Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Visual Effects Artists React
Niko: We are here once again in the studio during the pandemic socially isolated and distanced
Hey Clint, you want give me a high five over Wren?
(hands clap)
(laughs)
You know, I feel like we're in a car right now and like Wren this in the backseat (hahaha)
Alright we got some great VFX some bad VFX and everything in between to break down with you guys today
What is the first clip, lets see it!
You guys give me a lot of crap for not seeing movies, but this is a trilogy I did see
You did see this!?!?
Nah I'm just playin haha
I just read all the books
- So look at this wolf here - That's not bad
Like the wolf effects are actually pretty solid in these movies
- Good hair (simulation). - That hair interaction with their hand there. - Yeah, that looks really good
This wolf would have looked even better, like don't get me wrong it looks great, right?
This is beyond what I could do
But the one thing that stands out is the wolf's shadow on her
One of the challenges about doing fake shadows is that you can't just put a dark layer
Over your object to simulate a fake shadow
You have to deal with blocking the reflections and like how that's shining off the surface and that gets really complicated
and for the most part you just see what they did here
Which is some soft vaguely dark shape just moves across the person
And that's why I like when you shoot something like this it's always key to have reference
So if you know you're going to be putting a fake shadow over her then block her with an actual shadow at least
To see what it actually is doing
So before we actually continue I want to look at the behind the scenes to the shot real quick
It's she petting like a green stuffed animal?
It's far more awkward than you realize.
Wait is she petting Taylor Lautner? (laughing)
(laughing)
Oh noo, why did you do it this way?
He's not even talking to you. Yeah, he's literally just standing there, but that's not the most awkward part.
Oh no
(laughing very much)
And you can totally tell both of them are incredibly uncomfortable about it and the worst part is it's so
unnecessary, they didn't need him in the shot here
You know, it's funny cuz like this is the kind of thing where like the directors would be like
'I need the actors on set
so they can have they can have real moments and be
Spontaneous and feel it out' and they're right like they're having a real moment
a real awkward moment
You can just see in her face. She's like 'what am I doing with my life?'
Here's the thing though is like the final result. Not that bad
No, that's that's the thing the the effects company that did this
actually did really good work here like the fur looks excellent
And the compositing here is actually pretty solid
I want to make that clear
So this is how I would have done this differently
Your note about the shadow is actually a pretty good one
So what they probably should have done is just come out with a giant wolf shaped cardboard thing
which they have had for these movies to kind of show like the people on set the scale of these wolves
They needed to just have that there to actually have negative fill against her body there
But overall I think this looks pretty good
Yeah overall looks great
(record scratch)
- Really? - Wait, is it really?
Taylor Lautner went from this to Twilight
Wow, is that a stunt kid or is that Taylor Lautner?
- I think that's Taylor Lautner - I think that's straight up him
It's Taylor, Wow ! Taylor had some rad talent shows at fourth grade, huh?
There's always the kid that did both staff moves in the talent. Show. Was it you Clint? No
🎵 Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream, dream 🎵
'I don't got much fight left in me Max'
'Where's Lava Girl ?'
Whoa Wow, whoa
Dude, what if that's how Sam rolled up.
This is one of those movies that they filmed entirely in a single room
Dude that hair feathering
If you ever wonder why the edges are always so blurry back in the day and so soft
It's because our hardware is not powerful enough to actually capture all that data
When they shot like the prequel movies and they're seeing that all in digital or they shot this
you couldn't capture all the color data as well as your luma data.
So luma is like your black-and-white, how bright things are
Color is what color it is
Most likely they're shooting into a 4:1:1 compression and what the heck does that mean?
For every four pixels of Luma data you'd get, you'd only get one pixel of color data
so the problem that you would run into is if you're filming somebody on a green screen with a digital video camera
You would have big blocky chunks
even though it would look good when you just look at it with your eyeballs the actual color data
The actual green was 1/4 of the resolution of your image
So the edges will look chunky and you'd have to blur the heck out of it
Which is exactly what you see on the blurry edges of Taylor Lautner here. These days you don't do that anymore
with full-on 4:4:4 video spaces where for every single pixel of luma data you have a pixel of color data
and that's how far we've come these days
This is like a really high budget Nickelodeon episode
I know, yeah!
It knows what its audience is, you know
It knows that its audience is not gonna care about the look of the CGI. Kids don't care about that sort of thing
So when people subscribe to our Channel when watching these videos
it actually helps the videos get out there and get seen by more people
So if you're not subscribed
Please consider doing so it helps us out
and helps guarantee that you will get to watch the videos when you want to see them
So I have never seen this movie.
You've never seen Citizen Kane?
Have you ever seen Citizen Kane? I have not seen Citizen Kane
Isn't it like the film school classic film school movie?
Yeah. The thing is when you watch you're like this is okay
I guess why is everybody raving?
It's basically because Citizen Kane is like the first modern film
in a sense of like how it's shot, how it's approached, how it's edited
For example, you can see the ceiling in the shot
You would never see the ceiling in old films
because the ceiling never existed. They would always just had the ceiling be gone
So they put lights in there, but Orson Welles was like, you know what I want to feel the space
I want to get low angles
I want to make him feel tall and heroic and other things like that, imposing
They also made the film for really cheap. They did not spend a lot of money on it
- Like what like a buck fifty? - Three-fitty
But there's one shot here. So the film was made for cheap right, computers don't exist
I want you guys to tell me how do you get a crowd shot?
I mean we all we all did the Star Wars Episode, right? Is that a matte painting?
Yeah, it looks like a matte painting. It is not a matte painting. Well, it's-
kind of a matte painting but look closely at the people in the foreground. They're moving
I'm convinced it is a matte painting
But what is the... It looks like I see like slight like head motion like maybe like some hand motion
But all I'm seeing are just like blinking lights
- Yeah, do they like punch holes through and like play a little light thing - You got it !
-Got you - Yeah, they cut out
So it's a matte painting, they cut out a little sliver around each head
and they have a sheet basically of light behind them moving around and it gives the impression of the heads
Just moving a little bit from these little like white rims that shift around on their heads.
Woah no way !
It's such a awesome clever trick to make a moving crowd here. It's it feel dead without it
If it's just a picture like you can't do that
The thing that blows me away is how... How inventive they were to come up with that idea on the spot
It's not like.. There's no tutorials to read online. You can't just go google it you can't try it out really beforehand
It's just like yeah, we'll just paint it because we can't afford a crowd
It's black and white so I can just paint a crowd really quickly or take a picture of a crowd and then we'll cut it
Out and put lights behind it. And that will sell the effect. Trust me
I'm making this up as I go, but it'll look great
- We should look more old movies like this, you know, like look at some really revolutionary VFX from - Yeah
You know eighty years ago. So if you have any ideas for old movies that have some pretty interesting solutions
to achieving visual spectacle leave a comment down below. We'll take a look and review it in a future episode
- Gee, Pan's Labyrinth was a great movie. - Dude I made fun of Pan's Labyrinth
I was like, what are the stupid movies dumb fonz and it came out I was like ehh I'll watch Pan's Labyrinth
Let's get ready for a good laugh. And I was like, oh my god, this movie is a masterpiece. It's incredible
So the unique thing about this set up here are the Fonz legs
Basically, you got Doug Jones a very famous character actor playing the role of the faun here. This is all
Practical use and a full, you know full deal makeup
Now Clint you have a little story with Doug Jones
We were going to film shadow of mordor Clint was going to be playing an orc
it's gonna be Clint's first time being all in Makeup doing a full creature and Clint tweeted at Doug Jones.
I had to go out I'm gonna be you know an orc makeup for three days straight
Gonna try to channel my best Doug Jones
and Doug Jones tweeted back. "You got it. Good luck do a great job"
Holy crap I remember that dude! That was the best!
I had to sleep in the orc makeup because it was too it was too hard to get off
Yeah
We shared a room for that trip and every morning I would wake up and look over and
see an orc in the bed next to me
To me there's a friggin makeup would stick to the pillows like
euugh
Pillow come with me
Now real human beings legs obviously don't look like that
these legs are all twisted and backwards and whatnot
Did he go full method and just break his knees backwards to do this?
You know, he probably offered to (hahahaha)
So his legs are actually at the front where his knees are
basically his legs were just covered in like a
green-screen suit and they're basically having to key out the legs
and it was a painstaking process for the entire team
Because they had to replace the stuff that the leg was occluding
Yeah, that sort of process is never as easy or as straightforward as people think it will be.
Oh such a pain man
His feet are on top of the actual real costume feet, too
Which makes this even more difficult because they have to paint back in
the top of the foot that's being occluded by his actual green screen feet
Yeah, not to mention the hole in the bottom of the knee where his legs coming out.
The hole in the bottom of knee as well
Yeah, but you know what the final result is really convincing.
Absolutely wonderful you guys I think it was Cafe FX that did the visual effects for this movie, fantastic job.
So they actually did the same effect on another creature in this movie the pale man the skinny man
Oh, yeah, what a cool creature design. Ah the best || Warning for squeamish people ||
- Don't eat the food, don't eat the food. - Yeah. So as soon as she eats the food she's done for.
- Run girl ! Come on !
- Look at his legs. You see his thighs right there. - Yeah, super skinny.
They're just frickin little skin bones little chicken legs
Yeah, skinny legs is freaky, man
So Doug Jones is once again playing the pale man here and it's basically the same setup
You know, he is in a full body green-screen suit and they're basically having to key out the legs.
See this is an example that works really well for doing this method compared to the faun, which we saw previously
In theory it's the same method for both costumes but one is significantly easier than the other
Specifically because for this pale dude here we're looking at his front side
if we were to instead look at the backside
That would probably require a different costume. And once again this like assuming you had a costume
This is actually an effect that you could do because you just put the costume on and you know
Put a green screen suit on and all you have to do is paint out your legs like
you know, they're doing hard camera movements here
But if you had the camera on a tripod, it's almost trivial
Especially if you designed the costume in a way so you don't have to like have it be occluded by green screen legs
- I mean we kind of did that with a Gizmoduck. - That's true. We did kinda just that Gizmoduck
Viewers beware you might be in for a scare here.
- In for scare? - For a scare. - Too spooky for me
Just know it's VFX guys. Come on, it's me effects here. Oh, man you I know how I got these scars
Feeling that string run through your skin. Wait, so you're telling me this is a VFX and not a prosthetic
It's both. So how do you guys think this was done?
My guess is that he's got a little bit of a prosthetic lip attached to his real lip
And then they CG cut going back through his cheek
My guess is that the cuts in front on top of his skin. And they're just erasing his skin underneath. Whoo
Yeah, I'd say Niko's closest. So basically he's actually going through like silicone
It's a prosthetic that's over his mouth and he's actually stitching that together
He's getting really close to his actual face, but he's stitching that together
He's pulling the string through that's all real that you're seeing right there
They basically have like a little stretchy blue screen just inside of the prosthetics
so when her opens his mouth it reveals the stretchy blue screen. Wow
You can always add to the face
But you can't subtract makeup
and that's been like the big thing that makeup artists struggle against like how do you give a character with?
No nose, like well
I guess you have to just build up the entire face until it's in front of the nose and then you can make no nose
Or in this day and age you can you CG (Computer Graphics) to remove things.
- How do they do Voldemort ? - Voldemort, they erased his nose
So like if you actually see like raw
Behind-the-scenes images of Voldemort. He looks exactly like Voldemort, but with the nose and it's really weird
It's just once again a great demonstration of like
practical and CG like make everything as practical as you can
and then use CG to fill in those little bits that would otherwise make It impossible
So Snoop Dogg has asked me bring Tupac back to life for a music video
New visual effects newly shot scenes we want to present to you a re-imagined version of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory
I'm gonna put a nerf blaster on a drone
I wanna hit your drone out of the air! Challenge accepted
Thanks for watching everybody we're back to the studio here recording this as safely as we can
But while we remain safe, I hope you remain safe as well. Navigate the rest of this pandemic
I'm sure you'll start to wind down soon, hopefully, but in the meantime
We'll make sure that we're here every Saturday for you guys to be entertaining if you're not subscribed already
- Please consider doing so and on to the next one. - I want that butt hair dude