YTread Logo
YTread Logo

VFX Artists React to SHANG-CHi Bad & Great CGi

Mar 07, 2024
There were about 168 blue screenshots in this little sequence. I'll be inclined to say this guy's CG goes this far. This is ridiculous, but isn't it cool? Yes, no, it's incredible. We spent probably seven months talking. about how we were going to film it, can I guess how you did it before? uh yes please hello everyone welcome back to another episode of visual effects

artists

react

we're joined here by joe farrell he's incredibly successful he's worked on a ton of movies that you've seen you've heard of that, you love, even, more recently, being a visual effects supervisor at chongqi.
vfx artists react to shang chi bad great cgi
Yes, I was the additional visual effects supervisor, working primarily on the second unit. I absolutely love being on set, a lot of people don't. t because the beginning can have long periods of time in boredom,

shang

chi was far from boring, I just smiled from ear to ear working on this movie because it was so much fun, oh and Clint is here, welcome back Clint, It's good to be back, thanks for inviting me. Having you back, man, yeah, it feels like I never left, okay, let's jump, let's jump, you got the wrong guy, does he look like he can fight?
vfx artists react to shang chi bad great cgi

More Interesting Facts About,

vfx artists react to shang chi bad great cgi...

Come on, brother, so there is a lot of talk about this bus. Sequence we did because of the pandemic, we filmed in five different countries in the world and it was brought together by

artists

who worked from home, so it was quite an achievement and a pretty spectacular sequence, I mean, it's a fight scene, so I got a comment . in the fight it's like it's so classic jackie with the whole jacket thing and it just comes from brother, you know exactly, brad allen, who unfortunately recently passed away, bought out his stunt team that he had been working with over the years. years with jackie chan and The stunt team there, that department was a powerhouse with this movie, Andy, uh, the stunt supervisor for this sequence.
vfx artists react to shang chi bad great cgi
I think he had spent many years working with Jackie and was definitely channeling the use of all the clothes and definitely using the bus. became part of the fight and becomes quite integral to the entire sequence. We had a total of four buses, two of them we had to modify to do real stunts and then the other two were on air bladders and the other one we did. had been raised on this amazing platform where they could hold the whole bus and articulate it like 40 degrees to 30 degrees, so young lee and chris actually designed with brad allen and put together a whole preamp for this, I guess I think it's Se they call stunt views, so initially what happens is they do stunt visits and they work the whole fight sequence with cameras similar to the ones you're using, then we needed to do that as the visual effects department would go in and preview of all the pieces that went into that. so they would modify the gimmick according to what we had before and it was a back and forth process to finally get this so this was all filmed on a blue screen in Sydney oh really yeah well I'm coming from a background in composition, so my pet Peeve is car compositions just for simple things that you can do that sometimes get overlooked and make it look fake.
vfx artists react to shang chi bad great cgi
I will tell you there were about 168 blue screen shots in this little sequence, yes looking at this there are a lot of blurry edges and they are perfect edges, how do you extract blue screen keys like this that give you perfect edges? attention to detail in little sections where we take out an area there and redo it and do a luma key here and an edge there or a hand paint fix here and there, I've got it, so when you have something that has blurry edges you're basically going and making little masks around each of them and making a specific key for each edge depending on what kind of edge is right, yeah, I mean you could get lucky and make an awesome general key and pull it off, but I think that was There's probably a 0.001 chance of that actually happening.
I think you'll find 99.9 of the time, it's just the artists working very, very hard to achieve that goal. Yes, this is also just a fraction of the scene. This continues for about 10 minutes. ridiculous I think I think it's 5 minutes and 32 seconds or something like that I know I literally worked on this sequence for a year and a half we needed to choreograph it in so much detail because all the people on the bus are moving We're taking out chairs, we're taking out poles, they had to remove the windows because a lot of times the reflections are just the goodness of the equipment, so you add back the reflections and the windows and of course the background too.
When we film inside those reflections are natural, the interesting part is actually the setups and what's happening outside, so you have people standing there, you have blowers, you have people swinging them, you have lights coming. in the reflectors, the speed at which you move, you can't avoid them being in the shot, you'll do what you can, say, can we move the reflector? and the dp will be like, okay, I can move it. Here it's better for you, but you're moving at such a speed that we do these setups every kind of 20 minutes, so if you imagine moving 200 people every 20 minutes, oh yeah, in that shot, we probably spent seven months talking about how we were.
I'm going to shoot because it's a very, very complicated shot. Can I guess how you did it before? Yes, please, Clint, this is our chance, okay, Sherlock Holmes, this with the person who is right in front of us who can actually tell us how it's done. on the glasses, he's probably not even touching the razer's grip, he lifts up a separate plate and then it's his own plate and then the bottom is probably another plate and then the back bottom is probably another plate, right? I'm tempted to say his jacket is CG but maybe his whole body is CG.
I can also see that he is like wired or something. Where are they choosing it from? Is it the hips and then you have to get that out of there so the shirt is completely redone and the legs probably aren't? It's not even real and then you transition from the boom to a different shot of it right there, okay guys, do you want to let me tell you or do you want to continue, yeah, you're kind of getting there, it's a real jacket, it's real. shirt is real cemu and his real legs is a razor cg the whole bus the background in the foreground and everything else is cg oh it's much easier that way yeah much easier and are you transitioning with them or Is this a long take where I actually move the camera, this movement happens for four seconds and travels 22 feet, the camera just goes like this, yeah, we tried to get a motion control camera to film it, but we couldn't get it into the country, the pandemic prevented us from getting the milo, really what it is is a rail and I had it so that the camera would fall through a pulley system and they would jump off these stairs and they would fall and everything would land on a blue screen, so the whole thing the lighting you're seeing here is the art from the luma composer who did this and we just said okay let's bring more interaction and you know I hope we did a good job it looks cool I saw this I was like the one too rush hour, you know, Jackie going up the thing running through the bamboo and everything, yeah, this sequence was pretty special, the way the camera swoops in and then it becomes real and suddenly it's like you barely hit it Mind you, this is all crazy, crazy, crazy and boom, real people.
I joke about this sequence because I think he kills seven people in this sequence, but he does it in such a Charlie Chaplin way that I think he doesn't really bother anyone, but he kills that guy who dies, poor 49ers, I mean, that one Guy could have a family, I don't. I know I love these kinds of brutal falls, okay, so this shot here I'll be inclined to say that this guy's cg up to here now is real. I believe the beginning is real and I believe the end is real. or you could do everything really, really, because it's very hard to say because there's a wonderful glow that's like in every marble movie, yeah, and it makes the CG and all the compositing and all the real stuff blend together very, very good.
I would say that, um, pretty much from the outside, Chris said that we film as real as we can, so with this particular shot, the two guys on the left are real and the guy on the right is digital from start to finish. the due ending For the amazing animation done by rodeo fx, we actually had an artist doing that, but we needed to modify it enough to take it out of live action, so you ended up with a really good reference. Yes, he falls three stories and swings, he does this type of movement, but he needs to do it in a way that is threatening.
He's trying to go down for the purpose of taking out Shang Chi, so I think Destin suggested we have him come over and just kick really hard. and we see a lot of videos of parkour guys and they squeeze really tight and then they explode and that's kind of a martial arts move and we thought that would fit really well. I'm not a fan of you. I know how to lose weight on cg characters even if it's a little bit heavier than you'd expect, that's better, it's better to lean on that a little bit, yeah, and what we're seeing here in the background is the scaffolding, actually, yeah, everything is digital, but because everything is on a mirrored surface, it reflects the environment and if you notice the camera never stays still in this entire sequence, so the camera constantly moving means that all those reflections had to be rendered individually and this it has about 110 shots in the sequence etc. his black uniform on a very dark night in a dark city, the lighting and placement of the signs had to be done meticulously so you could outline everything which is really very clever and also incredibly time consuming, that's ridiculous and a lot of the time really we were.
Confused which direction the camera was facing, you needed to know you were looking at a building rather than looking through the scaffolding at the city on the other side. Interesting, so we did a lot of work and tried to figure out what the reflection looked like when you knew specifically when you looked at the city versus the reflection. You see that all the highlights have a slight increase in their densities to help with readability. Oh, I see it's like all the black levels have been slightly increased, so even the darkest ones. part of the reflection is still a little brighter than the darkest part of the people in front of it, correct, but that obviously meant we needed to separate the reflection from the main one, so they needed to rotate even more.
This is ridiculous, complicated, it's ridiculous, but. Isn't it

great

? Yes, it's amazing. Hello everyone who just stumbled upon the vfx artist. React for the first time. Please consider subscribing. They will have a good time. Many other people have continued to return. I think they will. I know one of them, so I heard you introduced a shot in this movie, you introduced a shot, you introduced something. In visual effects we always try to sneak something in. No, I mean, you know, there's a lot of talk about kind of virtual camera work and everything. technology that comes along with Mandalorian and there is one shot in this particular one where I did some virtual camera work, but it's so old school that it's surprising that you can take old-fashioned techniques and just apply them right in the middle of something so complex which is at the end, right, not the helicopter, it's at the beginning, it's right at the beginning, three shots, I know exactly, it's 57 frames long, oh my god, it's probably not here, the reason it was so interesting and difficult is because when you are pre- When visiting the shots, you can go to a previous company and say look, there's a sign, there's a helicopter and there's an explosion, but when you really try to put it in a 239 aspect, the audience needs to know what is looking instantly because the shot lasts only a little over two seconds, you have a little clue of the poster up to that moment.
Now the problem with the sign is that it is a giant light source and you don't want people to look at the sign and then take it. disappeared and you say: wait, how is it doing that now and why did the window disappear? You don't want that confusion. We did a couple of versions in previews and we're trying to offer different ideas, a camera on top looking down. and then a camera behind it, but all of those things overlooked one of those factors: you wouldn't see the sign, you would just see the explosion, so I ended up taking my son's model airplane, suspending it on a ruler with a piece of rope nylon, I got two chairs and then I basically framed the chairs knowing where the sign was and I was just doing different types of camera movements while filming this little model airplane and then taking it and tracking it and trying different ideas. and changing different speeds and then modifying it and then I ended up generating a camera to show to the director and they loved it and that was my version of a virtual camera.
I would love to see the official Marvel breakdown where it's like doing all the wipes and then it just shows like it shows Mike, it just shows my garage in a model. It seems like your solution was to simply have an orbiting shot, it started out asfocused on the billboard and then directed our attention where. The explosion happened as if it revolved around the helicopter in the center, yes the helicopter wasn't that important, the sign was reasonably important, but in this particular one that explosion kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger because we needed to get your attention.
It's a

great

lesson in clarity because it's so important. If your audience is confused, who cares? It doesn't matter, nothing matters, it's a great story, although I love that it's like you. Do what you can with what you have and as if you don't have to do everything, make it work. You know, actually, this is pretty traditional filmmaking. In this movie, it looks technologically savvy and we're using amazing technology and we have all of it. the gadgets and all the amazing gadgets and platforms etc, but it's all real sets, real platforms that actually move, there are no fantastic shots here and if there is a fantastic shot, it's actually done with platforms that can now do things fantastic for people.
Do you have any suggestions for anyone trying to do this? Don't do it unless you are passionate. You have to be passionate. If not, you win. I don't survive, so I'm ridiculously passionate about making movies or just telling stories and being able to do that any way I can is why I enjoy movies. Is incredible. You may have heard of the Jim Connor series where Ken Block goes out and does amazing stunts. Well, Joe made his own version of it with the sun called Koala Khanna, where they took a little plastic Tesla toy. Yeah we found it in the trash and we did it until we went crazy and we do about 20. miles they modified it they like to build their own drums and stuff yeah it's actually very cool and a great example of amazing cinematography that you can do just with friends or whoever, it only has like 300 views, I think it would be really cool. to give it the uh the old vpx rsv, let's try to get to 500 views, let's give it some love here and increase that, we certainly appreciate it, I think that would be really cool.
Hey everyone, it's me, Jake, back for another brand integration. With today's sponsor, Squarespace, I heard that Jordan has been doing these integrations lately and well, I don't want her to take my job, so I'm back to doing these integrations using cutting edge technology and I'm I'm happy to be here, but I'm even happier to tell you about today's Squarespace backers. Squarespace is the best way for people who don't know how to build a website to build a website and they have a ton of different features that you can get when you use them first and foremost, they have award-winning 24/7 customer service of the week and award-winning templates.
Don't forget that you can create a members-only area on your Squarespace website and have member-only benefits listed in that section. It's great, let's say you're part of a slightly bigger team. Guess what, with Squarespace's multi-contributor tools you can assign different roles and use the strengths that different people are good at contributing to your website with Squarespace's unmatched traffic overview tools. Just like this bot records everything in the studio, all Time Squarespace traffic summaries will record who visits your site, what pages they land on, and give you an overview of what their experience is like so you can better tailor your website.
Anyone who ever visits Squarespace can use their social media tools to post once to their Squarespace website and then have that post automatically formatted and go out to their other social media profiles. This makes posting to multiple profiles much easier. more effective and will save you a lot of time and probably some money, so if you are interested in getting some amazing technology for yourself, visit squarespace.com or team and you will get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain that is squarespace broker .com or just click the link in the description below oh hi christian i need to have a meeting with nico right now.
Do you think you could take me upstairs? Thanks, yes this is great I know. a little heavy, so we often ask what are your favorite shots from movies, TV shows, classic movies. I'd love to know what some of your favorite vfx are from YouTube videos and other online creators. I'd love to do a breakdown of some of the things. which we've seen on youtube from some of the wonderful digital artists here too, if you're a big fan of this show and love having longer episodes, we actually do extended episodes on our website, they cut a little slower, we're going to a little deeper into the knowledge, it's a good time quarterdigital.com check it out joe, thank you immensely for joining us yes, it was a pleasure every time you want to invite me to this therapeutic couch, I'm here, don't forget, also check out Clint's channel on youtube.com yeah, you know, teaching people how to do vfx in my weird way, so come hang out, it's a good time, okay Joe, thank you so much everyone watching, thank you so much.
See you tomorrow this Sunday because we usually have another video on Sundays or next Saturday if you don't see our other videos for some reason.

If you have any copyright issue, please Contact