VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 127 (ft. Gareth Edwards)

Gareth's Films hey everyone welcome back to visual effects artist react today we have an incredibly special episode you probably saw you know Rogue one Godzilla his breakout film monsters oh and the Creator which is nominated for an Academy Award in visual effects which is sweet cuz we love V effects here and that's what the show is all about you're going to want to clear the next 4 hours care cuz we're going to go through every single one of your films and nitpick Atilla The Hun it so back before you started directing movies you were actually doing visual effects every day is like your day job right and it led to this show the the h i directed this and but also did all the visual effects about 250 of them dang okay kind of a nightmare to do but there was loads of cheap tricks it was me like so inspired by Lord of the Rings this looks so good what the heck that was a Lord of the Rings shot right here that's straight out of Lord of the Rings come on you look at a shot how can you do this and so we had got a treadmill and then basically filmed a few different people walking on it and then you can in After Effects put them all together as cars so in 3ds Max you can basically make particles follow a Terrain and have a giant army and there's like little tricks going on I've added a little occlusion on the ground dust and things like this and then could didn't have drones back then so this basically a photograph projected onto a curved surface sure and there's the camera if you look at the trees they warp right completely warping but your brain's not looking over there so you get away with it so every shot was done in a day I had 250 shots to do like that was my schedule oh my God this is like taking me back you know like all the pain and sleepless nights it's funny you really underplay your VFX skills but this is like the most competent example of using visual effects you have 3D you have projections you have green screens live elements really great camera motion cinematography all combined into one big shot it's Monsters [Music] awesome so then you get a movie like Monsters here it feels like you kind of just went on a road trip with them and it was just the three of you and you made a movie we didn't have a screenplay cuz the idea was the second you have a screenplay you're now chasing in this very specific thing instead of writing a script ended up writing paragraph for each scene and so we drove around Central America and every time we turned up somewhere we were like hey excuse me is there anything really weird here like and they go oh there's been a flood and and a road is collapsed or there's a fire on the hill or there's this strange Festival of the dead that's going on over and then we would go there and then they could just make it up holy cow and then we shot it like a bit like a documentary so like a shot like that is that a real shot of a real ship up in the the or did you add that thank you for pretending that it looked good enough to be that uh no but before you started the shot were you like I want to put a boat up there no I'm going like a right something to something else so I'm like I'm going to put something up there it might be a giant wall it might be the ruins of a city it might be a boat right and I decide afterwards based on the edit context this is crazy to talk about cuz like it's the complete opposite of how traditional sets work generally you have limited time everyone is costing you money there it's like you have to be efficient with the resources you have it wasn't like on a movie set where it's like half a million dollar if you screw up if we screwed up and we wasted a whole day oh no £22,000 and so there was a lot less pressure and so you can take risks and I think fortune favors the brave when you can't risk anything and you can't fail you get really trapped some of this is done in my bathtub at home what a segue so back of my bathtub water Illuminating From Below it's like such a complicated thing to render and I had no idea how to do it yeah and so I filled my bathtub and then I got a toy model of the same bter jet oh hell yeah no way hold up and then I got a MAG light and I sort held it underneath and I was like trying to flash it with my thumb so the light we're seeing on the water is what you filmed in the bathtub yeah there's loads of little nonsense tricks in this he's just trying to get a collection of little pieces that you help you put together a Shar is actually really novel for me I mean even today that's a non-trivial thing to try to pull off in 3D so the jet there that we see as it rolls up and then starts sinking is that a 3D render of the jet or is that the pl so that's a 3D render and the tentacles are just little like tube things you create a spline and another thing can follow the spline and so the film was going to live and die on the creatures at the end right now I didn't I didn't know how to animate and so basically there was a rope simulation so I'm animating that one end of the rope and everything else is just happening it's just like turbulence all that all that little bioluminescent stuff that's going on that's purely in After Effects that's not happening in 3D well no you render passes out so I had a pass that is like the texture of the creature I had a pass which is like the translucency a pass which is the bioluminescent pattern and then I'm doing all the flickering and the animation in After Effects sure okay yeah absolutely were there other people doings on this as well or you did all just me yeah and it was like 250 of them in your bedroom and btub in the bedroom yeah but you're highly motivated because in your mind you're going if we pull this off maybe something will happen this is my shot so like you just go For Broke don't you absolutely yeah I wouldn't have got Godzilla without this I had to do that that logo in my bedroom you've got one busy bedroom yeah I'm just saying I've seen a lot of your movies and I know your bedroom comes into play in a lot of them you're very welcome to visit wait what that's the thing we need a tour of this bedroom cuz this where the magic happens all these crazy movies come out of this bedroom Surfshark hey I'm in GTH Edwards bedroom hiding from SE lad right now I need to get these Death Star plans to my friends in the Rebel Alliance but the Empire is constantly trying to steal my data and that's where today's sponsor surf shark VPN comes in by encrypting all internet traffic surf shark VPN keeps my sensitive information private even when on public Wi-Fi think of snoops and data miners as malicious tentacles always trying to get your personal information with their suction cups now think of a VPN like your pet shark so as long as you're rioting that shark these tentacles can't touch you but surf shark VPN can do so much more while I'm waiting for these plans to transfer I'm going to watch a movie now if the movie you're trying to watch isn't 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DEC Corridor and enter the coupon code Corridor to get three extra free months that's surf shark. decoror or just hit the link in the description all right now back to react no no no no no Godzilla no what I love about this movie is how it gives a really good sense of scale in almost every single shot Godzilla and I think the first Pacific Rim were the the films that were like okay let's Embrace CGI and like do scale Justice and you learn a lot of little tricks along the way purposefully we've put a little few tops of buildings in cuz if you don't have that it's just a load of smoke and so you're putting little details in to sort of go we all know that's the size of a person now therefore this must be massive and then it's also got to go off screen things going out of frame always is like one of those classic I feel like scale tricks where you're just like yeah sometimes it's too big this movie was a big learning curve for me in terms of how these kind of movies are made all the big set pieces on this film are prevised out so you end having that stuff really fleshed out you know I mean like overly fleshed out to be honest like if you look at the previous it's pretty much identical like we didn't stray at all because you've got second unit directors and all sorts of things going on where they're getting elements for these shots and so I came out the other end of it going previs is just a starting point you know what I mean it should be a starting point then you should evolve and grow from there because when you're on when you stood in an environment whatever you thought 6 months ago in your bedroom you're going to have a much better idea or being way more inspired in the moment this was day one of filming this was a Convention Center in Vancouver really yeah day one yeah that many are those how many extras are there like quite a lot yeah yeah like all right here we go this was added late I wanted to do this and I did a little storyboard for it and the previous people were like we're out of time and money so the previous never had that shot in it and then thank God once we had presented it to the studio they then magically added it so it's like a double-edged sword cuz previs is very it can become quite prescriptive but it equally for people who aren't imagining it finished they see it and go holy cow and it gets films green lit it gets actors excited you know so it's this LoveHate relationship with it to some extent this shot oh my God the halo jump was so sick and E squar did all the sound design on this film they you mainly just hear that I love the fact that it's got this bravery about it with the the perspective shifts so you get a big movie like Godzilla you see it through to completion people dig it and then you get this call from a franchise called Star Wars it's um rogue rogue one you're experiencing these bigger and Rogue One bigger movies at this point I assume you're getting more comfortable in that role as a director and commanding all of these different things happening I made this very small tiny movie and there was a lot of great things that came out of having all this freedom and then I got this amazing opportunity this massive Blockbuster and there's a lot of amazing things that come out of that too I really want to combine the two things and try and have this organic but with all this scope and scale how do we do that but with Star Wars we had a virtual camera and so they set up 20 seconds of Animation or 30 or something and it would Loop and it would just Loop and loop and loop and you could just kind of follow the x-wings and you could be attached to them like this shop was all found doing that and then you go down with it and then they pretty much show you it done I imagine that was a lot of fun it was so Grand M Tarkin here is a digital character based off of a real performance that you have on set what is your feeling going into this movie bringing an actor back from the grave that's a way to put it I think now if we did it it' be very different techniques but back then they have to wear the stupid helmets M and despite what anyone says it limits your head movement we we have a few of those here and I like what they do from a data perspective but oh my God this is so oh the other thing that was super interesting about it is the lighting was different to a new hope you know what I mean we weren't emulating the cinematography of A New Hope and what happened is when ilm started comping shots they do exactly what was there in the hdis and you just go hm what's what's not right the lighting On A New Hope is so embedded in your brain that's kind of what he looks like we had to dial the CG and to like cheat what was there on the day and be a bit more like the liting of A New Hope and then it started to go oh that's talking it was a very strange thing cuz You' think the face would work in any situation but no in a different lighting setup that's Peter Cushing but in this kind of lighting setup that's Tarin and we were trying to get Tarin one of my favorite parts of this whole movie were all the Space Battles like that ship that didn't have enough time to jump and just like oh that's sweet we knew this was going to appear so you go well there's an obvious gag here isn't there and you leave it up to ilm like they they invent all the details was working on Star Wars everything you dreamed it would be you watch this film and you're a little kid this was what you thought the world was you thought you'd be able to go into a cockpit of an X-Wing so when you're actually on the set of a move like Rogue one and you're there's a real cockpit of an X-Wing or you're flying around with x-wings and it feels correct it feels like finally this is what it was supposed to be all the other stupid stuff about getting a mortgage and a job that was nonsense we're back to what was promised and it's only afterwards when you go back to a mortgage and all the boring stuff you go did that happen that was kind of weird and surreal and very fortunate this has been one of the longest episodes we have ever filmed so there's definitely a whole bunch of extra content here extra part of this episode exclusively on quarter digital.com so if you want to see more uncut goodness here check it out Link in the description all right well G thank you so much for coming on like every single film we went through here has you know been a continued inspiration to us and uh it means a lot that you come here and sit down go through it all with us and now you're going to come back to my bedroom right and yeah and we'll make a movie wait a minute