Oh *laughter*
This is everything I'd want in a film
This was such a fun sequence to work on and let me tell you what is really great about this shot
Welcome to another episode of VFX artist's react, we're gonna jump right in with one of the most famous visual effects shots on the Internet
Alright, let's see it. Hey, what's up? Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dot net
Wait Niko are you serious right now? This is a classic though. No no no this is, why are we even talking about this
This is a great tutorial. no no seriously, why are we doing tutorials?
I thought this was for like movies and what, not TV shows
Maybe this is just bad. Honestly, why are we why are we doing this?
What's going on guys? What do you uh, what are you doing? Oh, hey Andrew
Oh I know what that is
Hey, I think your renders done yeah, yeah, I think he's right this is pretty bad
Hey, what's up Andrew Kramer here and welcome back to another very exciting episode of VFX artists react
We have a very special guest today Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot
dotnet
One of the most legendary visual effects artists on the planet and he's gonna be sitting on the couch with us today
Reacting to other movies and TV shows the visual effects whether they're great or bad or whatever
We're gonna talk about we're gonna break 'em down. I'm very excited to check out the show in person. Let's jump in
That shot when he busts into the Oval Office and gets everybody is just so good
This is one of the coolest scenes pretty much ever
How do you guys think they pull this off with like with?
Having a guy be there then not be there then be somewhere else and not be there
So I'm willing to bet Nightcrawler himself has never actually in any of these shots. Yeah, I think that probably makes most sense
He's probably the green screen element another interesting way they could do this is with like stunt doubles
So one guy does the shot here and the kick and then they cut over here
That's a different stunt double, and that way you could sort of have that continuity of action
Well, like take this couch shot, right? He you know flips the guy up if that is like a stunt man
he could just do the effect and then just jump down behind the couch and hide and then you could paint it out just a
Couple of frames. What do you think?
They're doing for all those crazy like atmospheric smoky effects every time he teleports so it's probably like a really high
particle simulation
But it is really nice the way that the color of his jacket
Sort of comes out in those those particles that are close to him
you can see like when he
Teleports, there's like a secondary animation that happens like the particles move or another simulation on top of the initial one
Yeah, this was a really popular effect when it came out
I remember people asking about hey, how do you do the Nightcrawler effect another thing?
Actually that I realized that it's probably a CG tail
that was just wondering about the tail that tail has a personality, especially when he grabs the knife and he gets shot its like (wren grunts)
the best visual effects happen when you're practical elements and your your CG elements are tied together as well as possible if you have no
Practical elements your visual effects don't look good
Even if you need to do something with a green-screen
Don't do everything with a green screen because you'll be able to get more believability if there's something really tangible in the shot
Just watch and tell me if you guys notice something weird.
Tell me if you guys to see anything weird you see it
See it are we looking at the fire? It's hard to catch. Catch What. Is there a flicker?
You could say that we're getting some frame frame duplications as you're going frame by frame. Oh
Oh ( everyone gasps )
oops
Yeah, that one made it into the final movie. No, way! Wait hold on but it's just the debris that's missing here
Yeah, this couldn't have been on the VFX house. There's no way that you guys are misunderstanding Magneto's power
So here's what can happen in a shot like this at the end of a movie
Anybody who's worked on visual effects knows that when the movie is locked. It's just like a vague way of saying the movies not locked
With so much crazy stuff going on
It could have got shifted one frame. Or listen, renders fail and that one shot didn't get rendered. Mistakes happen.
Everyone makes mistakes, we make tons of mistakes all the time that we're all human. Even the big-budget movies. We didn't even notice it
It's not like we're out making houses or something dangerous. Oh
Oh Yes
(inhales with excitement)
I know this shot. Okay, this the shot continues to blow my mind to this day. Wait, so there it is. There it is. Boom
That's magic that's the magic right there.
Remember taking the VHS of this while I was in high school
And playing it back and just having my mind blown- just the cinematic importance of this shot
What exactly happened here? So, we're looking at her run up the stairs and the camera is tracking with her, okay
Yeah, and then at some point we're behind her, the camera is now behind her over the shoulder
That's when visual effects shots are the best is when they are straight-up magic tricks and you just slap on
Oh, wait, what look at the end of the shot. It's not just a throwaway my
Some storytelling right there. How did they do this? This is a shot. I really dug into like the behind-the-scenes
But how do you guys think they did if you don't know alright, so they probably had some sort of
double
Watch your hand reach out. It doesn't look like it's perfectly in sync. I think I see it
I said I'm gonna throw this guess so right now it's just a shot of her cameras in front
Camera guys running backwards filming her. Mm-hmm straight forward, right?
So now what I think they're doing
Is they have another shot that gotten they went up to the mirror like with green screen behind it and they're pulling back from that
at roughly the same speed they were going down the hallway and all they're doing is then compositing the footage they have
Into that spot and thankfully their motion is kind of lining up
So that's just footage for reaching up the knob in this real-life version
Now look at her pointer, for example her hand position in the mirror is different than her hand position in real life
That's not an actual reflection of her that's just another element for reaching for it. So knowing how this shot was created
You're exactly right. Yes
There's no mirror in the shot at all
Yes
Green or blue?
over where the mirror would be the most believable part of this entire shot is the smudge is on the actual mirror you can actually
See, you know how mirrors have that little yeah edge
That kind of creates a slight angle shift on the refraction
So what they've done is they've done a distortion over the plate that's behind it
So that it looks like it's behind that glass. You see how it's like. Yeah. I'm refracting that edge right there
It's the best thing about visual effects. It's storytelling
Visual effects coming together making something that is even better
So, let me set this up, okay so Air Force One Harrison Ford present in the United States
The airplane is running out of fuel and they need to get off the airplane as fast as possible before it crashes into the ocean
Now, unfortunately, there's some problems
And so of course
I'll get off your plane
The summersault here at the end
It's tough. It's I would say the problem the water is not high resolution enough. It looks very misty
very smoke like right here and it sort of
sort of Miniaturizes the effect. I think the visual effects industry has gotten so good at water
Splashes and huge scale of water simulations that when you see this sort of smoky looking water
It's lacking any detail, but actually, the plane actually disappears a little bit so you can see the horizon. Oh
You can see the sunset, but you can't see the airplane in there
It doesn't help that the shots like two minutes long
Yeah, they look at this stuff probably in the same way
they look at their own shot and think the amount of time it will take to pull that off versus the other 20 shots that
Have to get done and there's a definitely a balancing act to doing this.
Oh Man alright, we're talking about that force awakens now, why might this specific shot be special to us Andrew?
I and a team of hologram artists helped to work on the sequence. You see here.
This was such a fun sequence to work on I worked on it with some really awesome people
so this is my favorite part of the shot right there where it's like that tiny little thing and
Expands out into this really high detail thing that fills the whole room
We built it as a single element
mainly because in the shot it has to come out and then it has to
Expand if you see some of the planets have a little bit more density
So we use like an additive material so that it feels a little bit more thick little hotspots that are out of focus
Yeah, I'm loving that out-of-focus bokeh. They're anamorphic. Yes
They used a lot of the original lenses when you film with an anamorphic lens, you're sort of
Squeezing the image through a lens to fit onto a square piece of 35 millimeter film and then it's being projected
Sort of at a two-to-one ratio and when it gets stretched out because of the way that it's filmed you get this sort of taller
Looking bouquet element rather than a round
Bouquet element you guys know that you can add depth of field and post using plugins and depth
We want to have that nice little stretch
so that it matches the rest of the film one of the things I got to give a shout out to is the
Team doing the 3d match moving on all these shots
Like look at this shot. What are you tracking? I'm tracking the oxygen
The 3d tracking process
involves analyzing
2d points across an entire sequence and then from those 2d points you sort of
Recreate where the camera is based on how those points would be visible if it was really shot through a camera
I usually do all the camera tracking here
It's like okay, I'm gonna stay here for a day and just track dozens of points manually
Nothing is more special than receiving a project with perfect 3d tracking data
All I can say is I have a real appreciation for everybody else's brilliant visual effects work being analyzed by people
frame by frame
If you guys are wanting to see us react to any like clips or movies that you know
Are your favorites or like good incredible shots or even into like shots and it looks so good
Please leave a comment below it helps give us ideas and inspiration for it
We can talk about in our videos and here's enough of that back to the clips
But why is there a dinosaur in the temple
After coming out of temple, if I'm honest, I don't quite remember it being as ridiculous
The only thing I feel it really technically falls apart on is the comping of the people into those shots
So this is what we would call like a 2d shadow that you would add on to sort of imply
lighting nowadays, they'll actually have
Objects on sets to block out the lights here. You can really tell that the Lighting's actually not changing on
Adrien Brody at all. They're just moving like a shadow a mask around him
Yeah to try to give the effect like it looks very very fake
I'm just gonna go out here and say I'm not a big fan of this movie
I think it exhibits a lot of the same problems that the Hobbit exhibits Peter Jackson
It's a lot of time on moments that he gets been a lot of time on
Overindulgent use of visual effects can be in its own way a form of bad visual effects
I mean Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Rings trilogy and frankly. You know what?
Yeah, I do whatever he wants. You can have a few Brontosauruses. It's okay
Dude I love Independence day like for the longest time was like my favorite movie
Hands down. same here. This is everything I want in a film. Jeff Goldblum. times up
Good old crowds running. Yeah, that looks like real fire cuz it is real fire
Did they just kill a bunch of extras what they actually did is they built a miniatures and they turned the whole thing sideways
Lit the explosion underneath and fire rolls up through it, but you're filming it from that perspective
So it feels the fires moving sideways God brilliant super cool is the exposure of the fire
Correct for what we should be seeing on a street. No, they had to shoot that fire in slow motion
They probably had to stuff down the aperture of the lens to get everything in focus
So that makes us so that everything's really dark. So even though the fireball is incredibly bright it all shows up exposed
But if you're shooting at night any sort of fire is gonna be so bright
It's gonna clip the end result I think is worth it because you see like the really good detail of the fire itself
It's definitely a stylistic choice
Getting hit by debris, space debris look out. Oh no my spaceship
If there's ever a movie to watch the theaters like this is it I watched this in the theater and it was amazing
Fake and it looks so real, the spacesuits aren't real the spacesuits
there are entirely CG and
The actors are in like a kind of a fake spacesuit that has like tracking markers on it - I get the motion
Right, but it's crazy how realistic it looks like the spacesuits do not look fake whatsoever
in fact after
The fact like I thought the spacesuits are real and they were just comped in like everything else around the most fake
I didn't know just the faces were real and that was it. So even though this looks incredibly realistic
Technically in outer space would not look nearly this good the ambient light in space
There is no ambient light you have the harshest most direct
Lighting you can possibly have because the only light that you're getting is from the Sun
So anytime you're looking at like the dark side of any of the people here, you wouldn't really be able to see it
You know a little bit of creative license. It just makes the shot a little bit more nice to look at
Yes absolutely, to anyone who's ever like getting into visual effects
And you don't know where to start literally go to Video Copilot dotnet slash tutorials and watch every video on the website Andrew
Andrew's done something very special for
Visual effects artists across the world that's sharing knowledge and techniques on how to do this stuff with your home computer
What a positive wholesome message. This is a positive episode
I thought we're gonna trash these movies. If you guys would love to check out Andrews work, of course he has YouTube channel Video Copilot
But also Video Copilot net definitely go check it out
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Mine, yeah
What were you thinking man he was sitting right there the whole time