VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 126 (ft. Gareth Edwards)

Welcome to VFX Artists React guys this is a really cool episode welcome back to another one of VFX artist react we are here with none other than Gareth Edwards Gareth is one of the few Hollywood directors who actually got their start doing visual effects getting into the nitty-gritty of how movies actually get made I am a wannabe filmmaker I'm really a visual effects person pretending to make films so I feel very at home here with fellow Geeks Who also pretend to make films right that's what we do you might know him from a few movies like you know Rogue one some zillig God and the newest one the Creator which is actually nominated for an Academy Award for best visual effects like what we got to do with this was prove out this approach and say we can do things differently look it's going to be a really big deal and you're going to want to see why 10 years ago today a nuclear warhead Inspiration was detonated in Los Angeles so the Creator is actually up for the Academy me Award for best visual effects this year how do you feel about that are are you proud of this like oh yeah like that's pretty cool no I'm I think that's really cool I'm like a real proud mom you know in terms of things that have affected this film you know whether it be a performance or you know a design or something the biggest impact on this movie by far is the visual effects to me the Holy Trinity of Science Fiction is monsters spaceships robots and I'd done monsters and spaceships and it was like it's time to do a robot movie movie and going to Vietnam and seeing all this imagery that to me like you know obviously what I associate with that is films like Apocalypse Now and platoon and and you start thinking of that imagery of a very grounded Warfare in Patty Fields with all this lush tropical kind of uh spiritual iconography with the monks and things but as robots and I was like I've never seen that that's not a film I can go well that's just that movie sure like the really crude fast way to say it to people which is and I'm not saying this because both of the these movies are total masterpieces but Apocalypse Now And Blade Runner if you just imagine they had sex oh that's absolutely what this is that's absolutely what this is it's super Unconventional Approach cool who told you our location there's robots all over this movie and if I'm not mistaken you're not putting pingpong balls on people no one's wearing like suits this is all just straight up we're capturing footage live raw in the moment and then yeah cuz if you if basically the problem was if you put dots on people or those moap pajamas they have to be robots right yeah and so then what typically happens is you you edit the film together and the guy in the map suit is out focused and kind of off screen and you're like oh my God we have to now spend thousands and thousands of dollars turning that into a robot and no one's even going to notice you know what I mean MH it's a kind of double-edged Sword by saying when let's not give anyone dots but then in in in the edit we can choose who's going to be Ai and who's going to be human it meant that we could pick people where your eye goes it was a massive leap for ilm yeah I was about to say that's that's very non-traditional yeah I feel in modern film making it meant basically this's big leap of faith where we were basically saying to ilm please agree to do at least a thousand V shots I can't tell you what any of them are we're not going to stop and get hdri eyballs you know what I mean we're not going to put tracking markers anything but can you promise us that you will deliver them by this date and any one with any sanity should go no that's how you go bankrupt I mean this was very much like the gorilla excitement of doing a film like Monsters but knowing you have industrial Light and magic in your back pocket yeah yeah and so there it was a bit like we can do anything this test we did this is Designing the Robots a part of the test so we went on a location scout and snuck a camera with me and shut all this material like so this guy smoking a cigarette he's looking at me like why are you filming me what you doing but there was something so naturalistic about his look that I was like my God if we can make him AI that would be incredible and so then we sit and we pause like a frame and then James Klein our production designer basically paints a billion options of what you could do for like Mech and interesting and what I found is like the easy thing to do is create a divide around the jawline and the front of the chin you know make it like a mask right but the problem with that is it feels like a decapitated head it has this uncanny valley thing of like you slightly reject it as a person like you're there's something wrong here you should be dead and it's important in our movie that you had an emotional like I like these people I I want to root for them and so we had to keep we found we had to keep the Flesh in I was about to say it was like I feel like the clear difference here between other movies is that like you keep that strip of throat down there at the front cuz that's like the throat does a lot of emoting animating I don't know how to describe it there's a lot going on with the throat yeah the second you remove that piece it it feels like the guy's dead like somehow a zombie but if you leave that little piece of skin in you don't have that feeling it feels like something's been removed from the back of his head like he's still there's still a a Lifeline to his body if you know what I mean yeah and I think the thing we were trying to do is really humanize them you know and make them feel I mean that's the theme of the movie isn't it yeah and have very one of them but but have very naturalistic performances like I it meant when you you know someone who sat here really bored or just like doing something really natural that's not like show offy at all I would get really excited like let's make them a robot because there World Building was a woman just off a candy bar to her grandkid but I was so excited filming this cuz like the second we make that robot I've never seen that in a movie I mean something so natural and beautiful and like this is available light we didn't like this this is really their house this is really just happening and we just sat down and asked if we could film to me that combination like you know Terence Malik meets James Cameron yeah hybrid thing this sh is my favorite shot in the film maybe was just someone just playing with graen you know if you said to the studio in a normal movie you say I want to do that shot like you storyboard it for some reason and you say I want to do this everyone goes okay and they they art direct and create the little basket you know we have to design what all the hands are cast up someone and they they give them a costume we set up this Shir and film it it adds up to like you know 100 Grand and then mainly someone goes Gareth what's this got to do with the story like What's Happening Here leads to those questions and you go well nothing it's texture it's just the world and they go we can't spend 100 Grand on something that's just texture but that's the whole thing like World building is so important though like and a lot of people I think think World building is like all right so 100 years ago this political faction you know like that kind of stuff no like World building isn't just like history and politics and stuff like that lineages it's like just catching like normal moments of life that are happening in the world it is texture but like it kind of brings you into the universe because you're just catching these quotequote natural moments you know rather than you know the Squarespace plot do you see this right here yeah this looks like a sweet innocent beautiful child but let me tell you it's a Devil in Disguise come with me consider this okay in the beginning of robot technology things were square look at this man right here being happy with a square robot with a square arm next Square robot working in harmony okay right here harmony with Humanity not against Humanity but that was never enough It's never enough they say oh it needs to be more human how can it be more human it's not human it's a robot they started doing circles okay circles equals Death and destruction and that's because they weren't sponsored by today's sponsor Squarespace let me explain Squarespace allows you to do many things including build a perfect website and run a perfect online business without ever having to understand how to do web development technology but if you're just thinking oh a website blah blah blah there's so many sites that can do that stop because you're thinking about it all wrong just like they did with the circle world you see Squarespace has some of the most advanced tools in the game including their fluid engine Next Generation website design system that means it's never been easier for anyone to 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squarespace.com Corridor crew to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain I think I've made my point let's get back to this Making it Look Real episode look look have you seen her all the tech on her is very much based on like product design from like Sony walkman's and and like sort of how we I wanted the future to look like when I was in the 80s and ID 0s yeah and like that different sort of material differences and little like color accents and stuff like that what was also it like very difficult for them was you've got a soft body if you want to call it that the skin that's like when it moves it Jiggles around how do you handle the you got a rock hard skull and having those two like can that's can make it feel like a false like it's been composited on and so they had to do lots of tricks to blend between the completely fluid movement of her face and a rock hard mechanical skull in a way that didn't distract you and and and I I would just take it for granted but there was lots of black magic to make Movie Magic that blend happen okay I'm just going to ask you how do we do this next shot you ready okay this one so this shot yeah oh boy well uh maybe I I'm going to just say I know you have a mavic so you're probably filming with your mavic somewhere is this in Iceland so we were scouting this riverbed we were just basically walking back from one location to the next and as we went over some rocks we were like this looks like a massive Canyon oh so it's a tiny little car yeah so that car is probably about that big you know and so we set up a slider you know like as if it's a helicopter and orang shot this shot where he's just pushing it like about this fast dude as if it's a helicopter PL so all those big boulders I'm seeing are just little Pebbles yeah you completely fooled me on this cuz there's nothing in the shot that gives away scale it just looks like a massive Canyon and then that's obviously a CG the one context clue is the car so everything else you just buy yeah and so there's all these little tricks and even inside okay so inside the vehicle that's a little home movie projector and we bought some stock footage of driving in the desert and just projected it and put some rain on the edge of the car and just rock the car and you kind of get away with it because trying to shoot this this emotional scene in Twilight when you've got a window of about 10 minutes oh boy yeah and it's like you really got to nail it I the way you just described this whole thing here like I feel like with the credits roll it's going to be your name like a thousand times like detonation 100 m radius set Bomb Boys in three low key my favorite part of this whole movie were the little bomb boys it was a server pleasing or server pleasing with you wow Jesus was server Bling No that's a different movie like no like it was so intense because like you're you're were saying about like trying to like you know build up the humanity robots and all this all these things you're putting into there and so when the bomb Bo pop out and they say their like little catchphrase before going on the suicide mission goodbye Ma'am it's been a pleasure to serve you I was like but wait how much sentience do they have like oh wait do they have do they have the feelings like the rest of them like this is it was like too much to handle I really like this shot where it runs inside the room and you get a split second of everyone going realizing they're about to die before it blows up it's like a horrific moment where they go no no no the reason why I love this sequence so much like part of it is just like the way it runs like it carries inevitability with it somehow it's just like a just I'm going to keep going we had to we had to work really hard on the on the Run Cycle from the side profile it looked great it had this really like sprinly like thing to it but really the the body is it's not a great design it looks cool but in reality you wouldn't build a robot like this because when it's trying to run it can't put its feet into the center of gravity oh so con and so like it was like we didn't want it to look like a an NFL mascot you know like like like some something a kid would punch you know what I mean like you know Chuck-E-Cheese party or something and so like we didn't want it to get loads of laughs you know what I mean and it wanted it to feel like menacing and some people laugh at this in a dark way cuz it was like it felt Relentless it felt like please stop yeah you know what I mean like please stop doing this yeah it was like a horrible feeling which is exactly what the whole thing was designed to be like yeah this Saving Money on Production it feels like a dream project in a lot of ways it's like okay you guys shot this with like fx3s which we have here in our studio too it's like I feel like that it's that mentality of like anyone who has that camera can make something look like this basically yeah and we use that camera for various reasons not cuz it was cheap it was because it was it's small and the main thing is it shoots at 12,800 ISO so you can you can shoot in Moonlight and and so that meant suddenly we didn't need giant massive bright lights everywhere we could take take like portable LED battery lights and and light really fast on the Fly and even hold them rather than like put them on stands like on a boom pole yeah yeah that's what we did and so we could relight within like 5 Seconds that's the way to do it like that's how we shoot too it's just ultra light and portable like that if you get the crew small enough the cost of flying anywhere in the world is cheaper than building a set like you know typically you end up on a green screen you build a bit of foreground like that foreground set is going to cost 50 Grand sometimes at least yeah and you go like well for 50 Grand we can all fly to the seventh wonder of the world and spend a week there and so we basically Cherry Picked we were in like the volcanoes in Indonesia we were like in the Himalayas in temples you know we were um in Vietnam Patty Fields all through Thailand 80 different locations in Thailand more than any other film apparently and again like we designed this sci-fi structure after we've filmed the footage because I would never have thought to myself that there's these blue roofs on all the buildings there but it was like that became something to Riff on so that you go okay that's blatantly not there that science fiction shape that's a very strange thing to have in the middle of the Himalayas okay so I'm looking at the foreground of those buildings there a real house that merges Into the Blue building yeah all that blue some of those blue buildings are all real but where does it end and where does it begin you know what I mean and so we're like trying to blend all the materials from the tops of the houses into that sort of Nomad Spaceship structure company moving in this is nomad copy that sending the right coordinates oh I wanted to talk about freaking the giant Nomad ship yeah so design-wise the The Nomad is kind of like I half wanted it to be like like a bird of prey like something dangerous in the sky like I think as mammals we have this subconscious like giant bird fear yeah and and then the other half was like I need it to be like an a Godlike eye watching over everyone it's got like I I love the blue laser scanning stuff the giant laser thing is super cool and intimidating the opening shot with the laser behind the soldiers walking out of the water I've seen this in the behind the scenes cuz it's literally just you running around with a commercial gimbal with a Sony fx3 a camera that anyone can buy and you're just like getting these sick shots and I recognize this is like one of the shots where the soldiers are coming out of the water what I love about this is that like it's all real but the lasers are added in but then you have all the light interaction on the water and it's like how do you pull that off and I'm willing to bet it's probably a full-on ocean Ren that is just comped on top of the real water and it's only pulling in the highlights I my guess right and I don't know the answer my guess is that they've obviously Roto the foregrounds I think it's in the comp right you do think it's comp yeah I'm like how's the detail there to pulling I think they're pulling from the the real life like lights and Darks of the water as like a matap or I like to think if not that they've used existing ocean plates that have more detail in them as like an element to to pull and a m like rather than CG rendering the reflections I mean we didn't have our budget basically to do things like that it would be quite a Nas for this this little moment I think cuz then at the very least it definitely Blends into the sort of like highlights captured from the footage you know especially around like where their legs are interacting with the water that's like real water that has that blue Highlight added to it at the very least there's a lot of great shots where the laser is like going across trees and I just thought that sort of like zdepth cutout of real footage was really well done but just love the detail of how the laser goes across the actual real footage of mountains it's like someone had to manually basically cut out the geometry for this to happen I think the way this is done and again I'm guessing slightly I think theyve actually did a Model they've got trees and foliage that are like creating that mat line I don't I think it'd be a nightmare to just Roto that oh for sure for sure I mean that's how I would do I would literally open up Google Earth and just like create my own photo scan of that one specific spot and then line it up with this B light going on within it it's not like it's just one pass you know what I mean so it's like I love all this stuff it's kind of crazy weird that you know when you're filming it and you're going I don't know what effect it has on people but you know when you go what would make me in the cinema go oh what like give me little Goosebumps where you're going oh that is so cool when you construct a movie you're just looking for those sort of moments the whole way through I mean Changing the Industry from what I do know from the artists that have worked on this every single one of them have all just raved about their time working on this movie and that they really thought it was something special I'm super honored and and and and proud of everyone they really really should have said no to this film it was sort of suicide making this movie financially creatively emotionally and um I'm just so excited about the future you know what I mean like I think like what we got to do with this was prove out this approach and say we can do things differently and I realize that in a cental we haven't changed the way we make films it's still the same exactly the same thing and it seems insane like in something that's such so technologically advanced with so many Innovations happening so fast we should be rethinking how films are made every single year and so to get to do so many of those unique ideas and to have worked out so well visually it's just exciting Gareth thank you so much for coming by today this has been a huge pleasure so we're going to get into this actually a little bit deeper here and you're going to want to check it out it's going to be over on Corridor digital.com on the extended version of this episode