That shot is incredible. You can't do fire like that as visual effects back then. There was not the technology for it.
What?
What's it going to take?
Hold the phone. The kid is a 100% CG
Hey, what's up, welcome back to another episode of visual effects artist react
We're still practicing social distancing and I also just realized I can utilize the entire length of this couch
We got some dragons and fire. We got some old-school VFX. I've got my smiles and my frowns and my raised eyebrows
I got a new one. Check this one out
Okay, so "Reign of Fire". I haven't seen this movie in forever, but I remember loving it.
What a cool movie
It's the dragon apocalypse
They dig deep enough and they find a bunch of dragons and the dragons take over the world
Everything you want to see in a movie, this movie has it. Brutal post-apocalyptic soldiers, dragons
We're about to see this shot. A shot that's so good.
It's stuck with me for life
Dude look at that fire. Look at how that fire is not interacting with the wind from the dragon at all
Shush. Come on
Come now, Wren
That shot is incredible. You can't do fire like that as visual effects back then
There was not the technology for it and like the lighting on the Dragon was super good to watch. Watch all the people get
engulfed by the flame at the bottom. How do you guys think they did this convoy shot?
So it definitely looks like that fire is actually there for real
Like you're getting proper occlusion of the foreground elements as they get engulfed by fire
Like there's a really good depth mat going on with CG fire, but this is obviously real.
Looking at the scale of the fire,
I would say that's miniatures.
I think you're right.
So, are we talking about like a robot controlled flamethrower?
I think they probably just flamed this shot for real and they just
replaced whatever is holding the
flamethrower with a dragon, like the dragon is coming at the end of this whole process.
So you talk about a man in green pajamas.
Not necessarily. Not necessarily.
I got some research.
So first and foremost, the fire is real, but they actually have
a caterpillar, not the bug but like one of the things that scoops like a backhoe on the end of it as a giant
Propane flamethrower.
Okay. Okay.
It shoots liquid propane. So there's taking that there going *Voosh*
well, just you know lighting up that set.
That means that the scale has to be at the scale of a freaking tractor.
Like a one to two scale kind of situation. You can freeze frame this shot
and if you line up what an excavator looks like and about how high it can raise its front arm,
you would probably imagine then that this couch is probably how big those cars are in the shot
and and that's why I like the fire looks so good is because
they're matching the scale of the shot. Really really well obviously doing it
One-to-one would be like do they even make flamethrowers this big?
Oh, yeah. They did a bunch of one-to-one shots.
They went through eight tons of liquid propane in this movie.
Eight tons
So, I mean imagine you write out your movie budget and you submit it and you're like "we need funds for about eight tons of liquid propane"
and then the executives are like "This is good. This would be a good movie."
I distinctly remember this movie having some really cool animation on the dragons. do you like
"Oh, man, this dragon means business". And this came before the dragons in Harry Potter, but they specifically inspired the Dragons from Harry Potter
There's actually some really cool things that came into play when they were trying to create the dragons
So they first started with like a komodo dragon
You know the real thing like a lizard style dragon
Just doesn't look mean enough and what they did is they went back and remodeled it so like the body will kind of hung below
the wings like a wasp.
They also put all like all the holes in the wings so you can like see those tatters and those tears and see the spikes
because that all makes it look more mean and rugged. It's all about that silhouette.
And once again like these CG dragons look really good because they're almost always in silhouette or lit with like very specific directionnal seam lighting
That's the Jurassic Park reference horn
I'm referencing the Jurassic Park T-rex because they were smart and they let the scene in a way that didn't require them to use
really fancy physically based rendering.
That Jurassic Park horn
I'm glad we honked it because there's a couple shots here that I think are really good examples of it
This is a really good example, having objects that can include it. We have all the atmosphere in the scene as well
Dude that shot through the grate there. So it's obscured. That's nuts
Yeah, a simple technique to really make the Dragons feel larger is simply have it break frames
That was something they did all the time for Game of Thrones
you can never really see the entirety of a dragon. The wings were usually clipping the tops or sides of the framing and that just
kind of gives a sense of like "Wow, this is so big the camera can't even capture at all"
Like this was like the first time we saw legit dragons in movies
I mean we obviously had dragon heart before that but you know, that wasn't like a badass dragon. These are badass dragons.
I want to watch this movie again.
I do too. Please leave a comment suggesting some other visual effects that we should look at.
There's nothing else for us to react to and we need your help
Are either of you guys
Basketball fans and have been watching the new last dance
Michael Jordan documentary? Halfway through every episode, they have like commercials that are really funny because they're like,
"We're a mid-90s news broadcast, but we're talking about the future."
"This is the kind of stuff that ESPN will eventually make a documentary about. They'll call it something like the last dance"
"It's gonna be lit. You ain't even know what that means yet"
I didn't notice any visual effects were being done until the final commercial.
"That's another documentary for another day"
"You're starting to sound like Kenny Mayne"
"And this is starting to sound like a State Farm commercial"
But I was watching I was like what's wrong with his lips? What is going on here? This is an effect
I didn't anticipate. What I initially thought was them setting up old cameras and trying to mimic the old broadcast style.
No, these were actually originally broadcast back in the 90s
Those are real sports news anchors, but they're making them say other things
So when I looked into it, the articles that I've already been written about this they say they did it with deep fakes.
The problem is that no one really knows what that means
Nico, you know what it means.
Just doing the effects of these faces isn't a deep fake
Replacing the mouth isn't a deep fake. A deep fake is when that computer can basically
repaint a face by hand using its knowledge of, you know
what thousands and thousands of pictures of that face looks like, so the whole face is an AI reconstruction. It uses deep learning.
That's why it's called a deep fake, like just manipulating or re-mophing or retargeting a face. That's not a deep fake
I don't think there's any machine learning involved in these shots
I think they are filming a mouth and they're trying to match up the cadence and the rhythm of the words to the chin movements of
the news anchor and they're just replacing his mouth with new lips.
See. Watch closely. Sometimes the lips slide up and down the face and the cheeks here don't react.
There's nothing happening the cheeks that match the lips.
You can kind of see almost like a soft
feathered mask around the lips and they kind of float there in that face and that soft feathered mask
But the part where she smiles where she turns and looks at the other news anchor at the end and smiles
that's going from the composited footage to the real footage when she turns her head there and
It stays real for the rest of that moment. Here comes so that's fake and then boom that's real. Okay
Yeah, also kind of notice how the dude's lips and like immediately around his lips are very clear
The clarity is high and it doesn't match the graininess of the rest of his head.
And, you know they could have deep faked the entire face then just cut out the mouth and stuck the mouth back on to. That is a possibility.
I mean that was what I initially thought specifically because they're saying they did a deep fake.
So I was going in under the assumption that they actually did do some sort of deep fake.
You are the deep fake expert here and you're saying it's not a deep fake.
The reason I don't think they did a deep fake and cut the lips and stucked the lips back in is because of the teeth.
The teeth look pretty good. In fact, they look very clear
and yeah
you can have clear teeth in a deep fake, but it's just
something about the the clarity and the way the lips move across and it doesn't look like a deep it to me.
Remember when you gave 2pac a center tooth? Yeah and called him "Tooth Pac"
So now we are looking at "Terminator: Dark Fate" and it's the newest Terminator movie.
There's some crazy effects throughout this whole thing
In fact,
There's like there's almost too many effects to talk about, so we're just gonna look at the two main terminators that are in this
scene here
That's cool
The reason why I love that shot right there is because they had the gun there the whole time,
but the bag was fake. Your brain doesn't have a chance to realize the bag isn't real before it starts getting all
amorphous and obviously fake, but that feels like a shot that was designed by a visual effects artist as
opposed to a director without any experience with visual effects.
The guy forgot to take his green-screen suit off in the background.
Wait, they're gonna give him Terminator arms later.
I thought that was legit a mistake
Look at those beautiful hits. God the CG in this movie is nuts
I really like Tim Miller's work just because his understanding of like
spectacle and visuals is so on point after doing all those videos with the blur studio.
That's right. Yeah, Tim Miller like he pioneered that crazy cinematic look
that video games back in the day had, and he turned into an actual movie director. He directed Deadpool.
They had a tiny budget but his knowledge of visual effects was so deep that they were able to stretch
all of that budget out and make a full-length Deadpool movie with tons of effects everywhere
They're very very ballsy with their digital doubles in this now there's like straight-up there's one right there
Yeah, there's a lot of digital doubles going on here
Sometimes they look great and sometimes it comes down to that physics thing
We need them to move in a way that things don't quite move and like it stands out a little bit
Like that looked like with the leg break there looks great like from a rendering point of view
The Lighting's perfect. The cloth looks great.
But like then the part when he jumps up to like the
scaffolding, like he jumps a little fast, a little weird where things can't quite accelerate like that
It looks weird because we are not used to seeing real superpowers
How do how do you move that fast and kind of looks wrong?
But it's because we've never seen anyone jump 30 feet like that before
Yeah
I think a good example is like the Boston Dynamics
demos when you see the mechanics required to operate a body of a certain weight.
You see the impact and strength that it's required and if a guy was like hopping around on these beams of giant robot,
he's probably gonna be knocking it over, bending, breaking this stuff as he's connecting with it.
Yeah, that's obviously a ton of work and also I don't think people really care.
You know if you sat down you're like, "All right. We're gonna make the physics perfect." I don't think the audience's would really care.
They're watching a robots fight like the point
trying to make is that it's always been the case of movies that physics get violated.
Okay. Sure
Oh man
Yeah, this is what I wanted to see here.
I was just like, "Oh God".
I love the ferrofluid effect.
Look at that crazy stuff. Yeah
See that kick there where she went into that that cabinet, like that looks good
in my opinion. That had the right kind of speed and momentum.
The head bonks, oh that is brutal
So this is the thing where they actually did several different takes, one with the real actor like when she's like slamming the thing into
his head, she's actually hitting a pad that's on the ground
so she's able to give all of her force into the the actual motion of it
and then they filmed a separate plate with her not in it of him just kind of reacting and then they add all the visual
effects with a digi double and then composited it all together.
I feel like they do a pretty good job of like selling the kind of power
someone with an incredible amount of strength has when fighting another person with an incredible amount of strength.
Sarah Connor: "That future never happened, because I stopped it."
I don't even think it's de-aging man.
It's just, I'm watching this and I'm just like this is unreal
Look at that.
We're looking at Sarah Connor as she was in Terminator 2.
We're looking at John Connor as he was in Terminator 2.
They even got like the perfect like 90's sunglasses for Arnold
The BTS guy: "It's by far the hardest work we've done"
(Bald)
The kid is a 100% CG?
Okay. There is a real person there
with the headband
needed the full body track and in-clothing track for some reason.
I think they were just like "We want the option to do full CG in case something goes crazy."
Yeah, so his hair is CG there. You know,
it seems like an easy thing, "Oh keep the hair for real and then replace the face"
But how like the the hair is leaving a shadow on the face? How it interacts with the face?
Sometimes it's easier just to make the hair CG as well.
I'll say it's nice watching a VFX shot like this that just works.
That completely surpasses the uncanny valley for me.
Yeah, this is perfect.
Like nothing about that is triggering my evolutionary senses of like "that's not a human".
Also, I love the casting of the Arnold body double because he looks exactly like Arnold.
Hold on
We just found our next piece of merchandise, frickin chin strap, a skull cap
motion-tracking corridor hats
If you want to get the latest in street wear, you should wear one of those.
Hercules: "My strength alone can't do it. Is there anything you can do to help me?"
That clip guys. It's one shot. It's one shot
Starring Lou Ferrigno.
Those pecs could gouge your eyes out.
But, I don't know what this effect is yet.
I don't even know what you're trying to show us here.
Optical cleansing effects with light effects. Yep. Here we go do that rainbow square
Is it going big? Using magic to make him giant
Yeah, no green screens here. This is, he's just grown giant.
Wait
I know it. I know what is going on. I know what is going on. I know what is going.... I got it.
The camera is just moving closer.
Yeah. But here's the thing. That's how it would actually physically work.
If you were to suddenly get large, you're now looking up at the thing
which is the same exact perspective shift as pushing the camera into that person.
So it's pretty obvious how they did this. The cameras just moving closer to him on the beach,
so it looks like he's getting bigger.
But it's a separate shot.
Well, the foreground there is probably just a single
picture that's been stuck over the frame and you can tell because she's not moving at all the woman casting the spell and they cover
that up with the magic square rainbow
so you can't tell she's moving. That helps sell the scale and then
beyond that little still frame at the foreground, is just a camera pushing in towards Hercules as it gets bigger.
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