Time. No one can
explain it well, and those who try and get a little bit worse with every attempt.
Why did he fight the second time?
And there's only so much of it to leave your mark on the internet.
You got to try stuff. Iterate. Ben knows what I'm talking about
As a visual art director, he used to melt stuff and film
it on a macro lens in a room (Macro Room!) with reasonable success.
Once, he melted some toy soldiers to the copyrighted soundtrack of Charlie
Chaplin's monologue from The Great Dictator.
And all of a sudden, there was context.
It seemed to resonate with people, just like all the times others had done
that same concept, but Ben went right back to melting
and swirling random stuff until he got a special new lens.
You remember this video making the rounds.
In English to shoot
can mean to capture it with a camera or fire bullets from a gun.
So you see, there was context again.
Wooooooah!
But he didn't really blast sci-fi lens bullets through a book on faith
based archeology,
just gently penetrated it with the probe lens on a slider and added the projectile
in post using a series of recently developed techniques
called SpecialDidgiVisualVFX... dot org.
Their allure is powerful, especially if you're only using them
to slightly enhance what already looks cool in camera.
So it was inevitable that Ben would eventually succumb to temptation
and put all his skills together in this fun, magic, time bending video
that everyone keeps sending to me to explain every single day. Please stop.
You're not prepared for the experience.
First, we got to excise the excellent
sound design, splice out the splashy transitions
and focus on what all eight scenes making up this video have in common.
Obviously, they all feature ultra slow motion, achieved with a high speed camera
These things can shoot
at crazy high frame rates to give you extreme temporal resolution.
And it's not the exclusive
domain of British boys with ridiculously expensive Phantoms.
There are some relatively affordable alternatives available
like the ones Ben has used.
Okay. Are we recording?
What you don't want to do is hit record too early on one of those babies,
because even a few seconds of real
time can end up as hours and endless gigabytes of footage.
But you also don't want to miss the start
of the instant event you're trying to capture. I'm missing it!
The solution is to not worry about starting the camera at all.
It records continuously to a circular memory buffer
where early frames are deleted as new ones are written.
Once the event has happened, you stop recording
and the last few seconds containing it, stay in memory.
Okay, what else?
Every scene has the same static angle, a single very diffused light
source creating soft, minimal shadows, and a pure black background.
Since most things aren't pure black, it's possible to automatically isolate them
with the magic of luminance keying.
It's like this whole setup is designed to make it easy to break
the different elements of the shot apart and manipulate their timing individually,
which is the only thing the magic of this whole video requires.
But anyone can generalize.
The fun is in the specifics.
Each scene is a thrilling journey of technical challenges
and directorial regret.
So keep your hands and feet inside the head at all times.
Individuals with hearts will get disillusioned.
In the first clapperboard scene, the color balloons filled with matching
color liquid are of course, played in reverse
because they were filmed separately from Ben.
But so was the stopwatch.
He doesn't actually throw it. Remaining palmed in his hand,
it requires some digital patching not to show through the gap
until he drops it behind the table while grabbing the slate.
The stopwatch flying out of his hand was tossed separately over a clear
backdrop, as evidenced by the slight rim of black edges around the chain.
Luma-keying or rotoscoping complicated shapes like this can be tricky.
It's easier to composite over the wet table using, say, a difference map.
The cookie scene starts out real, except there's no milk in the cup.
He brings the cookie up to a precise spot and lets go.
Since this was filmed at high speed, the footage of the cookie can now
be brought down to its natural slow motion and rotoscoped in the foreground.
But in his footage sped up to real time, the drop was instant.
Only a few frames needed careful digital patching to hide the cookie.
But even that's not easy to pull off perfectly.
At least with no milk in the cup, there was no splash to worry about.
He continued to mime
the action of taking the picture and showed off a premade photo.
The money shot of the cookie actually splashing into the milk
was filmed afterwards.
Since it didn't get wet the first time, it could now be carefully
set up at the exact same drop point and even in the same orientation.
Without Ben there, it's once again pretty easy to Luma-key the droplets
over the earlier footage.
I'm pretty sure it's the dry take version of the cookie all the way
until it intersects with the cup, when it starts to be composited
over the top of the one that really hit the milk.
Combining the droplets
with the reflection on the table surface probably took a bit of roto work.
And the artificial lighting of the flash is a nice touch.
But come on, that's totally not the same cookie.
I can tell by the chip-sles!
The balloon punch scene had a similar approach.
It starts playing at a higher speed, but once pricked, the balloon
by itself is slowed down to its true frame rate.
Mostly; rotoscoping an exploding mass of water is kind of hard.
Ben let some of the smaller droplets fall fast so that only the big chunks
were left to deal with.
And yeah, it is weird how it bursts on the opposite side
of where it's punctured, but that's just physics.
Take it up with Veritasium.
Meanwhile, the faster explosion underneath in Ben's footage had to be removed.
He cloned and froze and warped his way through the whole mess.
And it doesn't really hold up,
but none of us noticed because ...waterballoon.
Also the table might have not even been there for this.
Think about it. If you weren't
going to show the water hit it, but risked getting splashed every take, why bother?
The mess probably fell into a container, and Ben went on to throw the punch
with nothing there. But a superimposed table
and the creeping shadow on it tell a story of a whole different take.
And midway through the final shot, we can spot the familiar jump
of an invisible cut.
Aw, I've missed you, old friend.
It's good to know you're keeping busy after all these years.
Anyway, the cut takes us to a take with a duplicate water
balloon hanging in place hidden by the superimposed water blob.
Check out the less than perfect cloning work to hide the wire
As the punch happens, the water blob from the other take is warped
and blended into the real epic water explosion caused by the punch.
I guess he filmed this part last, huh?
It might have been better to shoot the exploding balloons separate
at the start to avoid tons of roto and logical compromises like this.
Utterly inexcusable.
The egg smash scene is easy.
A take of Ben making crazy gestures, a high speed take of the egg
being slammed into the skillet,
some playful time remapping and artificial shake on the static egg at the end.
A bit of color grading and subtle displacement on the shirt
behind the egg white would have really sold it there. Oh, well.
And then there's the birthday cake scene.
This one's deceptive because colorful sprinkles and ultra slow motion
really feel like a CG simulation.
But you've got to resist the urge to hypothesize about things
that kind of look like other things you've seen before.
The sprinkles are real.
They really fell and they really bounced.
But once again, without Ben there. You know he doesn't like to get messy.
That's why he's not on the table reflection,
and why no sprinkles bounce off his shirt or reflect in his glasses.
Not sure why he didn't put the candles in, though.
The jar was rigged, suspended upside down and the sprinkles
were quick released on cue to get the cascade just right.
Then in another take, the candles were lit and blown out
with both those elements captured and somewhat key-able.
Note to self: charred black candle wicks do not work with Lumakey.
There was still the challenge
of making it seem like Ben manually poured the sprinkles.
And for some reason he decided to do it the hardest way possible.
He filmed the shot of the full jar
for reference, but then used an empty one in the actual performance.
This was a bad idea because it required superimposing
and match-moving the full version into his traveling hand throughout.
Oh, the two dimensionality!
When the jar reemerges upside down, it's the rigged version
being tracked into place.
And as the sprinkles pour out, their border transitions
the entire superimposed jar to the real empty one in his hand.
Of course, the hand couldn't
hit the exact spot where the stationary jar released its sprinkles.
So some sneaky cloning of the stream disguises the misalignment.
It definitely would have been better to really pour the sprinkles
into a container and somehow bridge that with the cake take.
But hindsight's 2021.
Like in the rest, in the milk bottle scene
the wet, explosive action was shot separately from Ben's performance.
And while I'm not sure of the best way to get glass containers
to spontaneously shatter in this cool way, (what's that thing?)
I do know that one milk bottle is identical to another,
and setting up two of them to explode in different ways from the exact same
starting position takes minimal effort and maximal lactose tolerance.
The Jenga tower scene comes closest to having something to say.
It would be great
to have a real life undo button for the collapse of anything, really.
I like the subtle digital displacement of the button blocks
of the start of the shot so they can appear to be really pressed down later.
That's just nice.
But how does he manage to visibly drop the piece on top of the tower
after it reverses out of a collapse?
Well, by doing that part first.
The tower was set up in a way that removing the left piece
doesn't affect it, but removing the right one sends it crashing.
I kind of feel like he even subtly pushes it over.
A take of the left piece being dropped onto
the top was filmed and with the tower still standing,
the piece was carefully slid back into place.
Next, the performance was shot.
Everything happened as we see it, except, of course, the rubble stayed down.
And by design, the piece that Ben was supposed to remove wasn't affected.
So after pretending to watch the tower rewind, he reaches toward the rubble
while the image of the standing tower is matted on top. As the hand approaches
most of the superimposed image of the tower from earlier in this
take transitions to the one from the initial block drop take.
There's a subtle difference so you can spot the change.
And as the fingers touch the block, it cuts to the one from the rubble
while the rest of the tower remains superimposed.
He raises the block into the same designated spot,
lets it go, and it transitions to the one that really dropped on top of the tower.
Notice how it magically veers toward the left in freefall.
The block that really left his fingers takes a little longer to drop all the way
down onto the rubble and can be seen reflected in the glasses.
Busted!
That's okay. The final light bulb
scene makes up for it— a real tour de force of rotoscoping effort
See, unlike in the other scenes, the only convincing way to drop
the stopwatch here was to really drop it and walk away.
Of course, in real time, the stopwatch fell instantly and Ben got up
only after it fully settled on the table.
Which means its entire slow motion descent happened over the t shirt.
No Luma-keying possible.
From the moment it slows down, the entire thing is being manually matted
frame-by-frame on top of the real-time version of the footage.
And again, the faster dropping stopwatch from that version had to be hidden.
It bounces up slightly.
So a dynamically moving fake patch of the shirt had to cover that up.
Oh, boy, that's not how you do that.
The table surface is in sync with the stopwatch.
And once the stopwatch crosses that border, it's home free.
No more rotoscoping needed.
You can actually see Ben's reflection there and track when he really departs
in the slow motion timing. The lightbulbs, of course, were overloaded to explode
separately afterwards
and edited to look like they burst the moment he's out of frame,
because apparently Ben can't be bothered to take a few shards of glass in the face
for quality content.
Alas, even with all that effort put into the execution, playing with time
doesn't seem destined to be a runaway success on the channel so far.
Maybe because it lacks that all-important context.
Ben should have anchored the video around a relatable experience,
like always being late or fighting a time reversed version of yourself.
These are proven strategies that our organization
is poised to facilitate in raising your brand's visibility.
But don't listen to this [expletive]!
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I put my heart and soul and...
all of the money into my last video.
And with the help of Disillusion Industries, it did well. I'm very happy.
Sorry to interrupt.
I just wanted to quickly follow up on our correspondence from earlier.
If you're not interested in our services,
I understand, simply reply and say that to me by typing words
to keep the conversation going, because I really think there's
a good opportunity of mutual benefit here.