the five films nominated for an academy
award this year for visual effects were
each selected for their own unique
reasons but what they all do share in
common is that they show technical
artistry that is exceptional and usually
they use some new techniques that people
haven't actually seen before this is
kevin bailey he's worked on some of
hollywood's biggest movies there's some
really fun stories about how each one of
these films was made let's break down
this year's oscars vfx standouts
spider-man no way home has 2
400 visual effects shots in it which is
pretty much every shot in the entire
movie and 12 visual effects studios with
thousands of artists all over the world
worked to make the film happen you
wonder why credits are so long on movies
these days and you might have thought
that tom holland was wearing a suit
throughout all of his spider-man action
in the film and you'd be right what you
probably didn't notice is that that suit
was actually replaced in post-production
with a suit that had a new design and
had to interact with all of the lighting
environments that he was in with all the
action that he was in a real technical
challenge that i think they pulled off
seamlessly there were fully digital
versions of every character in the film
that were built and some of the
characters relied much more heavily on
visual effects than others
electro and sandman are two examples of
that and those two characters are driven
by what we in the industry called
effects simulations the dust and the
lightning they're natural phenomena that
are
actually simulated by the computer using
the laws of physics to make them look
real a lot of people think about the
visual effects award as a technical
award but the academy really considers
whether the visual effects were used
for a good purpose spider-man deserves
to be on this list based on its creative
and technical merits and it obviously
killed it at the box office
and i've got to say that it's really
really nice to see such a fun wholesome
film as part of the list of nominees
no time to die is the latest in the
james bond series of films it's actually
the first james bond film to be
nominated for this award since moonraker
so it's been a while what makes this
film really stand out amongst the other
five is that the visual effects are
there to really be invisible and to
support the story rather than be the
story a lot of the illusions in this
film really came as a collaboration
between three different teams the stunts
team the visual effects team and the
special effects team special effects and
visual effects they often get used
interchangeably but they're two very
different things special effects happen
in the real world
visual effects happen in the computer
after the fact for example there's a
scene where a fishing troller is sinking
with james bond trapped inside of it and
in order to do that when we're inside
the ship the special effects team built
a giant 50 foot long version of the boat
that they could submerge 20 feet into a
water tank on a sound stage and they
could rotate it 360 degrees to really
enhance the sense of peril for every
shot that was outside though it was a
completely digitally created version of
the ship made by visual effects studio
dneg
the premise of dune relies on putting us
into a totally fictitious universe but
every aspect of this movie works so well
together that we actually believe that
it exists and that we're there with
paula tradies everything about how they
filmed dune was really designed to be as
if they were shooting the real scene in
front of the real camera for example
whereas a normal movie would use blue
screens or green screens behind an actor
when they're planning to put a virtual
world behind them they didn't want to do
that on this film because blue screens
and green screens they kind of bounce
blue or green light onto the actors and
it sort of makes them artificial looking
and the artists have to do a lot of work
to kind of undo that artificial look
instead what they did is they used white
or sand colored screens behind the
actors in this film now that made the
jobs of the compositor whose job it is
to put the virtual background behind the
actor quite a bit harder but as they say
no pain no gain and as a result of it
being sand colored light bouncing onto
the actors instead of green or blue
light once the compositor was done with
their job the shot just looks completely
natural as if you shot it right there in
the desert the dragonfly inspired flying
machines that they fly on arrakis are
called ornithopters and the production
actually built a bunch of life-size
full-scale ornithopters so that the
actors would have something to sit in
and touch and they would fly those
things around on cranes or attach them
to motion bases which are these big
mechanical hydraulic machines so they
can move them around and have the actors
actually believe that they're flying
around in these things for scenes that
required digital ornithopters the
production still went through the
trouble of shooting real helicopters in
the shots and then they replaced them
with the digital ornithopter now you
might say well why do they go through
the trouble of shooting a real
helicopter well by doing it that way we
make sure that the shot looks plausible
because it was something that was
actually filmed for real the
imperfections in the camera motion and
the vehicle motion they all kind of tell
our human brain that it's real the shot
really looks plausible because of the
fact that the ornithopter's motion is
based on a real helicopter and the
camera is moving in the way that a real
camera would move and the imperfections
involved and all of that really would be
impossible to create by a visual effects
artist from scratch the giant city of
arakeen was actually built as if they
were designing a real city in that real
environment you notice that there's not
a lot of windows in there to keep the
heat out they even went as far as to
figure out what the flow of the wind
direction given the surrounding
geography would be and then placed sand
in spots where it would actually
naturally accumulate based on that wind
and when the visual effects studio dnag
built the city they also had to build it
with destroying it in mind because the
harkenins were going to come and unleash
missiles and a giant laser on it and
tear it apart the scale of the world of
dune was incredible and the director
denis venue he was telling me a story
about how when he was working with
jessica ferguson and she was acting in
one of the final scenes in the film
where they're facing off against one of
these giant sand worms and he kept
directing her to look higher and higher
and higher and you know she's a great
actress she did it but it wasn't until
when the final movie uh was on the big
screen in front of her that she came to
and said oh now i get why you're
actually asking me to look that much
higher those things are huge right
everything in the world of dune is giant
so the entire team really had to do what
rebecca was doing on that day they're
imagining in their heads whether it's
the sand worms or the cities or the
spaceships they're having to imagine in
their heads how giant all this stuff is
when they're filming the actual movie as
the sand worms close in on us the sand
kind of begins to liquefy around the
actors and when i was watching the movie
in this scene in particular i was
wondering like how did they do that in
the computer it's so good and it turns
out they did it for real the special
effects the physical effects team they
buried a steel plate underneath the sand
and then vibrated it intensely and that
created this really cool pattern on the
surface and caused the actors to really
sink into the sand dune was a film where
not only was the directing and acting
superb but all of the crafts visual
effects special effects cinematography
sound music they all worked together and
they clicked in a way that really every
craft elevated every other craft to
create a work of art what happens if you
don't stay in the pocket the forest eats
us eats us what does that mean
shang chi and the legend of the ten
rings really belongs on this list
because of the fantastical worlds that
are created really from scratch in the
film along with a kitchen sink variety
of characters and natural effects that
are in the movie even though the worlds
themselves are oftentimes fully
digitally created the team opted to
shoot real people or real vehicles in a
field instead of creating everything
from scratch and a good example of this
is our introduction to the mythical
location of tallow we follow a car
through you know a few bamboo shoots
that they had there on stage but you
look at the final film and it's a giant
bamboo forest of the lake and mountains
right and the reason they do this is
because if we have reality to test
ourselves against that helps us make the
end result look as real as it possibly
can the martial arts work in the film is
beautiful and it is augmented by
swirling leaves and dust that help to
make really magical choreography look
actually magical one of my personal
favorite moments from the film even
though it's really short so beautiful is
when water starts to emanate from a room
and hangs in midair and the actors
actually get to interact with it in a
way that is is just beautiful and
emotional there are a lot of really fun
mythical characters including morris
who's ben kingsley's sidekick what the
hell
oh
what is that who uh it manages to
somehow be extremely cute and funny
despite the fact that he doesn't have a
face now for animators that are the ones
responsible for bringing these
characters to life bringing that level
of emotion across without the character
having a face is a pretty tall feat not
all of the visual effects in chiang chi
were of the fantastical varieties some
of them were more invisible for example
some of the more elegant and long stunt
fight scenes involved stunt actors and
martial artists doing the fights and
then the teams use deep fake technology
artificial intelligence driven
technology to take the faces of our hero
actors and transpose them on to the
martial artists all of that combines to
make shang chi a fast-paced visual
spectacle that really has the kitchen
sink's worth of visual effects
techniques in it
[Music]
free guy which largely takes place
inside of a video game in a fictitious
city called free city makes some really
great deliberate choices to blend the
line between reality and the digital in
a way that the hero character whose name
is guy uh played by ryan reynolds that
he doesn't notice everything that's
happening around him no matter how
insane it is buildings are exploding
people are running around on fire it's
just part of his everyday normal
experience and it really creates a
unique concept and that uniqueness is
something that the academy really
responds well to when nominating a film
like this towards the climax of the film
guy faces off against a super muscular
adversary named dude the joke is that
dude is a version of guy they actually
shot a real bodybuilder as a foundation
visual effects artist got to work on
taking footage of ryan's face and
swapping it onto the bodybuilder to
create the seamless illusion that ryan
was fighting a muscular version of
himself free guy was a great example of
a combination of technology and creative
choices coming together to make
something that we really haven't seen
before
it's fake we don't matter that building
that's fake this street
it's fake
that car
the thing i love about this list of
nominees is that every one of these
films is on here for a different reason
they all made great choices about which
techniques and tools to use to tell
their specific stories and i really
enjoyed watching these films and talking
about them and hope you enjoyed learning
a little bit more about how they were
made