Hello everyone, I’m Andrew, and before we go full steam ahead into 2018,
we’re gonna take one last look back at the year in film.
Kya and Dev have already tackled the best and worst movies of 2017,
so for my video, I want to explore some of last year’s most outstanding special effects.
Today’s FX are so convincing that half the time we don’t even realize they’re there.
I mean, I definitely didn’t walk away from 'Logan' thinking
‘Man, they did a great job inserting a completely digital Hugh Jackman into that car chase.’
but I was blown away when I realized just how much of this gritty, bare-bones movie was rendered on a computer.
Modern CGI is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to stand out from the pack,
no matter how many millions of polygons you throw at a problem.
But last year had some of the most exciting, innovative, and awesome VFX work we’ve ever seen,
which is why we’re counting down.
The Best Special Effects of 2017.
When it comes to gorgeous special effects,
it’s hard to top the visual feast that is ‘Blade Runner: 2049,’
thanks in no small part to its use of
Modern Miniatures.
Shout out to George Lucas, I guess.
Yeah, 'cause he did use them in 'Episode I.'
He DID use them in 'Episode I.' Happy?
Denis Villeneuve delivered a master class in sci-fi filmmaking,
and while it may have underperformed at the box office,
the people who did see ‘2049’ aren’t going to forget it anytime soon.
There are impressive effects from start to finish,
like the incredible hologram love scene,
and a digital recreation of Sean Young that blows Grand Moff Tarkin out of the airlock.
Wait, what?
You may fire when ready.
But the most striking thing about ‘2049’ is its innovative use of one of the oldest FX techniques around:
Miniatures.
Now, if you've seen our 'Star Wars' video on VFX, you know where we're going with this.
To create the future LA skyline in the original ‘Blade Runner,’
FX legend Douglas Trumbull filled entire rooms with massive models made of brass and hacked-together parts from commercial model kits.
For ‘2049,’ Villeneuve hired Weta Workshop to recreate the same miniature magic with state-of-the-art techniques like computer modelling and 3D printing.
But despite all the high-tech help, the soul of model-making is still in the tiny, meticulous details.
Every window and fire escape on the 37 buildings around the L.A.P.D. headquarters was painstakingly placed by hand,
just like the decayed wreckage around the trash mesa,
and the monolithic masterpiece of Wallace Tower, which required a huge model to portray the two mile-tall building at 1/600th scale.
That measurement there is a human. It's gonna be a very tiny scale to work at.
By using models instead of pure CG,
Weta was able to capture the flaws of filming real objects in real space.
It has all of the inherent flaws of filming something. Real surfaces, illuminated with real light, with all the issues of tiny specular reflections...
It’s a lot of effort,
but those imperfections are what sells the illusion that these relatively tiny models exist as massive skyscrapers on the screen.
If you need a craggy-faced rock monster for your superheroes to punch,
standard Hollywood procedure is to slap some reflective dots on a B-list actor’s face and call it a day.
We all know Victor Von Doom was a freaking tragedy. And frick off, Steppenwolf.
It's the name of a band, isn't it? Frick right off.
But with the right performer and requisite expertise,
some studios use mocap to create living, breathing characters out of nothing but pixels.
A world founded upon faith and understanding.
Weta Digital brought an old animation technique called “rotoscoping” into the modern age with their groundbreaking work on Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings.’
They were among the first effects houses to use motion-capture technology to transfer an actor’s real life performance to their CGI counterpart,
and judging from their work on the ‘Planet of the Apes’ reboot series, they’re still number one in the game.
Just look at the way Caesar goddamn talks.
My wife.
The revolutionary ape might only exist on a hard drive in New Zealand,
but in the movie, that’s really Andy Serkis’s performance you’re seeing.
He’s not just doing the voice, he’s physically there, on-set, interacting with his fellow actors.
Not to mention, acting like a freakin' monkey!
You're not just representing the character, you are the character for real.
Andy Serkis is such an incredible actor, he has such an understanding of Caesar from the inside.
Over the course of their ‘Apes’ trilogy, Weta constantly improved their techniques and technology,
like introducing infrared sensors to capture performances on outdoor location shoots,
far from the controlled lighting of a traditional mocap studio.
They came up with the technique for ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ in 2014,
and when ‘War’ broke out last year,
they had enough confidence in the tech to bring the apes even further into the wilderness.
‘War’ didn’t have a huge breakthrough, but that’s okay.
VFX is an iterative field built on what came before,
and the film is the crowning achievement in Weta’s long quest to make you empathise with a damn, dirty, CGI ape.
Our next entry comes from Marvel Studios,
whose effects work is always solid, but usually pretty unremarkable.
At least, until ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ and its subtle use of
Fractals.
Nearly a dozen VFX houses were involved in the finished product of ‘Vol. 2.’
One company worked exclusively on Rocket and Groot,
another handled the perfect golden world of the Sovereign,
while a third had the delicate task of de-aging Kurt Russell by thirty years.
And when it came to Ego’s celestial form,
it took three separate effects houses to bring the living planet to life.
Usually, the only math involved with an MCU release is how many solid gold boats the execs will be able to buy with the profits,
but lately they’ve been experimenting with fractals.
Thank heavens!
They require about three years of college to explain in full,
but in the most simple terms a fractal uses a mathematical formula to create an intricate, interesting design.
It's like pottery made from algorithms.
The more you zoom in, the more complex it gets, all the way until infinity.
Think 'Ant-Man' shrinking in the last sequence of the movie.
It’s a hard concept to wrap your brain around,
and it’s even harder to incorporate into a big blockbuster movie.
‘Age of Ultron’ used fractals to represent abstract information,
and ‘Dr. Strange’ incorporated them in its trippy Multiverse segment,
I didn't really get to see the fractals on my airplane viewing of 'Dr. Strange,' but trust me, they're there and they're beautiful.
but ‘Vol 2.’ presented the unique challenge of building them into solid architecture.
Fractals are chaotic by nature,
they’re literally used to graph processes in Chaos Theory,
Sitting her in a car by myself, talking to myself. That's Chaos Theory.
but you need structure to create plausible environments like Ego’s palace and his underground caverns,
not to mention the insides of Kurt Russell's skull.
Which, I dunno about you, but I've been dying to see.
So Weta Digital came up with a method called ‘the plague,’
using computers to grow coral-like fractal structures all over Ego’s domain.
It takes a lot of work to build a CGI world, especially one made out of math homework,
and it’s even harder when you’re dealing with three separate effects companies,
each in a different time zone with completely different software and workflows.
But the end result is one of the most awesome effects we’ve seen in 2017.
You people have issues!
Of course I have issues. That's my freakin' father!
Now, as impressive as Ego was, we still have a soft spot for the real stuff.
That’s why we’re gonna close out our retrospective with some
Practical Magic
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ is one of the most stunning war movies ever seen on film.
From the cinematography to the sound design,
it’s crafted to make you feel like you’re actually living through the massive evacuation.
And since the ‘Dark Knight’ director is a stickler for realism,
he used actual World War II vehicles and equipment to maintain the immersion.
We really focused on that as one of the most important aspects of the film. Putting the audience in that seat.
He shot the vast majority of the dogfight scenes with three real Supermarine Spitfire planes.
There are only 54 airworthy Spitfires left in the world, but the plane that won the Battle of Britain has stood the test of time.
Nolan’s planes were able to twist, roll and dive like it’s 1940,
all with a 50-pound IMAX camera attached to the wing.
No one has ever put an IMAX camera on a fixed-wing and gone air-to-air at 200 miles an hour.
Make it look like it's shot on a GoPro with the quality of an IMAX camera.
Speaking of mean machines, the final entry on our list is ‘Baby Driver.’
One of my favorite movies of the year, despite Kevin Spacey's appearance.
Director Edgar Wright put his actors through intense driving training,
so they could pull off the insane stunts and intricate maneuvers worthy of Hollywood’s greatest car chases.
Of course, there were plenty of stunt drivers involved as well,
but either way, most of the action is real.
Wright kept the green screen and stunt rigs to a bare minimum,
in order to capture the authentic vibe of classic chase scenes like ‘Bullitt’ and ‘The French Connection.’
All to the dopest soundtrack I've ever heard in a movie, and synced up to it so that's bonus points to you, Mr. Wright.
The action isn’t as bombastic as your average ‘Fast and Furious’ movie,
but somehow a tight 180 turn in an alley is more thrilling than a dozen CGI cars falling out of a plane.
That’s because we have an easier time connecting when we can see the actors actually driving.
They’re real stunts, putting real people in real danger, and it just pumps your adrenaline up.
and they immerse us in the movie more than a thousand computer-animated crashes ever could.
I wanted you to watch the movie and really feel the car chases, like you're living vicariously through Ansel's character.
Visual effects have come a long way over the years,
and 2017 saw some of the most impressive digital feats ever committed to film.
But as our last two entries have shown,
no matter how fancy computer graphics get,
Sometimes your best bet is to keep it real.