free guy is a 2021 science fiction action comedy movie that is basically the answer to the question
what would happen if you mixed the truman show and the matrix with simcity grand theft auto and
fortnite well as it turns out it's actually very entertaining and has some stunning visual effects
a total of 11 vfx houses worked together to produce the visual effects for this movie
digital domain scan line and industrial light and magic were primaries and reynold
v effects mammal studios capital t lola visual effects twisted vfx studio d and
botv effects were secondaries and halian worked with digital domain to provide previous work
vfx supervisor sven gilberg was in charge of dividing up the vfx workload and sequences
were given out according to each vfx vendor's strengths however we were told that scanline
vfx supervisor brian grill and digital domain vfx supervisor nicos kalitzidis did jokingly
arm wrestle for a particular sequence although we weren't told which sequence this was or who won
free guy actually has three different worlds the photo real virtual world inside the free
city game as seen by the characters who form part of the game the lower resolution game
like version as seen on the monitors of the people playing the game and then the
real world set in seattle where the game's creators designers and players actually live
digital domains vfx supervisor nicos kallitzedis told us that a tremendous
amount of design work went into creating the look for the video game version of the gaming world
not only did they research the subject heavily but they also used gameplays made by their own
in-house vfx editor as reference the director sean levy used the assistant vfx coordinator charlie
lemma who is also an avid gamer as a consultant to help get the look and feel of the gameplay
this amount of research and reference material was essential because finding the balance between
virtual and reality was such a fine line to walk if they made the characters look too real
it would look like the people playing free city were watching a movie on their monitors rather
than playing a video game if they made it look too simple the transition from seeing the game on the
monitor to being inside the video game world would be too jarring and the audience would lose empathy
for the main characters in addition to this the vfx team had to avoid falling into the unnerving
realm of uncanny valley eventually they settled on a stylized grand theft auto type of look with
a more vibrant fortnite-esque color scheme for the numerous stunt scenes happening throughout
the movie the vfx team had to produce 46 unique digi doubles including the characters milli badass
monster duke keys and buddy in order to create the digi double for guy ryan reynolds had to
visit digital domains facilities where they took an ict scan of his face basically an ict scan uses
a light stage to shoot light from different angles at a subject in this case ryan reynolds the data
of how this light reacts is processed and this supplies detailed maps including displacements
depth and area of subsurface scattering and specular values on the sheen of his skin
the ict scan was combined with performance capture data received from ryan reynolds's head mounted
camera and the actor going through his lines to create the photo reel digi double to substitute
the actor for the stunt scenes for the gameplay versions of the same characters they used the same
digi doubles however these digi doubles were far too detailed to be the digital avatars played by
people in the real world so the detail and texture had to be dialed back a bit and their features
smoothed out they were also rendered with a small shutter angle mainly 90 degrees but sometimes
45 this reduced the amount of motion blur and gave them a slightly jerkier video game motion
lola vfx was given the task of digitally transplanting ryan reynolds's face onto the body
of duke in order to do this lola used their own specialized lighting rig that they affectionately
called the egg the egg is a series of programmable led panels and six cameras that are positioned
all around the actor forming the shape of you guessed it an egg after lola received the live
action plates for the sequence they hired a stand-in actor that had a similar build
height hair color and complexion to that of the person they were going to digitally transplant
in this case ryan reynolds the actor sat inside the egg and then using the live-action plates as
a reference they got the actor to look directly at the individual coloured leds in different
positions around the egg getting the actor to turn his head at the same angles as the actor
playing duke did in the live action plates the position of each of these coloured leds for each
shot is then recorded and these were the markers that ryan had to hit for each shot thus ensuring
his face was always at the correct angle for every shot lola then proceeded to pre-light
the egg referencing the live-action plates they adjusted and recorded the led lighting to match
that of every shot on the live action plates this is a laborious and time-consuming process
that took nearly three days finally ryan could come in to have his performance recorded acting
towards the led markers and his face looked perfectly to match that of duke
although they did have to use some spray on suntan makeup to get that bodybuilder orange
principal photography took place in boston so naturally the primary look
and layout of free city was based on boston using reference photos lidar scans and data
gathered during principal photography including drone and aerial footage that was taken for the
badass opening shot scanline built 1.5 miles of high resolution downtown starting from the free
city bank location down to hitman's beach this downtown area was surrounded by three miles of
mid-resolution city environment which in turn was surrounded by 6.2 miles of low resolution
environment scanline's asset team created a library of 140 different buildings over 150 types
of trees and plants 86 different model vehicles and 284 different props to dress the environment
special attention had to be paid to aging and adding dirt and grime buildup to these cg assets
in order to perfectly match them to their real-life counterparts so that the transition
from live-action plate to cg was seamless scanline also spent a lot of time developing the look for
destruction on the buildings within the video game world they wanted it to look like a video
game glitching but to still have the weight and emotional impact of a real building falling
during post-production for the scene where badass hands guy the evidence
the filmmakers felt a reshoot was necessary so that channing tatum could say an extra line that
was crucial to help the audience follow the story unfortunately it wasn't practical or logistically
possible for tatum to come back to reshoot the line so the filmmakers asked digital domain if
there was something they could do enter charlatan charlatan is a proprietary tool created by digital
domain that can merge one performer's face with that of another and like a lot of modern day vfx
tools it uses ai similar to weta digital's deep learning system digital domains tool uses ai
machine learning which is basically a library of information that the tool can learn from
this information is called training data normally charlatan would require hours with
the actor to compile enough data that data would involve five 4k cameras shooting from different
angles whilst the actors said a series of visemes whilst expressing different emotions
visemes are the visual equivalent of phonemes while phonemes are sentences designed to cover
every sound in the english language visemes are sentences designed to cover every facial movement
one example is the odd toy cow eats green oat cheese unfortunately digital domain didn't
have this data so they got tatum to record the new audio performance for the new shot
and then began to compile as much training data as possible they used tatum's previous performances
and they also requested any additional takes over length clips and bad takes and fed it all
into the machine learning engine digital domain artists then created a new facial model which they
animated to lip sync with tatum's audio this was then combined with a neutral render from charlatan
please give us a like if you enjoyed this video don't forget the links in
the music used in this video are in the video description and let us know
in the comments below which movie vfx you'd like to see behind next