few there's a video i did earlier this year called gizmoduck um that was a lot of fun to do but i made the mistake of having the main character have half his body be cg so every time he's on screen i have to replace that which just added up the number of shots and they weren't just easy shots they were like tracking animating 3d rendering all that stuff and so i was like oh god on top of all the other effects that were in that video so that was that was a hard video to do i had to pull a few all-nighters from that one then there are some videos that are challenging to do because they're hard to kind of like wrap your head around i directed a video a few years ago called portal trick shots oh yeah that's one of my favorites oh awesome yeah no i'm i'm really really proud of that video but it was a really challenging video to pull off because it's like okay we're gonna put a portal there and a portal up on the on the ceiling right but here's the thing you can't just put a camera you gotta really account for what it's like for light to travel through that portal at the same angle as coming out of that one and so then you have to put a camera basically up there looking in that direction flip it upside down and put it underneath that portal down there [Music] yeah you basically had to account for what is the view from this far away from this portal basically meaning this far away inside of that wall up there you had to basically like move your head and position it inside the wall that just that same distance away that you are from this portal and do that for every single portal um and so and then also trying to come up with you know uh tricks you know trick shots that were at least interesting but also leveled up as they wanted so like we started simple and then by the last one it's like right yeah so that was that was a challenging one to really kind of film we didn't really know what we're doing with that video changed dramatically in editing we had this whole scene set up in here that we filmed in here that ended up just kind of being like this montage thing in editing and it really played to the video i think in the end it helped that there was a good soundtrack that we could just edit to right yeah yeah a lot of our videos change uh quite a lot from just from the point of shooting to the point of editing yeah or yeah it's like this is what we're gonna make and it's like this is what we filmed and then it's this is what we've edited and they're very they're very distinct things yeah and and they have uh there's a name for that in the in the film industry the the third stage of writing is editing i think is how that's called it's like there's the first stage the writing the second stage the actual filming and the third stage is editing yeah everything can change very much in editing is is the story take a long time to build a story it can uh i'm not particularly great at writing stories i'm not really a writer the stories that i i tend to direct and write are are ways more simple sort of like i'll tell a story but it'll be a very simple story and to the point and it's usually a little bit more visual based rather than dialogue based or driven rather right and it depends on the video if it's just like kind of just a simple video it depends of the point of what we're trying to do is this more like a visual gag that we're just trying to throw on youtube and hopefully it'll get a lot of views or we're trying to tell a real story with like real meaningful beats those like the more meaning we put to a story the more time we'll work on it more dialogue in a piece the more time we'll like try to make sure the dialogue is good and other times we'll just straight up improvise yeah right so um and when you watch uh a short film because i always like like when i'm watching hollywood films or whatever like that it always blows my mind because i don't understand visual effects enough to know how some of these effects are done but i know somebody like you would probably watch a lot of films and know exactly how they did that that that and that is there anything that you've ever been stumped by that you don't know what they did so recently there was a movie called john wick two semi recently earlier this year there was a movie called john wick 2 and in it there was a fight scene that took place in a hall of mirrors so it's like they're literally just fighting back and forth like shooting guns and stuff with mirrors all over the place and they had to paint out all of the camera crew the cameras themselves all that stuff we're painted out and i don't really know how they did it to be completely honest right probably a lot of just like putting up one-way mirrors and shooting through that so they're not even in the shot to begin with but yeah um i don't know a lot of the stuff i'm pretty much anytime ilm works on something i'm just like yeah i don't know how they did that yeah because it's like that's what happens when you throw millions of dollars and hundreds of people at a problem and it's like it gets amazing uh but then you have other companies like you know frame store and gosh mcp in pc and pc right um you know which are much smaller but are still able to do you know similar levels of quality you know uh where to workshop where to digital in new zealand they're putting out freaking uh gorillas that look so lifelike you cannot tell the difference and there's a lot of intricacies that i have no idea how they do that with but the overall architecture of you know shoot a person uh get facial capture uh facial animation uh performance capture rather and going through the the broad steps of okay take a shot animate a shot uh digitally uh render that out and then composite it with various passes i've i've gotten a lot better understanding the broad spectrum of how to do that sort of thing but as far as like the specifics of how they do a lot of that stuff like i remember pacific rim the movie pacific rim which came out a few years ago was a great example of they i think they just started using the arnold renderer or it was one of the first few movies that they'd used with that and it was great because they were able to do all kinds of rendering with it and they were doing like water simulations smoke simulations rigid body simulations all that's rendered uh and it just blows my mind that they can do that you know it's like in theory i know that you have to simulate this ocean and you simulate this giant robot leg swishing through it which will cause waves and then you have to add the foam and all that stuff to it yeah i couldn't even begin to tell you how right you know because they're using proprietary software i could tell you how i would start trying to do it with the plug-ins i already know how but i can tell you right up front that it's not going to be able to do the same thing yeah yeah and it's like any anymore a movie will come out and it has flawless visual effects like a few years ago i'd be like oh i can tell that that's a visual effect but anymore it's like it is straight up photo real you cannot tell the difference between real life and fake we're right at the cusp of that being a normal thing did you have you seen the revenant i did see the revenant yeah that bear scene had me that was ages wasn't that intense that was really intense and it was all one shot and they managed to i mean they filmed it in a few different shots but they were able to blend it together really really smartly yeah and i was amazed at how um like it was all about like because of course if you've got a cg character in a live action they're fine separate but the moment they interact it's like oh well how are we going to make that look real but he's he was getting like pushed around and shoved and i was like how is this happening this is actually a good example of an effect i don't quite know how they did that because they obviously had to have some sort of rig interacting with leo dicaprio like pulling them picking them up throwing them back down and flipping them over stuff like that and i guess they must have just like yeah a combination of that maybe there's like an actual rig there or and they just had to paint it out it's like there's a lot of steps involved and i don't exactly know how they did it i can speculate how they did it right yeah yeah yeah that movie man visual effects look so much more real when you are able to combine it with with real life elements you know like being able to do a real explosion and then comp in fake explosions around it they suddenly look way more real because the real explosion is carrying so much weight you know stuff like that uh yeah anytime you can combine visual effects on top of a real plate of actual special effects they will always look way better than they would single-handedly just visual effects or just special effects yeah definitely well it's been good talking with you dude andrew thanks for coming by this has been great yeah it's good to finally meet you in person i've watched a lot of your videos so it's cool to actually talk with you like in the flesh oh nice awesome cool yeah thanks for the interview i look forward to seeing this online yeah you

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 711,902

Keywords: corridor digital, tour, interview, vfx, film making, artists

Id: XOXeRNw9XX4

Length: 59min 26sec (3566 seconds)

Published: Tue May 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/RJKfilms]

Great video man, super interesting!

[u/ssbarf]

Would love to see the guru on a corridor video

[u/aTechnicality]

Cool stuff. Wren's quite eloquent, very interesting to listen to.

Something seems the tiniest bit off with the reverse/interviewer angle cuts though, but I can't quite put my finger on it... maybe a L/J cut would have helped, or a wider shot? Right now it felt a bit jarring.

No idea how the pros do it, maybe they cheat by having a second interviewee angle and messing with timing?

[u/Azazels_Vassal]

I'm excited to watch this. Corridor inspired me to look into doing something more creative and you were one of the best channels I could find on using blender.

[u/[deleted]]

Hey Wren, do you feel the pull of Blender yet?

[u/loller]

I appreciate the work that went into this but "Mhhhmm. Right, yeah." loses its value as a meaningful response after the hundredth time.

[u/hamman91]

Hey donut guy

[u/Re-Define]

/u/wrenulater you mentioned how you were a part of corridor back in the day when they worked adjacent to FreddieW. I have one burning question that I would love to hear your answer from that era:

Do you have a ridiculous Logan Olson story?

[u/realfoodman]

Andrew Price and Wren in the same room. I'd die of happiness.