VFX Artists React to AVENGERS ENDGAME Bad & Great CGi

Wait, how are the ducks in the shot? Oh what, there were a couple of innovations in the way we approached Thanos' facial work in that shark form. We had a version that was much larger, maybe you discovered something we didn't even discover. I plan to put in the movie Hello, welcome back to another very special episode of VFX Artists React today. We're joined by Matt Aitken. Matt is now one of Wedda's visual effects supervisors and it's an incredible honor to have him here on the show. I worked on a lot of movies, from Avengers Endgame to The Lord of the Rings.

He was in our Lord of the Rings special. I'm the guy who scans the cave troll with a laser scanner very early on, that's cool. Tell us a little about your role, what it means to be a visual effects supervisor. My role is to be a sort of point of contact between the Weather Digital team that produces the visual effects on a given show and the people at the studio, like myself, I work with the Marvel team on the Avengers movies, I tell them. I'm providing, you know the finished visual effects shots to go into your movie, so when you go to the dentist and you have the nurse that likes it. work on your teeth for a while and then the dentist comes in just touches everything briefly at the end is that it's basically possible that

endgame

was actually nominated for an academy award for best visual effects.

We're also nominated for the BAFTA, which is the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, so I can fly to London to go to the Baptist and then come back here next week for the Oscars oh wow, who knew that a career in visual effects was such a star-studded city that it normally isn't? Of the scenes that you guys were responsible for in the Avengers

endgame

was the climatic and battle scene, yeah, that's pretty much what we did. Our job began when Thanos appears on ship eight and destroys the Avengers compound and we progress to the end. tony making the photo and his final demise spoilers ahead somehow i haven't seen this movie wait until you see the next one everyone not everyone i think it worked this was a pretty shocking moment in the movie it's like oh okay then and throw away the credits shockwave On that giant explosion we worked a lot on that because it had to look like it was going to create a huge crater, but at the same time it couldn't look like it just blew up all the pieces, so we had a version that was much bigger.

They said yeah, that's cool, but no one could survive and that's because all the CG fire was all dynamics and simulation, yeah, yeah, sure they shared the shot with the movie, so at a certain point here it becomes a shot of the movie, they did all this work here. All external things, you should talk to them. I'm sure they would love to come too. They'd say, "Hey, I applied for an internship a while ago. Why Johanni? I'm always impressed by the level of consistency between all the different effects houses delivering the same character in different scenes worked on by completely different people.

Yeah, the team at Marvel does a lot of work in terms of giving us each note We'll show a version of Thammos and they'll like the aspects of that and they'll take that photo and show it to dd and you know we'll share geometry and textures You know they're completely different assets. which two completely different 3D models of Thanos appear at exactly the same level of quality, so you can't tell the difference between them, that's what we were trying to achieve. I mean, I'd say you nailed it. There are several different versions if you enjoy the show and want to.

To keep watching well, consider subscribing so it appears in your subscription feed and never miss an episode. I thought that by removing half of life, the other half would thrive, so when you have a character like Thanos, he's completely digital but obviously driven by A real actor, what are the main steps between his performance and what we finally see in the movie? He'll be wearing a marked suit, so we'll get the performance of his body from there and also put stitches on his face. He will often wear a head-mounted camera and the spots on his face will be filmed while he performs.

What we do is capture the movement that occurs at the same time as live action photography, so through infrared motion capture we can capture the points of the suit without contaminating the light that the cinematographer is creating in the set. I feel like a lot of people don't understand how motion capture works in movies, they just assume that motion is captured and then applied to 3D. model and that's all you have to do and it will really be amazing to have the motion capture actually play with the creation of his movement, but the number of times we have raw motion capture data on Thanos is zero, we need to clean it up, but we also need to just find Thanos in the motion capture so that some of these fight beats weren't actually josh.

A stuntman is making the most dramatic moves and we are capturing the motion of the stuntman, but he still won't move the same way as an eight. Thanos straight, muscular and a foot tall, would move, so the fantastic animation supervisor where Sydney Contomo's combo would dial in what he would call Thanos' body mechanics to get the weight and maybe slow down the movement a little , that's something we'll do. keyframe plus motion capture data, when you're dealing with that much armor on a character it can be very difficult to animate it all and have it move properly and slide on itself without cropping, yeah, so some people pointed out us in this shot of his glove you can see the pieces of his fingers cut off a little oh I know we missed it oh no that's it so it's something no one ever saw by chance until it came out in theaters yeah I wish that we would see it. at that point it just goes to show that there's always a little more you can do, but yeah, we're working a lot on the armor now, you don't want to limit what Josh is doing on set, you want him to do it. being able to act and then you just have to make the armor work for that, so there's a lot of sleight of hand bending things that should be rigid, it goes back to that craftsmanship thing you know, bringing in the hands-on craftsmanship of an artist. approach to sculpting that suit I'm going to really enjoy it, can we talk about Thanos' face for a moment?

Sure, the pores stretch. If they do it. There are a couple of innovations in how we approach Thanos' facial work up until Infinity War. We would go directly from Josh's facial motion capture to Thanos' performance. What we started doing in Infinity War was introducing this intermediate step that we call the puppet actor. We have the footage of Josh from the cameras mounted on his head. we have a digital josh and then we have our digital thanos and we can see very clearly if it's deviating a little bit from what josh was doing and then it's actually a reasonably simple process to migrate the animation curves from one puppet to another, so Lo What you're telling me is that there's a perfect digital double of Josh Brolin that you can place in every shot of Thanos in the movie, kind of like mission impossible.

Take off the mask, which is more difficult in your opinion, your mouth or your eyes. I think people look mainly at the eyes, which is often a criticism of digital performance, if it doesn't work, people say the eyes look dead, so we have to get them right and we spend a lot of time lighting them so they have a Good highlight, so we'll put a special light in the scene and it's a small area light but quite bright, so the eyes will pick it up and it will have a very subtle effect on the rest, so the green screen that you guys are using. lots of green screen in this, plus rotoscoping, yeah, how do you get such perfect edges on your green screen?

I mean, they're good green screens, they're well lit and clean, and then we have a lot of really very advanced Techniques, you know, doing parts of the hair differently. You know, if we get something really gnarly, you might have to match the motion on a digital version of the actor and replace the plate here with cg here. Wow, when your helmet comes next. is that cg here for a brief moment for the ponytail to twist, i think it's actually just a warp and i think she might have moved her head, that's the hair from the duck photo, wait how are they the ducklings in the photo right there?

Oh what? 17 frames of them, ladies and gentlemen, in one of the studio reviews, they said, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool to see what the duck looks like in the movie somewhere, so we had to migrate this asset, you know, they sent us how the loom duck had done it." for Guardians 2. They gave him one of the devastating weapons too big for him. I just realized that each of those portals has a different color scheme inside and represented the infinity gauntlet with the different colors. Yes, I have never done it. I noticed that before, because you know you have wakanda, you have deep space blue, maybe you discovered something that we didn't even intend to put in the movie if you want to see us

react

to some specific movie. or TV shows, leave a comment in the description below and let us know and we'll look at it.

I don't think anyone has seen so many similar heroes on screen at the same time that the filmmakers who know how to balance them. all those things, so, um, it's personal, a lot of it is, um, like these little beats, you know where we get these moments of characters changing cameras, oh, give me you have a little one and we'll explain the meeting of Tony and Spidey. the things that make it successful, you know, we're just there supporting these fantastic character moments, so of this whole sequence where it worked, in what you think was probably the most challenging single shot of the whole sequence, there's The shot was called Wanner, it was the scariest part of the cut for a long time for me, but now I can enjoy so many layers of complexity, from opposing armies to digital doubles, animation and I like real life, which means cg al Same time. explosions, we started working on it from the beginning and it was one of the last shots we finished, so we had like a sub-team working on it, he had his own animation supervisor, his own animation team that was building the elements of the shot that populated the scene.

We're iterating all the time, so as soon as there's something that's halfway decent, we'll push it to the lighting pipeline, all that lighting work is done at the same time as the animation work. The really cool thing about this is that the characters are an edge next to the sun, so you have to really coordinate where the light is, so you work as a master lighting position in tackling a lot of these things. One thing we do do, which is exactly what they do on set or on location is, don't worry about any kind of consistency in the position of the sun, the key light, so they'll always put it behind the character they're filming. , which I like to show people and that really explains that.

It's a scene from the end of the first Independence Day movie, the sun is always behind everyone, yeah, which you have to do because if you were filming it from the other side, they'd just get completely burned, so you're exposing during shadows we try to adopt these principles because they are established filmmaking principles that work, so I know for these scenes here they are actually filmed on a practical set, but do you end up having to replace any of the foreground elements? Yes, sometimes we do. There's a little set element behind these guys that we kept because it was appropriate, but we did this thing where we essentially took the actors off the set and put them in a predominantly CG environment that sounds like a lot of rotoscoping, so basically cut out each character and none of the background is real only the characters are real exactly oh boy wow obviously um tony his cg suit so every time we see him just really the only thing we keep is his head anyway iron man this was the last one take that we delivered on the show, oh wow, it was about two weeks before the premiere, so it was getting close to the and on the line, you know they had store versions, but they still wanted it to be that way. changed a little bit, so we were happy to keep working on it.

What was really important in the end was to show that Tony is suffering all this damage because he will ultimately kill him, so we had to know that he was making a big sacrifice. but it also couldn't be so flashy as to distract from his performance, we had some of those um those arcs of energy creeping further into his face and then it was like you just looked and didn't look at him. true, you really have to be with him right now, you have to be exactly with him,so I feel like you guys had a big creative challenge here with Iron Man dying and you need to show that the wounds are fatal, but it can be done.

It's not going to be so gory or so macabre that it doesn't exactly make this a family movie and that was something we explored for a long time through concept art to begin with and it's a little bit similar to the snapshot we had to allow it to retain its dignity. Through this, through this moment, how much of this was makeup versus digital, it's completely digital, so she doesn't have any makeup on set exactly and it was a really good decision that they made to do it that way because if they had prosthetic wearing. in it, essentially, they would have been trapped in that gaze.

Yes, you would get more flexibility by doing it digitally, especially when you know you can achieve a photorealistic result. Yes, it depends on that. I read that most of the wounds are actually simple two-dimensional tracks rather than full 3D, yes we matched exactly, we moved his head, but we found that his facial performance was so subtle that we could use similar optical flow techniques to warp the prosthetic digital in the movement of his face, so we did it. I don't have to try to match the movement of his facial performance, the other thing was that for us we had to sit on the secret for six or eight months and it was like, oh my God, if this leaks, am I in a little bit of trouble? ?

We can keep a secret here. We've never had a leak in wood, we just have to hunker down and do it and they were totally fine with us and it was a total surprise to audiences around the world. Can you talk about anything coming up in the pipeline at Weta? We are working on the Black Widow movie that will be released soon. You know we have an ongoing relationship with Marvel and it's fantastic. You know the work they involve us in is challenging and diverse and you know they make

great

films. It's a

great

kind of storytelling that's happening with the MCU and it's really exciting to be a part of.

Wow, well, it's been a crazy episode. They get all this information straight from the source whenever we're sitting here on the couch most of the time. We're just guessing at this point, so hearing a real professional tell you exactly how some of these amazing results are achieved is really great to hear. I mean, I've seen some of your stuff and you guys are very aware, so Well, that's really good to know, if you want to find out more about Wida, check out her website, you know, at fx.co.nz. There are articles on how some of these effects are done and lots of great information, so don't rule out just going and checking it out. your website is great to be here oh thanks matt I really appreciate it I thought you were a ghost it's really creepy for a second because we're here ghost hunting for our video next quarter but in the meantime tiny guns 2 just dropped on the YouTube channel of the corridor, if you're not familiar with it, it's where we put all of our short films, so check it out and this time give us a

react

ion in the comments below, check it out on youtube.com.