What do you guys think is real?
[yells] What a transition!
[laughs]
The hardest shot in this film-- right here.
That shot right there?
Hi, welcome back to another episode of VFX Artists React
Today we're gonna show you some really cool VFX
and a couple not so cool VFX.
Clint's in Ireland so we're joined by Sam today
Hey, my name's Sam and I'll be your beetus companion
Anytime you're watching the beetus of a movie
Just call me up and I'll give you a tip
I'll explain what's happening
[laughs]
So we're gonna kick off this video with one of the most requested movies
That we've ever seen in the comment section
and it also won our Patreon poll:
Alita: Battle Angel.
So I actually really enjoyed this movie, it was really fun
Kinda wonky but very fun
Look at that facial animation
So, honestly, when this shot came up on-screen,
I literally said out loud, I was like, "wow."
Cuz it was very realistic
Even regardless of the big eyes
It was very real.
Look how dilated the pupils are.
Like, look how much light is going into those eyeballs
What is the actual like, canonical lore between having big eyes?
Is that because she's like a super advanced cyborg
and she needs bigger eyes to have more like cones
so she can see better?
The reason is anime. The anime.
Their eye budget was all the way up
[yells] Their eye budget?
And when they built the rest of the robot's body, they're like
we'll just make everything else small
Just get the child model for everything else.
Is this good or not?
I'm just looking at it and it looks weird and I'm like,
I guess it's good
Is it the face of Alita or is it just like everything about it
There's a disconnect happening, you know
The problem is is you're taking this crazy, wacky
anime character and then comparing that to everyday humans in every day world and stuff
and so, of course, it feels super out of place
despite the fact that the rendering is like top-notch.
I feel like you get over that really quickly when you're watching the movie
after like, the first five or ten minutes you kinda
just accept internally that she's a CG character
Because she is still emoting quite a bit throughout the whole movie
and you believe that it's a real performance.
Rosa Salazar, I think is her name
did a really good job doing all the facial performance capture and whatnot
The eyes are, you know, the window to the soul.
We express a lot of emotion through our eyes
And for how well everybody can read emotion through eyes
Most people don't know explicitly what to do
to make those emotions come out.
I say Ren, draw me angry eyes.
You might draw me like, you know, slanted brows.
Yep, that's what I would do, just like--
but if I went Ren take the eyebrows out
now draw me angry eyes
[laughs]
The point I'm making is there's a lot more going on than just the direction of your eyebrows
a lot of it just has to do with where your eyelids sit on your iris.
If your eyelids are raised up off your iris at the top
that can give you a very, like, rage look.
Your eyelids down a little bit at the top of your iris but completely off the bottom
That gives you like a "are you kidding me?" look
Happy is actually both of your eyelids coming into your iris a little bit
So it's entirely where those two skin sleeves on your eye
Sit relative to your pupil and your iris
and that's where a lot of emotion comes from.
In Alita, her entire character is basically based on where her eyelids sit on her eyes
[laughs]
So that Zapan character, there?
Is probably my favorite.
He's got a little chin spike.
He's got a little chin spike, you're right!
Is it still called a soul patch of a robot, or is it--
It's like a soul bar.
Soul bar?
It's cool seeing all the different mechanics inside that guy's neck move around.
That's my favorite part, honestly
I'm just trying to figure this out though,
Like, that face looks real.
His face looks real.
You know why, Sam?
Why?
'Cause it is real.
That would make sense.
His face is real and it's his body that's completely computer-generated
Is that little metal soul patch real, or not?
It is also real.
I love that they have the goatee on him, for real. [laughs]
Yeah, yeah
Like of all the things to put real on him, it's his goatee.
They actually add makeup along the edges of his face
to actually make it look like it has thickness.
I think they actually re-projected the photography of his face onto a 3D model
to get all the right shadows and lighting and whatnot
Oh my god! What a pain in the butt.
Nah, but it looks so good!
You know, what's interesting is when they recorded these scenes
They had their movie camera recording the main angle
And they had a bunch of cameras around the set
Recording her as well, that they can then use to triangulate positions and markers on her suit.
All these are like, custom sets
They're--they're very controlled
basically they're shooting this within a box
so that way each shot can be processed quickly and efficiently
unlike Chappie for example where it's just like,
hey, let's do guerilla run-and-gun filmmaking,
and like put a motion capture s--
in quotes, a "motion capture suit" on him
which ends up being completely useless, you know.
What Sam's saying is that you can spend more time on set and less time in post
or more time in post and less time on set.
It depends where your time is more valuable
Is it more valuable ahead of time or after the fact?
It's worth noting that when you're on set,
especially a big set like one of these films,
and you have a hundred people
all making at least, you know--
300 bucks a day, most of them probably making more.
It's like a single minute
costs hundreds of dollars.
What was the budget for this movie?
Two hundred million dollars was the budget of Alita: Battle Angel.
So talkin' about a big-budget movie,
this movie had the biggest budget of any movie
ever in the history of movies.
That's a complete and utter lie.
The budget for this movie was 15 million dollars.
Good for them.
That's how much a movie should be made for.
Yeah.
It forces you into all these, like,
problem-solving situations where it's like, alright,
we can't afford to do all of this, but we still want to do something like it.
Everyone's got a CG person in their movie these days.
I mean, I love how you can actually see straight through her.
You definitely believe that you're looking at a robot,
even though it's so human-like.
It looks so good.
Really good.
What do you guys think is real?
Hands and face.
Of that, I think her face is real
and I think the actual chest, even though it looks like her costume,
has also been replaced.
So I'm pretty sure everything except for her face has been replaced.
You're pretty much right. You're spot-on.
Well first off I just want to point out the genius
of designing your costume with little black separators
for what's real and what's not.
Like on the edges of her wrist, she has a little black bracelet cuff--
Okay.
So there's a very easy-to-find spot where you can cut off the real and the CG.
It was actually kind of smart, because there's a grid pattern on this costume too,
that allowed them to sneakily motion track all of it.
The face is real, and her feet are real.
Well that's great, because that's the point of contact with the real world
and you want to have that be as realistic as possible.
Exactly. That was exactly what they were going for
'cause they knew that all the things that interact with real life - your feet and your hands
Those need to be real so they weren't trying to replace those.
And of course the face, because the face is very hard to replicate.
But the rest of it, not so much.
They kept the face real, which is like
the main workhorse of an actor, right?
Yeah.
Is the face. And so they're able to get all of the emotions
of an actual character but in the body of a robot.
You might think like, "oh, yeah."
"The face is real, the hands are real, the feet are real,"
"Easy."
Do you--
Nope. [laughs]
There are some really hard things.
There's a tremendous amount of object tracking going on here.
It's all hand-animated.
The average shot length was 8 seconds for this movie.
Most movies
[groans]
have an average shot length of like one second.
Yeah.
So those like 300, 400 robot shots
are all eight times longer than your average blockbuster movie shot.
Here's what became a headache for this movie.
So, they need to do the reflections.
Now usually, you just track your--your character
and then you set up, you know, a mirror material or whatever,
in your program, and you get a reflection.
It's that easy, right? It should be automatic.
They shot on anamorphic lenses
meaning that there's slight distortion to the environment.
And, also the set has slight distortion in it
meaning, not only did they have to hand track her in the foreground,
they then had to go and hand track her again in the reflection.
Yeah. --Ugh.
The hardest shot in this film-- right here.
That shot right there?
That shot. This shot is the hardest shot. --How is that so hard?
The actual shot in the movie is like 16 seconds long.
When humans are sitting still, they're actually never sitting still.
We're always moving a little bit.
I'm so steady right now. As still as possible.
You're moving all over the place.
So Ren has had the most caffeine this morning.
[laughs]
All right, let me just hold up some of this cool new Tacticool Reloads merch.
Let me see if I can hold this still.
See if we can hold this merch still.
This-- did we plan this plug? We didn't plan this.
I'm gonna keep this fast. We just launched some new merch.
It's very high quality stuff it's based on Tacticool Reloads
We also have some other great shirt designs in our store:
If you like what we do here
it supports us, please go check it out.
And so here's the thing.
It's one thing to like--
Somebody's running down a hallway,
which I said was like the easiest thing to track.
Lots of big movements.
It's easy to just track things in by hand.
Somebody sitting still,
with their hands wiggling like a pixel at a time
in different directions
That's so perceptually hard to see frame by frame if you're tracking it by hand,
but in real life when you're seeing it in motion
if it's not there, it looks completely wrong.
So you're saying the challenge was literally just the motion tracking of her arms.
Yes.
Not the compositing it or anything else like that.
Just the motion tracking.
All these little separate pieces that you're doing to track on the arms
Not just the arm, but the wrist, and the hand, and the thumb, and the fingers, and all the little digits on 'em
That's a great example of a shot that looks completely average
[laughs]
And has a disproportionate amount of work put into it.
Pretty great VFX in this, all around.
Obviously the YouTube algorithm is gonna keep recommending these videos to you
But, if you don't want a robot controlling what you watch
hit the subscribe button and take control of your own fate.
Can't top that.
[laughs]
[maniacal laughter]
Finally, a good movie.
[laughs]
Come on down to my world and die, suckers!
Off to the North Pole!
[laughs]
Or South Pole, technically.
[laughs]
Hot Pole.
The Hot Pole--
This is the North Pole after global warming.
OK so did they just go down to hell?
This is good!
Yes.
Wait, it's getting-- Oh.
Yeah.
N64 vibes right now. --Yo, it's--
[laughs]
I'm gettin' N64 cover art vibes right now.
[laughs]
Man.
Wait I'm--I'm confused what's going on right now.
They're fighting Satan.
Wow, he's like--
Attack on Titan?
Whoa!
This is crazy.
And it's--
This is so insane.
The frame rates-- just imagine that shot.
Oh my goodness.
Woo wee!
Didn't even track that explosion. [laughs]
Just place stuff in there and-- [laughs]
Oh my god! It's literally just like--
[still laughing]
This is nephew grade visual effects right now.
Whoa.
Oh this is my favorite, like--
Hold on, wait--
Oh, this guy.
Oh, see that's CG --Malebolgia. Look at that mouth.
What?! --Now that's CG.
Okay way back in the day when this movie came out
like Nico and myself were working on the effects
In 10th grade
In 10th Grade.
Now I'm watching this, a movie that came out almost at the same time.
We could have done this.
It's a lot of work, but we could have done this.
We could have made it look like this.
So I had--I had Deus Ex Machina, which is this video that Sam and I made in 10th grade
Do you know how long this shot took to render?
Alright, this shot, by the way, took 30 days to render
[yells] Thirty days!
[laughs]
Thirty days!
Look at that
What a transition! [all yell]
Oh my god
This is so embarrassing, honestly
it's not embarrassing it's like-- [laughs]
Alright get my MP5 with my silencer [laughs]
Takes the silencer off! [laughs]
This is gonna be a loud one!
[all laugh]
He shoots the jet pack at the guy
What?!
Like, obviously--
I'm just saying we could have done the visual effects.
Obviously their choreography is a little bit tighter
[laughs]
Look at that
This is--this is what I'm talking about when--
Yeah, this is straight-up Spawn --When we're watching Spawn
and we're saying we could have done it, just look at this
this is like totally like Spawn level.
Oh, he shot my house!
[laughs]
They show it that I got burned
Wait is that a burning face? --See I'm like Spawn
I got turned into Spawn!
Dude, you're just flyin'.
This is some straight-up Spawn stuff right here --By the way,
This is literally Spawn, the movie.
Look at that. That's pretty cool.
How do you think we did that Matrix spin?
So, it looks like you're either...
Oh, you know what, I--I bet I know.
You are resting on a stool that can spin
and you're just like...
holding your arms and legs out and they're just spinning that
and the cameras staying still.
Yep. That's exactly what we're doing. --Is it?!
I'm literally just on a green screen on a stool
and Nico walks up and spins me
You just match the camera--
Track-- we match the camera to how fast I'm spinning on the stool
Anyways, Spawn, our movie-- --anyways, nephew VFX
basically the same.
but I think ultimately it's basically the exact same thing. --it's basically the same
[laughs]
I dunno. I didn't think it was too bad for a movie that's 22 years old.
I think it gets away with it 'cause the art direction is actually so awesome and crazy.
Yeah.
Aw that's-- that's insane.
Dude, like he's disintegrating and it's all like
fluidy and particle-y and then there's a skeleton
and then he's not there at all.
Honestly as a visual effects artist,
that shot has inspired the way I do action visual effects
it-- so profoundly.
I'm not lying, like every single time I do like, someone blowin' up in a shot
I'm always like thinking this shot.
By the way with this clip right now
We had a lot of comments asking for it
if you would like to see a clip,
please leave a comment below.
We read 'em all, they're great inspiration.
So wait, didn't they do something special with how they actually film this on set?
Wasn't he wearing like a special like blue suit?
Yeah.
that was emitting light?
So, Dr Manhattan's, you know, giving off blue light.
The thing is if you want to do that like, "fake"
like you want to be the blue light after the fact
it's a lot of work and it's really hard to make it look real
it's easier to have the actual light in the scene.
They had him wear an LED suit and he's wrapped in these LEDs
You can see it in that shot where he crushes the tank.
Right there. You can see the blue light shining off the guy's lab jacket.
Oh, that's true. Yeah. Okay.
The glow doesn't feel like glow though.
It's like a little dark.
It's-- yeah.
I think it's too strong in the blue channel.
I think that's really the issue, honestly.
I think when cameras process color if you have too strong of just blue,
it doesn't necessarily register as being bright.
We associate brightness with the color white.
Like regular lights have a spectrum where the LEDs will just give you a spike in one wavelength
We're just kinda getting like, one spike in the blue wavelength,
which, if another material doesn't have something in it to reflect that specific wavelength
it's just not gonna reflect anything.
Technologically speaking, we finally got to the point where we could actually
rig up LEDs on a suit for somebody to wear,
like, before this point it wasn't even technologically possible
So it was a great idea. It's not really a critique
it's just more like it's a painterly character in a real life movie
so you can kind of get away with it not being a hundred percent real
It's cool seeing them go towards a new technological step
today it could be even more strong as in terms of visual impact that would happen
Yeah, they've got pretty bright LEDs these days.
Alright hold up, hold up, hold up--
This show and this entire studio is supported by our patrons. patreon.com/corridordigital
We want to give them a thank you. [names onscreen]
And thanks to all of these people!
All of 'em. If you'd like to support what we do in the studio
and you'd like to be able to vote for clips that we react to in the show
please consider supporting us on Patreon patreon.com/corridordigital
There's a link in the description below
Thank you so much to all of you that do.
It gives us independence from the ads on YouTube
and lets us make what we want to make.
And see you guys next week!