VFX Artists React to HARRY POTTER Bad & Great CGi

The Harry Potter movies are packed with many things and visual effects are one of them. There are many things on platform nine and three quarters. The scene is a good example of basically sleight of hand. The coolest water ball I've ever seen. Seriously, look how cool, dude, no, no, oh, so how do you think they did that shot? Thanks to our sponsor. Vessy, stay until the end to find out how you can get $25 off your pair of Vessy shoes. Guys, welcome back VFX

artists

. they

react

, we're finally doing it, the last episode of Harry Potter. The guys actually watched all eight movies, believe it or not, every single one, so I'm really excited to go over these effects with all of you, man, I'm excited too.

We do our best to cover the best effects we can, but there are eight films, each packed with visual effects. Let's go over all those things. It's going to be sweet, so let's jump. Shut up, shut up, oh friend, this scene. scene, this is also such an important moment in the movie because it's like wait, what's pumping up, it looks so good, yeah, it's amazing, not this, it feels like it's 100 practical, I mean, you know, mine , it's like a painted wire or something. I mean, that's exactly this whole scene is practical, man, it's amazing, they actually had like three different fat suits that she could wear and they actually had a bunch of different bladders inside the actual suit that could be inflated.

It is a real physical prosthesis and none. That's digital, like the way she folds and moves her head, yeah, such a nice little touch that comes from practice. They actually put a double in the big suit because they put her in the air with wires and everything. the actual digital effects happening here are just the removal of cables. I'm impressed by the gravity effects they have. It actually looks like she's bouncing like a balloon filled with helium and to set up that wire so we can replicate it. Look, I imagine it's very difficult. Did they replace the roof?

Maybe it's the roof. Cg. I'm imagining that the ceiling itself isn't there on set. I think it's like a classic sitcom where you have all the walls up and you have like the crown. molding and then nothing, you have rigging and lights on top because for her to go from the dining room to this like a little patio room, she's probably attached to four wires, I think so, no, I think she's attached to some wires because look how they cut , they never actually show her completely through the door, they show it through a series of cuts, so yeah, I wanted to mention this because this is a good example of something that was a cool mesh between you know, doing everything practically but using . visual effects to make this happen, so the scene on platform nine and three quarters is a good example of basically sleight of hand, there are effects here, you know, basic rotoscoping, it's not really that crazy, but we have this transition in the one where Harry Potter enters the Wizard Land train station, wow.

My first guess is that this was done in several takes. You know, this is funny because that's how I would do it too, but they don't cut. This is the same shot of Harry every time. The way they did the shot is

great

. So this background here is actually the background we see later after it's gone through the pillar, but they've done vfx to replace the cool old steam locomotive with these new trains, so it's basically just an image in the background here and if you look You see how the reflections don't move on the top right, it's even 2D, it doesn't actually distort, yeah, it's just an image, it's literally just an image in that corner because no one is looking at it, yeah, you're Looking at Harry's face, yes. so what happens after the screen goes dark, what is happening there?

So they just do a lighting gig, they just turn off the lights and make a new light that comes on here on the side of the brick wall behind him, it's really cg that's a full cg brick wall full cg brick wall okay, that's a fake Harry Potter shadow right there, yeah, and the thing is, they have this problem, okay, so how do we reveal the wall? we reveal the wall that just passed by with the tried and true cleaning, so when that bill hop crosses it, it reveals the wall, it's very subtle, okay, it sure makes your eye completely lost when the wall appears, it just It is there, but these are like psychological tricks. which a good vfx artist can really implement to make impactful shots and then they turn the corner and they reveal the scenery that is actually there, but okay, no, I'm confused, it's a wall that extends forward, no It's a pillar, yeah, that's cg on the right.

Yeah, the brick wall, I mean, you can see the texture of the tile, so you can see a repeating pattern going up the side of the brick wall. Yeah that's so fun these days that the train would be completely cg, yeah totally, they don't. they have the ability to make the train look realistic with the steam like that in the past, like the technology didn't exist, so they had the train there for real and this is a situation where it's easier to put something on the train and then reveal it. than having it there and then trying to compose it into a new, big, amazing train, it's like you don't make it into something real and then paint it later for the beginning of the shot, yeah, it's always about what's easiest o The cheapest thing to do these days is it's hard to make a big train like that for real, but it's easy to make one digitally, so if we were to redo that shot, the beginning of everything would be real and then the end. be fake, yeah, welcome Hari to the diagonal alley, so you could say, "Hey, it's Harry Potter, they have all the money in the world, they built this crazy set, they actually built a crazy set, but the set ends like 10 feet in the air, well, there you are." money

harry

gringos the wizard bicycle so this photo here looks real, right? yeah, how do you think they did it?

I don't know, niko, how they know. Do you know how I did it? It's a miniature, right, miniature, it's a miniature, but This is the challenge: they have a moving camera and they film real people and look at where this is supposed to be today. If you did that take, you would film your take. You know you have your blue screen or something. and you would go into the computer and the camera would follow the shot or combine the movements of the shots. Yes, basically the computer analyzes points in the scene and based on how those points move, it can determine where the camera was and where it was moving. what he was doing, so they did it of course, but this is what now they don't have just a 3D model that they can place, what they have to do is take their miniature, get another camera, put it on a computer controlled arm, miniaturize movement. that they made and then they replicate that exact camera movement on the computer arm that films the thumbnail so they can paste the thumbnail shot into this shot and all the movement lines up, which is a clunky and difficult way to do things because the cameras stay the same size the sensors stay the same size the lenses stay the same size and now you're trying to stitch these two shots together and one of the challenges they faced with the shot that took them a long time to fix was lens distortion because It's a wide angle shot and there is a little bit of lens distortion, but the distortion is different for a miniature shot up close versus a real building that's still far away, yeah, I think that's a cool thing and I want to try it. mess with literally I've been wanting to have some kind of motion control system for years just so we can experiment with bringing back something like this, yeah, like this, to me, this is how you make a movie look really small and fast , trivia vfx moment for you all these candles floating in the air cg right wrong one hundred percent real all those are practical candles makes your job as a filmmaker so much easier having a magical space to work with yes gryffindor yes you're in a magician, okay, but looking at this hat, obviously the whole hat is cg because it's like a character, right, but it's interacting with a person, so they have a wireframe hat that the actors are working with, oh Actually, now the thing is when that wing falls. on the face you see a shadow fall on his face and this is a big problem that you have when you have cgi objects that cast shadows is that there shouldn't be any directional lighting coming from the top, in fact what should be happening is Harry Potter in the shadow. it should be lit from below because the only light that would reach his face would be the light bouncing off the ground, like here you technically wouldn't have the lights on his glasses because they would reflect off the bottom of the hat. which is in the dark, yeah, actually, let me grab the hat, fix our animatronic sorting head, I've got our sorting hat here, so now when Ren puts this on, we're going to lose all this overhead lighting here, yeah, too keep a look at specular reflections in his glasses how they disappear look at his nose look at how the bottom of his nose is now brighter than the top of his nose now take off your hat now the top of his nose is brighter than the bottom bottom of his nose so you put that hat down there is no more light coming from this direction the only light is coming from this direction so his face is now low lit but Harry Potter's face with the hat is not low lit wait but in what house I'm you're in my house now oh son griffin, it's such a subtle thing that no one would catch this like no one in the movies would catch this, but it's one thing, it's totally one thing, but that being said, this is an effects artist trying to make up for the decisions made on set and me.

I think they're doing a pretty good job, they're doing a solid job because I mean, look at the shape of that shadow, it actually warps perfectly around her face on her nose, it goes up over her nose, it's perfect, everything about this is perfect except "For the fact that an artist had to somehow go in and paint the directional lighting on Harry Potter, but they still did a

great

job. The composers on this movie are like world-class composers; there are so many effects in eight movies, of course we can." I won't talk about all the effects in this episode, so we will do another Harry Potter special, but this time the difference is that we will specifically use your comment recommendations for that second episode, so leave a comment below and we will read and review them on camera it's going to happen, it's going to happen, intriguing, right? you know it's pretty in your face you're like wow I just walked past a mirror focus the bow guard is interesting and everything looks like they make some really cool transitions but for me personally the most compelling thing about this whole scene is just the camera. and how they use it to go through the mirror, sorry, that's interesting, so we've been in his imagination the whole time and now we're back to reality, that's cool, oh my god, look at Harry though, he's turned around, the whole scene is flipped. the final shot of all of this is backwards his eye patch is on the wrong side his scar is on the wrong side what are you implying we're in a different dimension now we were in a different dimension the whole time and when they started learning to defend themselves against the dark arts were actually in the real world only for a moment no i think, i don't think anyone thought about it too much, they're like you're going through, it has to be a reflection of what you're going through. you're looking because you know it's a reflection, so how do you think they made that shot?

I have an idea, well, first you get it, you're looking at the shot in the mirror, you're moving at a certain speed, you figure out a way to do it, whether it's controlled or you just have a little song playing in your head, you're hitting marks at a certain speed. , whatever it is, and you turn your camera or set your people to the actual angle that you're looking at through the mirror and then you have a little cgi thing in the middle, I just try to match the speed twice and then mix them together, yeah, exactly, that's exactly it, the camera is just pressing like it's nothing there and they're following that shot and rendering it in this cabinet that has you know, a mirror front, all they do is take the footage from the second film shot and they just place it in a plane behind the camera so that the cabinet itself reflects it, which means that at some point they are passing the reflection. from actual footage to actual footage exactly, yeah, and it was made even more intensely here at the end because notice the mirror moves, you know the whole door is open and it reflects the side of the room there, they actually had to have footage of the side of that room built in a 3D space and it happens so fast you know it's a very dynamic shot, it works really well, I just thought it was a cool cinematic touch that again requires visual effects to make it happen, man cool, that's awesome .

That's so cool, I think magic is cool, but I quote the fact that no one has done the kind ofthings you think magic should be able to do, especially if you play some d&d, yes magic can be brutal, but This is a kids movie franchise that can't be brutal, but what if someone could make it brutal? Yeah, what if someone could make it brutal, almost like Harry Potter was ranked? What would happen if someone already did all that in the videos that come out? tomorrow on the Runner Crew Channel That's right, we made R-rated Harry Potter.

We took some of our favorite moments and made them violent, like really violent, like seriously violent, so R-rated Harry Potter is coming out tomorrow on this channel yeah You are not subscribed and want to see it. Consider signing up for a major character in these movies to be Voldemort and not enter the picture until the fourth movie. One of the key images of Voldemort is the fact that he has no nose, he has a sort of snake slit. They did most of this with makeup, you know, they painted his face to make it a little paler, they put everything like these veins and things on his head and all that, but he still has a nose most of the time, no. there are tracking markers and some of the close-ups, they have tracking markers, then they would obviously track her head and try to just recreate that they had a very precise photographic scan of her entire head, with and without the makeup and the prosthetic, and then compositing , try to use as little of that as possible because sometimes they just need to replace just the nose here, other times they would have to replace everything from the eyebrows to the bottom lip, that's a lot of work, man.

That's the not fun part about vfx, yes they said it was a very laborious process but they had to make sure it was done as perfectly as possible because it's a face, even though it's a weird and crazy alien face, it's still a face and if they get all that wrong it just doesn't look right buddy right away that smoke effect is pretty sweet yeah from the beginning oh yeah buddy this is a guy with a leaf blower on the side of the frame i love that movie like you know stop the power and it turns into a fireball oh yeah dude that's so sick dude this part this part here the coolest ball of water I've ever seen in my life seriously look how cool that is dude oh my god dude this here it's so cool He looks so fragile when he puts his arms out I know, I know, I know, I know I'm actually okay, that's a little less cool now, I agree, they look like chicken wings, man, what a scene, There's a lot to unpack, let's get started.

I don't know the wand effects, like what you're talking about, like the juicy liquid, yeah, yeah, effects exactly, that's a very easy effect to do in After Effects, you just use this plugin called cheat code in particular. I have done it extensively. I think you could achieve this with trapcode. I achieved it with trapdood. I made a whole short film with it. Is incredible. You gave it the liquid gobs, yeah, and they land on the ground and everything, so these guys are using a program called realflow. it's like a liquid simulation tool that lets you get to know these liquid and fallen effects here, they're mixing practical and visual effects, they have a lot of lights blowing up the actors, that's essential to selling magic effects like that, it's like you have something that generates light you can't just add it to the scene without having that light, you have to have it there in person, you can add it to the scene, but it's very, very, very, very difficult to make it look good. just a waste of time it's like doing it on set yes and it's like any time it's better if you do it for real this is the fifth movie in the fourth movie we see this wand effect happening for the first time in the graveyard between

harry

and voldemort and they actually used the old cash data from the fourth movie and put it in the scene from the fifth movie and when we say cash, we're not talking like Benjamin, we're talking about c-a-c-h-e, it's basically a cache.

They did a fight scene in another movie and they're doing another scene where it's basically the same angle, we're just two guys shooting wands at each other and they're like, look, we can use our same gooey simulation that we have. the cache is already done, we don't have to simulate it, just place those polygons in the new scene, call it, so for this movie they filmed more practical elements than the previous four movies had combined. Yes, the way they did it. They look so real if they film real elements, but we are looking at a snake here.

There's no way they set a snake on fire, how would they do that? So the snake is a 3D model and there are like flames that are composited and that's probably some fragments of real fire, but the biggest thing that makes it look extra cool is that there's something going on called fluid simulation. I'm not talking about water, I'm talking about gases, it's all these tricks that these visual effects

artists

hide up their sleeve to try to really sell these things and make them real, so the way they did it is a mix of 2D and 3D.

They got a giant glass sphere about six feet that they shot high-pressure water into. They obtained elements of the thing dripping. They got a huge dump tank. they dumped the water and filmed all of this, oh man they did it for real but the top half of this is a real flow simulation, they are mixing this in such a beautiful way and when the ball falls apart that's just the Footage from the dump tank that is perfectly compiled, how cool, what a scene. This is a great example of combining practical and digital. The scene wouldn't have been as good if it hadn't been done practically half of it, in my opinion.

It would be mediocre at best, guys, that was a magical episode much like our sponsor, Vessy, handing out these magical shoes. These shoes really aren't magic because they are waterproof, they are not waterproof, they are waterproof, it also feels like wearing socks. You might as well be in the driest spell you've ever had on both feet. You might as well be levitating above the water because these shoes keep your feet dry and also guys, these shoes are sustainably made if that doesn't get you. here's the cool thing guys, these shoes are made of dimetex, it's a double knit material, Dumbledore's cloak was made of dimetex and it also keeps your feet warm in the winter and cool in the summer, just like the Hogwarts boys, They are vegan, they think they are vegan shoes.

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There are so many good things.