VFX Artists React to STAR WARS bad and Great CGi

Star Wars The original Star Wars was before computers but they really executed those techniques in a very clever way, all painted oh, no way, I saw it, I saw a stop-motion thing there, it's crazy, let's explain how they did it, oh God. god wren I'm your biological father hello welcome back to another episode of vfx

artists

react

today we're going to talk about

star

wars

the original

star

wars

because those three movies totally redefined visual effects in cinema, it was before computers One of these things is like analog technology which is pure magic almost mysterious to most visual effects

artists

today, so let's break down how they work.

Have you seen that? Wait, have you seen the original Star Wars? I've seen the original Star Wars. I'm very excited for this episode, you guys are ready, put your seat belts on the computers, it's super important visual effects, but when they did the original Star Wars, the computers they had at that time what they were able to produce was that little wireframe representation of the Death Star, that's the limit, that's the heyday of computer imaging at the time, so all the crazy compositing and work that you see, all done on film, no computers , just blue screen models and compositions and mats using real chemical processes, it's crazy, let's explain how. they made it an elegant weapon for a more civilized day lightsabers be careful with that thing it's a bit of a hidden weapon jump cut here yeah I wouldn't say it's hidden it's pretty obvious yeah look how thin the blade is it practically disappears so the lightsabers They did a couple of different effects techniques and they're doing lightsabers and Star Wars in the early original Star Wars.

A new hope, the way they made the lightsabers they actually had would have a stick on the lightsaber and it was covered in a retroreflective material basically. The same thing you would see as a safety vest when you are riding a bike late at night, so if they turn on a light near the camera, that device will basically reflect the light back to the camera and light up. Once you have that glow stick, the other artist needs to take the film, project it onto a large cel sheet like the one they use for animation, and trace a small dot for the lightsaber to enhance the sheet with another small pass of light. .

The thing is, there are some takes. where they couldn't have the stick on set on the lightsaber for example here where Luke is fighting a little droid well you can actually see him jump around shaking yeah so the artist is literally guessing how long the sword is and where it sits. the hill and that's the reason you would be moving up and down, oh yeah, it's worth noting that this shot has two other very high level visual effects going on at the same time, there's a little droid ball flying around, which is a stop-motion element and there are also stop-motion elements on the chess table at the same time oh, the chess table is in this shot, this is probably where the lightsabers looked best in the entire movie the glow is looks cool the actual central white beam looks good the fight is so crazy yeah If you look at the raw footage like the fight looks so tough the funny thing is the lightsabers are actually a little fragile there's a clip from uh you turn to the jedi where Luke goes crazy on Darth Vader with just the raw lightsaber and you.

I can see you went flying, it just broke, yeah, once they got to later episodes of Star Wars, basically the rotoscope artists were doing the lightsaber effects entirely, they weren't relying on a retroreflective material on the set to give you a little. of a shine, they actually cut the lightsaber so that it was just a transparent film for those scenes and then they shined a very bright light through that little slit to expose the film itself and that's what you get with the nice reel of the The shine is because it's actually a double exposure of the already exposed film with something really shiny, but talking about how the lightsabers were made here and how they actually used the film exposure to their advantage, that's how they did a lot of the groundbreaking scenes in Star Wars, so death.

Star Trench Run with a New Hope is like the most amazing climactic action scene of any movie from that decade. This is what brought people back to the theaters a dozen times for all the spaceships. They actually made real physical models and filmed them. against a blue screen, that makes sense, you just know that you remove the blue correctly, but back then it was a complicated process to remove that blue and that process starts with how the film

react

s to light, so when you film something you basically have three colors that make up what you see red, green and blue if you put different filters and from the lens you can see what your red channel, your green channel and your blue channel look like for a blue screenshot if you just took that shot put a filter blue on it and then project it onto black and white film, the parts that were blue will appear white and the parts that were not blue will appear black once you have your blue pass that was printed on black and white film.

Then you can go and do just the red channel, now red is on the opposite side of the spectrum than blue, so anything that has had any exposure to red will show up in the red pass and the blue pass, so when You combine the two, you take this. piece of black and white film and now you can use this to block the light, so when you project things onto a piece of film to expose, you can now use that black and white mask to allow you to expose a thing in the windows, for For example, or the background and something else in the foreground we are so used to thinking that things are stacked these days on the computer, you have your layers, you can't work that way with film because once you expose something on film it doesn't. you can just If you expose something on top of where you just exposed something, you're going to get a double exposure and that's why you need these pieces of black and white film because they actually block the light from going through that little mat, which will make it Only the part where The X-Wing is lighting up remains.

A small X-wing-shaped silhouette prevents light from reaching where the X-wing element was already exposed, so it is not stacked; In reality, everything is basically cropped and has to be perfectly aligned with itself working with film. This is a very complicated process because you had to know exactly how everything was going to look in the final product before you even started filming any of it, so they filmed these miniature physical models against a blue screen, but the way they moved These models are different. which made this special because they didn't move the model specifically, they moved the camera using a very special motion controlled camera rig called a dykstra flex using a super rudimentary computer system, they would basically program exactly how the camera would move, they were able to do that one and again, instead of a ship flying towards the camera or away from the camera, they would reverse that process, the camera would fly away or move towards it to simulate a ship moving towards or away from the camera, allowing no only the ships would move in correlation with the camera, but also to stack multiple ships next to each other, they would only film one ship at a time, but in a shot like this they could have had Darth Vader in front with two Tie fighters flying behind. him and they were able to do that because he had the exact same camera movement over and over again, so you can actually see the motion blur and that's actually captured on camera.

They pioneered an idea for Star Wars called Go Motion where when the camera is moving frame by frame by frame throughout these shots of the models, when it makes the exposure, it actually moves at the same time to provide motion blur and when adding motion blur they say motion blur was their secret weapon, it was their special sauce that made all this suddenly look good, we told you a long, long time ago in an episode far, far away, that we would make an episode about classic star wars, we have a couple of special episodes coming out very soon about lord of the rings and the hobbit, subscribe for that, this time they're coming out for real.

I am very excited. Now let's take a look at a scene that combines all the things we've been talking about and turns it up to 11. The thing about a real asteroid belt is that they're never too dense for a real asteroid belt, but it's fantasy, fantasy from Star Wars, not science fiction, oh look at all these moving elements, yes, that guy who got hit, the hand painting, yes, the hand drawn. lightning bolt, look at that hand animated shadow, oh yeah that's right, all the shadows were hand painted and now it's an actual miniature set instead of a miniature prop, so they're flying a camera across the set and They then grab the items from the ships. dude that looks so good yeah that's shit there's like 80 different things happening in all these shots so there are foreground asteroids that are filmed individually like you mentioned real physical props of asteroids and there's like a middle layer which is like all painted asteroids and there's a background layer and another background layer where they're doing the same thing or someone just went and painted rocks and then they're compiling all of that into a movie, this shot here where the Tie fighter cuts off its wing , remember every item you have. color printing, you have the matte, you have the reverse matte and then of course you have the background, so 25 elements multiplied by five things needed for each element, so one of the last big techniques they used for this film was Matte paintings are an old school technique, but they really executed those techniques in a very clever way, so the scene where the emperor appears back at the pier, this shot here, wait, those aren't real people, that It's not real, wait, okay, very clearly. the people that move are real, the magic of something like this is that they are combining a painting with real images where the stitching of the first row of soldiers is and some of those officers are real, all the rest are fake and they actually have a false image. army is a fake army, in fact they have cutouts to make the forwards real, but then there are human shaped silhouettes in the painting, so this is an example of how cool it can be, but let's look at a shot that is actually much simpler. scope, but it actually clearly illustrates how this works.

They're not going to spend all that money to make that set. It would be crazy. You don't need to do that. All you need is a large piece of glass. A talented artist. Actually what they're doing is creating a set and Alec Guinness just walks along a platform maybe three or four feet above the ground and they basically just painted in the distance below it and there's a hole in the glass that's a little crop perfect for making images reveal or project from behind Now, the quality of their matte paintings completely dictates how the real things look and it's worth noting that Star Wars has some of the best matte painting artists in the world. world.

The Death Star painted the trees and that satellite dish. all painted that landing pad all painted oh no way an ATM is a real model but everything else around it is painted in this shot except the little platform all painted how much does that paint cost? I don't know, I would love to have it. that painting this takes all paint except the atat oh that's how they get you because they add people walking on the side exactly they have the emperor coming down from the platform the little droids gliding all those things trick your mind and say oh yeah this is a thing complete, this is a whole mess before we see hot you want to see a video of the guy in the wampa suit falling all like that, wait what yeti was trying to walk in the snow on two and a half foot stilts.

With his mask on he was 11 feet tall, he looks like he just gave up on life, so we've explained a bunch of crazy techniques they've used so far in Star Wars, let's see how it all comes together in one incredible intuitive force. of visual effects spectacularity, these are video binoculars, so what they did was a stop-motion animation of the atat walking and then they projected it on a movie screen and then they took a video camera and recorded the movie screen making movements panning up and down to get the binocular look wow so cool they only had three atat models the two little ones in the background are literally just cardboard cutouts no way but they matched them perfectly the lighting is exactly the same the perspective is the same but they are a cardboard cutout the feet are hidden in the place where it makes contact with the ground, oh friend, which makes your job easier because when it comes to stop motion you need to anchor your model ofstop-motion to like the floor and be able to animate it, so try to show the feet. where all the bolts and pins are going to be a big pain, this shot right here is crazy it seriously looks like a drone racing shot if you look at what's going on here, the camera flies under the legs, the a-t-a-t wow, for right, noticing that the a-t-a-t is walking the snow and leaving footprints, I just realized it happened, how was it okay, sorry, continue?

The animator has a trap door that opens and moves the atat and he can't brush or touch the snow around the feet because the footprints need to be real footprints made by the movement, so he has to be very careful, then the camera flies underneath of the ata's legs, so what they're doing is getting the motion controlled camera rig right and then when it gets close to the 8080, they're doing it? they just lifted it up, modeled it and took the model out, it's flawless, I saw it, I saw a stop-motion thing there, you saw it, the snow pops into place like something happened between shots, that last little pop, there's a big layer of snow on the surface that wasn't there a frame before, damn that explosion, all the debris, yeah that's sick, oh another interesting thing about how they do all the explosions is that they shoot them in camera very slow because a small explosion is done like that where the big exposure is like that, you can emulate that type of movement by filming it very fast to do it in slow motion.

I love how those little embers pass through the air like that. Oh, that's because they actually film it for real. going through the air, yeah, it's on a cable like a little zip line, they're just filming it against the blue screen. That gave you the best simulation possible if they only filmed statically, you wouldn't have the atmosphere flying. Yeah the wind direction is right, oh man look at that, it was definitely stop motion because you can see the stutter, it's the brief glimpse of the atst the Chicken Walker as they called it, it was a

great

idea to have a full space battle. not in space because it gives you similar images to see in the background plus a star field, yes the hot scene is an amazing demonstration of all this hard work and I really like some old school techniques like simply king hairy basic house in stop-motion style but then combined with a very inventive approach to filming it all and combining it with live action.

Can you imagine being Mark Hamill and saying oh yeah, we filmed this took a while, it was hard work, doing something innovative? Hopefully it works and then you get to the theater and you see this and you're like, "Oh my God," so as always, we ask that you leave a comment below if there's a TV show or a movie or even just a scene that you'd like to see. let's analyze and react, but if you want to have direct control over what we react to, the best way to do that is to support us on Patreon because each patron can vote on one of the things that we will be reacting to, so it's a way to have direct access to us and there are a couple of sponsors we'd like to thank right now, thanks jack o'connell, bobby hansel, regards harris, reggie patrick, philip oxford, we're thinking of you ellen. albanza nothing canadian spy skinky snack the glitch cube I'm brian and toast thank you all for supporting us if you like what we do here you want to consider supporting us it means a lot to us it helps us do what we have There's a little bit of merchandise left because today and tomorrow are literally the last days.

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