VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 221

Wa. — Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Visual Effects Artist React. We got a bunch of crazy clips for you today. — Wa! — That is insane. — You've probably seen a thumbnail. It has

something in it that you want to check out. — The Moana trailer. Come on, — take that top off, Rock. — The story has just begun. Look, Disney, they can't stop making their movies realistic. — This looks just like the original. — When did the first Moana come out? — I think it was 2014 or 2016 or something like that. — 2016. 10 years. Only 10 years now. Disney is literally just going, "We had a hit 10 years ago. Let's make it a second time. " — You're welcome. — Wait, pause. Just can you pause? — That's not his body, right? — No, that's not his body. He's now Dwayne the Suit Johnson. Are you sure he's in a suit and not it's not a CGI body? — That's a suit. It doesn't have the same characteristics of the way the skin interacts with light. — Yeah. — So, it does feel a little bit like I could press it in a bit. — I don't know how else to say that. — To me, what gives it away as a suit, if it is a suit, is a sense of his hands being the same size and his wrist being the same size, which once again, maybe they've actually gone through and doed it, but like when there's a part where it's going like this and you kind of get the sense of like everything's big, but it comes it tapers down to like normal human wrist size. You know guys, I'm looking at this closer. I'm going to change my mind. Here's what I think is happening. I think we're looking at a CGI body. I know he's wearing a suit. There's behind the scenes photos of him wearing the suit, but look at the way the muscles move, the way the skin folds. And think about this. They're going to have to animate the tattoos. So, do a CGI body anyways. And one last little bit of evidence. You look at that necklace. It's different from the behind the scenes photos to the film, which makes me think that that's just them doing a CGI necklace to hide the seam. So, there's a very high chance it's a CGI body. And probably in a lot of shots, it's still the suit. You know, it depends on the right tool for the right job. — You're doing great. — When I think of that particular character, Maui, he's like even bigger. The arms are bigger, the shoulders are broader. Like, and I feel like everything else is like pretty faithful already to the animated movie. Why not go like the Yuyu Haku show route, you know? Do Voltric capture or some stuff like that. Like really make him feel otherworldly, not just like in a suit. Also, like I feel like I don't know, maybe more neck, maybe more chin. I don't know. It just it looks it just it feels a little weird. Not going to lie. — You're welcome. — I need your help. — I'm not going on a mission with some mortal. But — what do you guys think about the integration of the actors into the environments? — I know they probably filmed on some sort of volume, you know, for lighting and stuff like that. But even still, like when I watch it, I just go like, "Ooh, there are so many replaced backgrounds. " You kind of get that green screen effect for almost all these like close-ups and medium shots. We've talked about all these movies filmed on like water tanks or on the edge of the sea. It's like those just work really well. You know, that look still works. Does make me kind of like yearn for a little bit of that Master Commander authentic ocean cinematography. Like there's a time when Disney used to be like that hardcore where they'd go out and like film on the ocean. I get it. You have a big rubber suit on. You're not going to go out in the ocean. Yeah. Be way hot out there. You're going to sweat to death and then drown. — Would it would or would it keep you afloat? That might save your life. — That's a good point. It's going to make like5 billion dollars. — Oh yeah. Oh, these things hit. That's why they're doing them. And like if the end result is great, great. Like I think How to Train Your Dragon was well received, right? I never saw it myself, but you know, — look, my kids are going to love it. I'll probably have a good time, actually. — I'm probably going to end up seeing it, too. Yeah. — You're welcome.

— U quick editor's note, whatever Jordan Allen just said was wrong. What he meant to say was that today's video is sponsored by Epidemic Sound. Also, editor's note, when my lower third pops up, put a really cool sound effect in from Epidemic Sound. Do it right. you do another one right now just to be safe. — Okay, — thank you. That sounded awesome. That sounded great. If you're an editor here at Corridor, you're using Epidemic Sound pretty much every single day of your life. They've got over 55,000 premium beautiful tracks to pick from in all kinds of different genres and over 250,000 sound effects to choose from that range from boings to robot noises to thunder. Wo, that one was scary. One of the best parts about Epidemic is that all the sound effects and all the music is restriction free. So you can use as much of them as you want and you never have to worry about copyright issues. They have a plugin that's built directly in to Da Vinci Resolve, which is what we edit all of our reacts in. And that makes it as easy as just clicking into the plugin, typing in what you need, and then dragging that straight into your timeline, and it's ready to go. You don't even have to open up your browser. Edit editors note. It's also in Premiere. And listen, with that many tracks and with that many sound effects, they have a beautiful search function that makes finding all of them perfectly easy and perfectly simple. But if that's not enough for you, they also have this new beta feature called Studio, which lets you upload a video and then it automatically pulls from all the different tracks and all the different sound effects that are already on Epidemic and places them perfectly within that video. It's basically a really quick and easy way to get a first draft in of all your music and your sound effects while still giving you the full creative control to do with it as you please. So yeah, if you're editing yourself, if you're making video games, if you're making music, if you're making anything that needs sound, Epidemic is pretty much the best tool out there that you can be using. I don't joke about that. I am literally in Epidemic every single day of my life working at Corridor and it's great. Editor's note. Um, if you want to try Epidemic for yourself, just go ahead and click the link in the description below and then whoosh out, but do like a really cool whoosh. Yeah. Like a like Yeah. Hawaii, land of surfboarding and body

boarding and mountain boarding. — I don't actually know what it's called. — Oh god. — Yeah. — What are they doing? — I mean, some of the shots are great. Ooh, that butt shot. This is a time ramp. — They go bullet time speed ramping. — Oh, dead. Oh, wow. — We're up. — He freaking turns into a CGI guy. — My friend turned When you get hit so hard, you turn CGI. — There's somebody doing this by hand trying to guess how this 3D model should be flopping. And it's not quite following the arcs. You can actually see as he's rolling backwards, there's like a smooth motion and it just kind of like jarringly kind of turns and slows down. — Another big issue here is the compositing. — They're adding bloom. They're adding lens flares. The lighting's too perfect, which is an instant like shot in the foot. I feel like you add those things when you go, "Oh, this doesn't look real. " — So, you start just slapping crap on top of your footage to try and obscure it, but like it just makes it look more fake. Like looking at Jason Mo's beard here, like you can see a bit of like that fringe, that lighter fringe from like, you know, the different environment poking through. They're trying their best to cut it out with the hair and the blur. And it's just they're in two very different environments. And it's footage being cut out of one, put in the other, and you can just tell. — One thing that I think would have really helped the close-ups is if they had like little flexcks of like mud and pebbles and stuff to just like shoot at their face as they're going down. Like so you see stuff like bouncing and sticking off them. and makes it forces them to like squint and go, you know, — I feel like that would really go far here. — Look at his hair on the top. It's gently blowing, but I mean, this is a violent downhill bomb. Like, he should be getting hit with, like you said, dirt, all that debris. Also, some crazy strong wind should be mounted to the front of whatever he's riding. — And like the camera is shaking so fast, but they are clearly not shaking at the same rate. There's that disconnect of just I'm watching footage that's being shaken afterwards. And you know, all these things, the practical, the digital, they all need to be brought together a little bit more for this scene to work. — You're in a situation where, as the visual effects artist, you are given slowish footage of men riding down a grassy hill and are asked to basically make it look like a photorealistic lava mountain. — It was a valiant attempt, but definitely looked very CGI, VFXy. It's very ambitious scene. — It's a Yeah. Sledding clearly dangerous. But you know

what's more dangerous? Unicycles. — Yep. — From the future though. That you roll it. Whoa. Dude, that bike, how is it staying up? You just has to constantly be accelerating at like 1g. — Yeah, it's like a onehe. — They're tracking your cell phone. Ditch it. He kills this innocent bystander by throwing his phone into their car. Like this guy coming home from work trying to pay for his like three kids. — Boom. — Oh man, he's dead. — Where's daddy? — That was intentional. That wasn't behind him. That was a lob onto the car. — Wa! The transition to real person. And a train takes the bike out. — I like this. This is my favorite part. Oh my god. I love the part where you like if they put him in different parts of the frame randomly. — Yeah, he just shows up. — Let's see. He's on frame. Right, left, right, center. — When you're trying to do a hidden cut, how do we transition from CGI land to real land? — I have an idea. — They'll never notice this one. Flash, and we're there. — Gone. — No one knew. — Wow, that's incred. It's like you just blind them. — Sorry. I love committing to no motion blur in anything but the footage of him. — Yeah, there's so much motion blur in all the rest of the shot and they're just like we don't have time. Turn it off. — Turn off the damn motion blur. — This whole chase it's off. — This movie the rest of the movie had that bat insane energy or is like — I you know I don't know. This is the only scene I've seen from it and so far 10 out of 10. — You guys are pulling some real wild scenes. You want to see some wild scenes? — You got one? — Warning. I've got a clip so long we can't even put it in YouTube. It's only in the extended react. That's right. We're looking at a movie called Hellfire. WA. — I like old school graphics, low poly

stuff. And there's a Coinbase commercial and they're doing a low poly style except practical. Check it out. — Move it. Slow poke. — Doesn't that look weird? — Wow. Interesting. — I mean, there's a little bit of VFX and stuff in here, whatever. But ultimately, they're like constructing the core of this look practically. — I love that roving band of baldies. That's freaking awesome. — It's really visually striking. — Yeah. — And like the faces are actually really cool. Like the way they did the low poly faces is really neat. — What do you think they used for that? — It's actually mostly just like stretchy painted fabric. It's just like literally cloth wraps — and you just clean up the neckline. — That one. Nah, that one doesn't work. It doesn't feel low poly. — The this stuff people like playing NPCs. It actually feels like too much. — Yeah. I mean, they're definitely like referencing like GTA 3, like these vibes. — Great art direction. Like the art people on this, the costume freaking killed it. They pull out some crazy looks. Great job. — The message is really dumb. What if the character in the game wanted to break free and not just be a mindless NPC anymore, but be different from all the sheep and use crypto? — It's just like so you just put turn your money into crypto, wait 10 years, — break out the system. Come on, give me a break. — Yeah. — You want to see the magic trick? — Yeah. — Oh, watch this. See? Look. Nothing. — Mhm. — Oh, what's behind there? Oh, subscribe. Now you have to legally

— There's a movie that Steven Spielberg made about wildfires called Always. And no one has ever heard about this movie because it kind of was a bomb. This is the same year that The Abyss came out. ILM did all the effects here. — Oh my gosh. — Yeah. ILM did The Abyss and Always in the same year. — What a year. — We know we're aficionados about long lens airplane shots in this show and we know you are too. So please sit back and enjoy Stephen Spielberg working his magic. Oh, no. They're coming. He's coming again. — It's not down yet. How close is it going to get? — Wa! — Let's go. Let's go. — That's so intense. That looks like it's right on top of him. — Oh, yes. — Yeah, they did manage to land the plane directly between the two guys in the composition here. — I think they didn't need to cut. — I kind of agree with you. So, I kind of — I think the cut ruins this. — Ruins. — I still love it, but it ruins it. — But we're not here to look at long lens airplane shots. We're some pretty crazy miniature cinematography. — Is that just a real wildfire? — Yes. In order to make this movie, uh, Spielberg and his team went and filmed the Yellowstone fires that happened like a year before production here. That's all footage of they're just filming the actual water planes. — It must be. — Wow. — But look at these shots. These 100% in camera practical shots. Like there's no CGI. This is 1989, — right? — Whoa. — You doofus. Get out. — Legit. You know his flies, right? — You have wings. — He made it. — That is insane. Those planes look so real. — The first time I watched it, I didn't realize I was looking at miniatures for that stuff. — So, you have your, you know, guys in a cockpit, which they're basically just filming against a movie screen with footage they filmed from like the Yellowstone fires, and they have, you know, people with fans and smoke machines doing that. But then they have these crazy shots where like the planes are flying just above the clouds. So, that's a miniature. Looks so dang good. — Would that be a bigature? No. Big is bigger than the original. No, big is a big miniature. Yeah, bigature — That be a bigature. — It's all miniature. This is going to be a bigature. I mean, bigature is just a random word, guys. I feel like bigature. It's miniature. It's a miniature. — It's minier than the original. So, in that way, it is a miniature, but it is bigger than a miniature. Average miniature. — Do they become a bigature when they no longer can be contained on like an a kitchen tabletop? — Yeah. What's the bigger line? I think if somebody goes, "Whoa, that's really big. " Then it's a bigger. — That's big for a miniature. — And then you say, "Correction, it's actually a small plane. " Yeah, it's actually small for a regular. — At first, I thought it was real footage of the airplanes because they have the real airplanes, of course, but then you look at the clouds. The clouds are kind of moving fast. Yeah. It makes me feel like it's not like steam or smoke, but I feel like is that like liquid nitrogen? If you spray some out, it, you know, vaporizes and like turns into clouds very quickly. And if you had a couple tanks, you could go and have just suddenly like a crapload of thick plumes of white cloud come up from something. And it's not smoke, it's not steam, it's not fog, — you know. I think those are just static planes. — Oh, you might be right. — And the clouds are moving. — Yeah, they're just blowing them with fans. They're blowing all them with all this with fans. Maybe even filming on a windy day. — But then what would they be using for like that secondary plane? Like how would you be driving it? Well, if you're standing still, you're just putting on it's on wires. It's a puppet. — Oh. Oh, so you just like wires that are invisible to the human eye based on distance. Okay. — It's so funny how the wires show up in these photos. — Yeah. And not on the footage. — What's the deal with that? — I have tried to make wires invisible my whole life. I've never been able to do it. Like I always see the wires or it's like it's fishing line. It's something thin and it always appears. — Yeah. How the heck would you like that to get rid of? I would think the specular is what gives it away, but you could see the entire line. Well, to be fair, that's a low angle, but you just light it. You light it so you don't have light hitting the wires in the way that illuminates them against a dark background. — You just light it. How you light it? This VFX telephone is great. I like doing — I asked you, you asked him. — Hold on. I'll ask him real quick. Let me ask him. How do you do that without them seeing the wires? You light it. Anything else or? — No, that's it. — He's done. — Okay, cool. I'm here. If he has more questions, I'm here. — Yeah, I'll tell him. He's getting more questions. — Oh, his engine's on fire. — Damn. — This is a comedy. It has to be. — By the way, the guy whose plane was blown up, he's a ghost now. So, if you see him just hanging out in the airplanes with them, it's cuz he's a ghost. — What? Dude, okay. — Like, what do you mean? Don't don't explain. Boom. Right through that. — She's fine though. She's fine. — Look at these miniature shots here. — So, they're in a huge warehouse. They got tons and tons of Christmas trees and they lined this like fake mountain inside this warehouse and they would light all those Christmas trees up on fire for these shots. And they're probably using a bunch of propane and things like that. So, you can actually just turn it on and turn it off. When they had shots where they had to fly the remote control airplanes at the camera, what they do is they actually set up a mirror. So rather than flying the remote control airplane and divebombing the camera crew, it'd be flying past the camera crew and dive bombing the mirror and they'd film the mirror. — Cool. — So all these aerial shots with the miniatures right here were uh directed by Joe Johnston, the storyboard artist for Star Wars, director of Captain America. — Dang, — he's got a great eye for this kind of stuff. — There's some awesome shots in this. — There's this pretty cool uh log stunt that they do also. — Whoa. Run. — Yeah, this is a decent log shot. — That was a good log shot. — Yeah, pretty good log shot, actually. — Let's see that guy jump underneath it. How close is he to dying? — Wa. — Medium. — Medium close. — Medium close, actually. I mean, kind of close, but I think you're probably going to put that thing on like a wire or two so that way it doesn't — go too far in one direction. — So, crazy miniature work. I love miniatures. This was a recommendation in the comments from when we were looking at Lost Bus. People were like, "You should check out the fire scenes from Always. " Leave a comment down below with a clip that you want us to look at and I will tell you how it's done. — He said that the — Where'd he go? — Oh, he's over on corridorigital. com. — I like it. — You like this vent? Is this a good vent? Are we still rolling? All right, we're done. Bye, everybody. — I'm sorry, guys.