And the Oscar goes to ...
Interstellar.
Ex Machina.
The Jungle Book.
Blade Runner 2049.
First Man.
Here are this years nominees for "Achievement in Visual Effects"
The best way to start, I think, is just by you telling me who you are, what you do ...
Okay.
Well, my name is Niko Pueringer.
I'm one of the founders of Corridor Digital, which is a YouTube channel.
And we specialize in doing VFX action-heavy, spectacle-heavy YouTube videos.
Cool.
So we're here today to talk about the movies that were nominated for an Oscar for Visual Effects.
The whole thing with this movie is that it's made to look like it was done in one take.
It's not entirely revolutionary and unexplored before, but they're doing more complicated
setups and scenes while still trying to maintain that one take look.
The challenge they have with that is that these effects need to be invisible.
I would love to talk about this long run scene.
If you look at the, the behind the scenes shot and then the actual shot of the film,
you know, first you might notice like, oh, there's some extra explosions added
or there's some extra soldiers.
But what you might not notice is things like the tire tracks from the car that they're
driving have been removed or the dust being kicked up from the tires.
And that's much, much more complicated than just adding another explosion in the background.
The challenge with 1917 is doing these invisible effects, but doing them for long takes
and then having these hidden cuts be seamless.
Because the moment you get one of these little details wrong, you break the world.
So I think looking at the scene, what will probably surprise most people looking at it,
is that the majority of the scene, the vast majority of it, is 100 percent CG.
The stormtroopers, the speeders, the sand, all that kind of stuff.
There's a phrase for things like the dust clouds, and the physics and things
like that — the smoke.
It’s usually referred to as dynamics.
That's one of the first, very first giveaways as a CG scene, is looking at the smoke and
being kind of, like, painterly quality where it’s not quite realistic – And we’re
just kinda getting to the point where we can kinda match real life with that.
I think a lot of the hype that I heard was definitely around these animals.
But you were talking about how it's really setting that impressed you.
I’d the biggest thing that stands out to me — in any of these environment shots — is
the vast number of actual objects on screen.
Like this, this shot of Mufasa and Simba walking through the grass as we focus away from the
spider and onto them — there's thousands of blades of grass in this scene.
There's leaves — there's hundreds of leaves on the bush from the camera, and so all of
these things need to have an incredible amount of detail.
That’s what stands out to me as being incredible here.
Yeah, the animation is great.
The rendering?
Impeccable.
The lighting simulation?
Great.
Wonderful.
You know, all that’s awesome.
But the fact that all of it comes together cohesively?
That’s way crazier to me.
So there’s a couple things about Avengers that – that are really ...
impressive.
One of the first ones is the, the time travel suits.
All those suits that you see them wearing, those are completely CG,
and they look completely realistic.
You cannot tell that they are fake.
They replace the entire body except for the head.
And that's insane.
Why would they do that?
Well, it takes a lot of time to construct these costumes for these characters, and it's
only being used for five minutes of the film.
Is there anything like particular on the suits that made them stand out to you?
So I was scrutinizing the suits when I watched this scene again and the only things that
really give them as being CG — and you have to really be looking for it and know
what you're looking for – is when they're interacting with something real.
So a suit really and only interacts with two real things.
The neckline of the actor and the feet on the ground.
You have to fake the shadow from the suit being cast on the ground.
And there's a lot of nuances to that.
But ... Nobody’s analyzing the neck lines.
Right.
You know, to me, out of all the films I've been nominated for an Oscar here for Best
Visual Effects, The Irishman has the most unique, brand-new technology.
The reason they're going through all this trouble ... is because they want to tell a
story of a character throughout his entire life – and they need to get him at his,
you know, when he was 60, when he was 50, when he was 40, when he was 30.
How do we let this guy shoot a movie like this with actors not wearing any markers or
tracking suits?
And yet we somehow need to capture a full 3D-model of the face for every frame of the
movie – basically a full real time 3D motion capture.
They just lit the scene with infrared lights from the "witness cameras," they’re called.
So they're seeing the scene with perfect lighting.
And we can't see with our eyeballs, the actors can't see the infrared light.
The main camera that they're filming the scene with can't see the infrared light, and it
was really, really smart.
They did encounter one problem, though, and that is: old cars.
Old car windshields and glass, they used to use lead when they'd make the glass.
Lead doesn't let infrared light through.
So, they actually had remove all the windshields from the cars at any time to see a car in
the film that windshield, the reflection of the windshield,
that's fake.
Do people really care about this award?
You know, These are just five films, and a good chunk of them are just kind of doing
the same techniques we've already done.
In fact, when comes to visuals, there's so much going on in the space – every year
you're building off of the knowledge and the tools that you've gained from the previous year.
And so these, these more advanced techniques that they're using for these movies, you know,
it's lending the visuals to looking a lot more photo real ...
but we've seen it before.
The Oscars, it's good recognition, but there is so much more that drives an artist – at
least a visual effects artist – outside of hoping to win an award like an Oscar.