Original subtitles

Hey guys, new shirts are on sale.

I'm going to peel this couch dry, dude.

Reptilians making this movie, dude? What's going on?

Get away from that.

Get out of there.

This is a movie that deserves its Rotten Tomatoes 0 % score.

Here's what happened.

Did you guys see Mickey 17?

Bro, what?

I think it contains the best clone effect in film history. In film history?

can see that.

Hey, what's up? Welcome back to another episode of Visual Effects Artists React.

Today, we've got some drama to talk about, so let's just get into it right

All right, Christian, will you pull up the TikTok that I shared with you?

Okay, coming.

Video spice on.

What are we looking at here?

It's hard to tell based on how far away. This isn't how small it is. This looks

like an AI takeover.

So you guys are thinking AI takeover. Okay.

That's a good theory. Let's pull up the full screen version.

Yeah. Reflections on hood.

A siege car. Wait. Oh, is this full siege?

This is Blender. Is this a scan?

Oh, is this like a photogrammetry scan of the city?

yeah it's more obvious on the bigger screen it was really hard to see on the

tiktok screen but that looks really good i was like this looks like drone

footage but i clearly see the shadow of a car on the ground there it's like a

little too cohesive and good for like ai you know that shadow of the car is like

a little too intelligent isn't that very like realistic looking yeah

deviously realistic looking yeah it's like when you focus too much on the

textures of the buildings you can see they're quite low res freddy sent this

me and he's like how do you think they did this and he gave me the same quiz i

was looking at my phone and like i could not figure it out like this looks like

ai but like yet it can't be ai it's everything like the smear on the glass

like perfect like haze like it just it nails the dash cam footage camera motion

is nice too it's really impressive what people can can do with blender these

days It's also just like, I was distracted by Robert Downey Jr.

Yeah, where was he down there?

Go to his TikTok. He has one where it's like the proof. It looks like AI.

He's like, nope, here's the actual shot.

Yeah? Wait, is that a, yeah, that's a photo scan, yeah? Mm -hmm. Or like a

Google Maps or Google Earth thing.

Dude, the people were literally just silhouettes.

2D silhouettes.

It's all you need to trick the eye.

So, I'm down to jump into mine.

Fantastic Four just came out.

So we're going to take a look at Not That Movie.

Before any of the Fantastic Four movies were made, the students at USC made a

fan film about the Silver Surfer that came out in 1993.

Oh, what the heck? So a year after T -1000.

Yeah, well, they were working on it during 1992.

It took them a while. They're doing the same effect as the Liquid Terminator.

So let's take a look at what some kids can do in 1992.

Man, shooting on film is like instant production quality.

Is that Terminator action figure?

Yeah. It is.

Dude, 90s bullies are the worst.

Oh, the glasses.

Dude, the lighting is really nice. The kids' reflection.

Yeah, wow, they got like the intensity of the highlights pretty dialed in.

2D cut out. You'll see why.

Okay,

you narcissist, calm down.

That's Back to the Future right there.

And that was it. Wow, that's ambitious.

If you look at it now with today's perspective, it doesn't look good. If

expecting the Silver Surfer from the most recent Fantastic Four film, there's

obviously going to be huge differences.

But the thing is that this was made 33 years ago. So first of all, this was

on a machine that cost about a quarter million dollars.

Eric Fleming and Robert Letterman were two students at USC. They got this whole

thing off the ground. Apparently, they got it in front of Stan Lee.

So this was actually made with permission from Marvel. Now, this is

before Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that stuff. So at the time, they were

trying to get a Silver Surfer film made.

And so this was kind of like their spec for that.

I think they kind of nailed the chrome look.

Yeah, they did a really good job. If you're just to pause on this, like,

actually a pretty good render. They matched, like, the highlights perfectly

the black levels perfectly, and they're really benefiting from the fact that

back then you take all this and you print it all back onto film.

Yeah. And that's what gets... shown to people and printed from. So like just by

nature, nothing's like too out of the whack. It kind of gets all pushed back

into the film look. So I'm assuming they got some sort of panorama of the scene

for the actual environmental reflections, including a picture of the

front of the camera there. Right. If you are doing a good job with your film

exposure.

and your color management you can get this effect like i think this is why ilm

you know they had the abyss and they had the t1000 yeah and everybody's pumping

out chrome 3d models is because back then you don't have like hdri's you

change the exposure on the shot and have like the bright spots and the silver

guy change exposure as if you're changing exposure outside what's really

happening here is measuring the angle of like a polygon on the model shooting

basically a sample array out to a bitmap and then grabbing that pixel color and

mapping it onto that silver guy So whatever digital image format they're

the color values in that image are getting mapped exactly the same onto the

chrome shader, onto the silver server. So there's no exposure changes. There's

no lighting changes. There's zero light simulation. It's truly just grab a

pixel, stick it on. Grab a pixel, stick it on. And if your original picture is

the right exposure, it will then match once it's all combined into the shot.

it's full commitment. That's the thing. It's full send commitment. Your picture

has to be perfectly exposed. It has to match the exposure of your film plate.

And the white balance has to match. to be the same, the film stock has to be

same, the time of day has to be the same, clouds have to be the same.

You're really locked in. Also, we didn't even talk about the glasses. I know.

The glasses shot is crazy.

So I'm assuming that's probably just a composite of him on that fisheye image

background and then just animated somehow.

You are getting slightly different motion jitter in each of the lenses. So

don't know if it would be from one render.

Or the lenses are each just 3D shaped.

I feel like you can almost see the polygons and the edges.

Or it's literally just a guy trying to cleverly animate just a 2D image in what

he thinks should be the response to the tilting of the glasses and then rotoing

it for each lens.

That is crazy ambitious.

So Eric Fleming and Robert Letterman were the two main guys on this piece.

Robert Letterman went on to direct Monsters vs. Aliens and Detective

Oh, wow. Yeah. But the main guy, Eric Fleming, whose channel this is on,

really direct too many movies.

After this? He directed a movie called My Brother the Pig. I turned my brother

into a pork chop, and now I'm driving to Mexico to see if my nanny, as her

grandmother, might be able to turn my brother back into the monster he wants.

Pack up. We're going to Mexico. And then last August, he was arrested.

What? Really? Because he was the one who supplied ketamine to Matthew Perry.

Oh.

And now he faces 25 years in prison for distributing ketamine.

What a twisted clip took, man.

Wow. Yeah, well, he made a great student film.

We need something lighthearted.

Should we do a little palette climbing and go back to the drama? Yeah, we'll

our visual smelling beans. Did you guys see Mickey 17?

This time I wasn't scared.

I really

want to see this movie. I've just...

Not gotten around to it yet. I think it contains the best clone effects in film

history. In film history? I can see that. I think so. I think so.

But it takes place on an alien planet, and that planet is replete with what

call creepers.

But there's some really cool interaction with the aliens and Robert Pattinson in

one of these scenes, and I thought it'd be fun to take a look at it. They're

very creepy cuties. They are, yeah, yeah. It's a fine line. Not creepy

creepy cuties. Creepy cuties.

They're such little sweethearts.

This is a really cool shot. I imagine he's on the back of five or six

people in green morph suits as they push him up under the snow.

You're really close. Really?

Really? They had a full waist rig that would hoist him out of the hole for some

of the shots. But for this shot in particular, they had a team of stuntmen

white outfits instead. Oh, sure.

They're going to roto him anyway.

And they are literally hoisting him and trying their best, bless their hearts,

not to cross over his body with their hands to obscure him. But of course,

a rig around your waist and with a whole bunch of stuntmen hoisting you up...

It's going to happen. It's going to happen. Couldn't you just cover him with

little grub?

Well, that's the thing is they kept the performance of Robert, right? It's just

that we're calling him Robert. Are you going to tell me that legs and body are

3D?

You know, for a moment I can kind of see the legs being 3D actually.

The vast majority of his body is full 3D. They were able to keep one arm, a

little bit of the shoulders, and a part of the head. That's it.

Everything else was digitally replaced.

And basically motion maps in a way to his actual performance. And then they

changed the animation of the grubs in order to account for that performance.

Wow. But it's like, it's borderline seamless. There maybe are some elements

animation that are a little visible. Right before you said it, I was looking

his stomach and there was something off about it. Maybe it was the carabiner.

Maybe it was like the stretchiness of the lines on his stomach. But it wasn't

enough for me to be like, oh yeah, no, that's CG. I was just kind of like, oh,

noticed something and I didn't really understand it.

We interrupt this program to bring you VFX Producer Reacts 2, Good and Bad

Mental State.

All right, I'm ready. Let's jump into some scenes.

Oof, man, that guy's looking like he's having a rough time. He looks like he

could use someone to talk to. Oh, look, this guy's looking pretty happy.

He's probably in, like, therapy or something.

So if you feel more like the first guy versus the second guy, maybe you should

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I personally couldn't recommend it more. Now that's it for VFX Producers React.

Now I'll get you back over to VFX Artists React.

And as cool as these creatures are, I think the real hero of this entire movie

are the twin effects.

Now, we looked at sinners not that long ago. And Nico, I don't know if I'm

misremembering. Did you say that they were the best clone effects that you'd

seen to that point? The working sinners.

Okay. And I really want you to take a look at this. Okay.

Dude, that moving camera. Okay, so far the camera's only panning and tilting.

It's not moving through space.

So, so far you're not moved. That's okay. So far?

Yeah, yeah.

We're building, for sure.

Okay, camera's moving through space.

It's pulling back.

Okay, motion control.

He just grabbed him.

Oh, wow.

This could be a... Wow.

This is mild Mickey.

And this is habanero Mickey.

That's really impressive.

There's a lot of subtle tricks going on.

Interacting with both of them at the same time. That's crazy.

Bleeding.

Mike, you weren't thinking of trying the same thing.

I saw you sneaking up behind me.

Bro, what?

Come on now. At this point, I think the only way they could do this is like full

3D head replacement.

Literally nobody cared in the theater. I was losing my mind. I was like...

I'm always like, what are you doing? I'm like, that was really good.

It's got to be a body double. How can she interact with both of them at the

time? At the very least... Anything

goes, dude.

It's wild.

How is he twisting his own hair?

Yeah, it's that good.

The thing I'm looking at is, like, who's there with her at the moment? And are

they swapping her out? Because, like, she has to interact with both of them

the acting, and they're kind of dependent on her. So, like, are they

clever wipes and swapping her out? I'm going to tell you this.

VFX supervisor Dan Glass said they used no motion control on the entire

film. Wow.

He says that when it comes to performance, it gets in the way.

The sensible way to do something like this is to get a body double that's as

close as possible and you're doing a CG head replacement.

Depending on the shot will dictate whose head gets replaced and who's actually

being the primary actor in the moment. Traditionally, the twin effect is done

having one person do a take and then having the same person do a separate

So those are two simultaneous things existing separately.

When they start interacting is where the real challenges come in. I think when

you push into the guy and his face is all motion blurry, you get the original

actor. That's as close as we can get. It's like a photo of Bigfoot. It's like

just a blurry, like, wait, that's him.

I don't even want to guess anymore. How do they do it, Jordan?

It's obviously...

with all movies with colon effects mixed bag all the above traditional split

screen as you guys saw in the beginning something like this probably traditional

split screen there is uh 2d head compositing going on specifically in the

the shoulders i've actually found this very entertaining robert pattinson has

such a distinctive jawline that they found that in the dirty over the

they couldn't leave the body double it they needed to composite the jaw back

Because it's so sharp. So I was literally watching all the dirty over

shoulders and going, oh yeah, that's hilarious.

They just put his head back in there. Typically when filming with, you know,

these two roles playing in the same shot, whoever was leading the dance in

of camera motion dominantly would start. They would run through it and they

would pick up the second pass. Now for these more complex shots, VFX supervisor

Dan Glass said they used deep fake compositing and they used volume caps.

crazy rig system is what they call it, and they would do it in order to gather

the perfect training data for the AI tool sets.

Every single lighting environment that he was in where they knew they were

to replace them digitally, they used this VoluCap system.

So kind of a similar thing to Sinners?

Similar thing to Sinners, but to me this is like obviously the next level up

from that. That's the VoluCap.

crazy rig system.

That said, not that it's a magic wand, but like it's the greatest deep faking

I've ever seen.

So they must be kind of doing something similar to like what they did in the

second Matrix film where they're filming Robert Pattinson doing the performance.

So you're getting a full high quality performance and somehow putting that in

the right spot, tracked under somebody else's head, doing a combination of that

3D rebuild plus a deep fake re -render, so to speak, to kind of like bring all

the little details home.

It's very, very good. I really want to see a breakdown of this.

Yeah. If any VFX teams are responsible for this, please drop a breakdown. This

is so cool.

I know it's a great effect when I'm super excited to see you see it.

Like, as it was coming up, I was like, oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I'm so about

see it.

All right. Time for some drama.

Why is this drama, Nico?

All right. So War of the Worlds just dropped. 2025 edition.

It's very poorly rated on Amazon right now. It was shot during COVID, and it's

been in, like, re -edit hell for about five years.

Ah! Always a bad sign. We're going to kick things off with the asteroids, the

alien asteroids, hitting planet Earth.

Okay! Why'd you do that? But they're portrayed as asteroids.

So I think the idea for this film is like a, it's all from the point of view

Ice Cube working out like the NSA.

There was a jump cut on a Zoom call.

I'm going to peel this couch dry, dude.

She says outside.

She's holding a road bike with a dead cat on it.

Insane video.

How do you upload that?

This is a tough problem. How do you make everything from like a screen cap

interesting for an hour and a half?

You don't. You don't.

My coffee.

Oh, no.

What is this point of view that we're in? Are we in his computer webcam or

Oh, no. My After Effects tutorial.

Ready for a math of day loss causing a plane to no longer fly? Pull all the

data? Dude, and they even delete his Facebook page from his, like, dead wife.

Oh. Oh, here we go. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

So it's a sufficiently janky movie. I mean, yeah. All the

effects I've seen are...

They're fine.

Here's what happened based on what we've researched.

It was actually supposed to be kind of like this quirky, funny, like told from

the point of view of Zoom kind of movie.

After about a year of that, the executive team was like, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no. This is way too niche. We need a broad audience with this.

And then for the next four years, it got re -edited and retweaked and redone.

But all the effects that we're looking at are effectively the unfinished Temp V

effects. from that first year that had been we're supposed to like filter to

look like phone footage and zoomed in on macro blocks and all that kind of stuff

underneath a lot of like glitching artifacts and they're supposed to be

small not full screen so they delivered them to a degree of quality that they

were anticipating being covered up and now they're just being played cleanly

us and it's pretty rough but this is where the drama begins so we're going to

hit some slightly sensitive footage So, forewarned. The directors and producers

are using footage in the film, and their idea was like, let's take real footage,

real disaster footage, real war footage, and let's comp aliens into it. No!

Yeah. No! It's so gross!

Field's burning.

Okay, cool, cool.

Now you're getting some wildfire stuff.

Getting kind of a little tasteless.

I'm feeling grosser as we go.

Now it's like Paris attack or military footage? Was that real?

Little tasteless guys.

How about some like Middle East war footage? Oh my, wait.

Guys. Bro, that's awful.

So back in Afghanistan, I think it was, there was a C -130, I think it was, and

the cargo load didn't get strapped down correctly or the straps broke and it

caused all that weight to shift to the back of the plane and made the plane do

this. And when a plane's flying forward and then it does this, all those wings

become walls.

and it slows it down and it falls out of the sky. Six or eight service members

died. Very unfortunate that it happened. And there's footage of it, and the

footage is pretty wild. They had put that footage in this movie for a moment

when the aliens were making the airplanes fall from the sky, and they

left it as it was in the film. Until at some point, somebody was like, this is

crazy. I need to at least redo it with CG and hope they don't notice. And

what we actually will see in the film here. So there's real footage there in

left and the CG on the right.

What they've done is they've animated a CG airplane to follow the exact same

motion, effectively object tracking the real crash footage.

How does this make you feel, Jordan?

Well, first of all, I appreciate whoever decided to recreate it in CG.

If you have a VFX artist who is likely being overworked and underpaid, pull an

extra shift in secret.

to replace and fully rebuild your shot, you're doing something wrong, man.

That's a major red flag.

If that's true, that's a level of dissociation from humanity that's really

concerning. Yeah, and I guess the director never realized.

I was talking with someone on Reddit who apparently worked on it. It was a

throwaway account, so he's not revealing himself, but he was saying that, like,

no, the producer -turned -director specifically wanted this clip to be in

movie. He wanted that to be in the movie.

It's not just a matter of, oh, I want a plane crash.

That looks realistic. Oh, here's a plane crash that looks real. No, it's like he

wanted this specific one. Yeah, if that's true, that's really upsetting.

But, yeah, I mean, even a one -to -one is like, I don't like it.

But here's the thing, though, is that, like, I can understand the physics

of this. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, if your cargo...

shifts in your plane and the plane goes down, it's going to look like that. But

why did they match the camera angle? Why did they match the clouds and

everything about it? Yeah, the camera shake is also very offensive to me as a

VFX artist.

Yeah, it's offensive camera shake. Those random fires with smoke plumes, one

thing. Wildfires, we don't know if anyone was hurt in that one in

A little weirder. A little weird because it's like... Still not maybe fully over

the line for me.

But the minute that you were talking about people's homes being destroyed in

acts of war, and you're like, we could probably make some money if we just comp

some aliens in there and make it a fun flick for the summer.

Disgusting. Like, abjectly gross.

I feel like I can understand the idea behind that desire to use real footage,

because there's legitimacy to the...

To that actually being real. Like, that's a real dusty explosion of a

exploding in the middle of an actual Middle Eastern town.

Whoever made that call is so detached from, like, people.

That's the first thing. And, like, the impacts of footage and images.

Maybe I'm totally off base here, but if you replace that with aliens knocking

down the Twin Towers.

Yeah. If you replace that with an alien roaming the halls of Columbine.

Yeah.

that's really a little extreme but literally literally you're talking about

human tragedy and you're compositing aliens in it for like the feel -good

like exciting yeah and it's like this is devastating footage to lots of family

sorry i'm getting a little hot but a couple caveats here context of a scene

matter if you're making a world war ii film and you have a clip from a newsreel

of like a plane getting blown up or bombs going off Okay. Like, it makes

It's within context of the film. And it's, like, taking it seriously. It's,

like, being historically relevant. Or if you're using footage for reference. It

literally ends with he needs to buy something from Amazon so they can

the drone so it can bring him, like, batteries or something that he needs in

order to save the world.

All right. Let me head to Amazon .com.

Flash drive.

Click on it. Buy now.

Address.

DHS.

Gross. Wow.

and on the way, the Amazon drone crashes by a homeless guy, and so they buy a $1

,000 Amazon gift card to give to the homeless guy to help the Amazon junkie.

my God.

No.

Rep Killian's making this movie, dude? What's going on?

Sir. Please flip it over.

Oh, I guess there's explosions.

What? For a year?

Come on, guys. And he's like, what?

He's like, I'm... Wait, wait, give him an Amazon gift card for $1 ,000.

Hurry. Oh, my God.

Amazon. That'll get him. He's like, all right for that? Heck yeah, dude. Amazon

Prime Air.

Amazon Prime Air. In -flight GPS. It's in smart mode.

Dude, look at this interface for the Amazon drone.

Amazon Prime Air. It's just the DJI interface and the different logo on the

corner.

The audacity of them to try to do this.

This is a movie that deserves its Rotten Tomatoes 0 % score.

Yeah, rotoscoping someone's death and, like, animating on top of it. Yeah.

That's weird. That's super weird.

Apparently, it was a team of around 10 VFX artists.

Bless them. For the whole movie.

Yeah. And they worked on it for about a year, and that was back in 2021.

Yeah, what a ride.

Hopefully, lessons were learned from the blowback from this, because I don't get

it.

No one sets out to make a bad movie.

Look, if you guys have any recommendations, I need some visual

If you have any recommendations for some visual smelling beans, please leave

them down below. Ideally, they have some sick effects from them. Thank you for

subscribing. Consider checking it out, the show on quarterdigital .com, because

we have extended reacts there, and I'm sure there's some big goofs from this

episode on quarterdigital .com right now. We'll see you guys next week. It

pleasure and a little bit painful this time.

All right.

Bye.