VFX Artist Answers Movie & TV VFX Questions From Twitter

Careful consideration when filming

the live action pieces is absolutely critical.

Where does the live action end

and the computer graphics begin?

Disguising that transition is to me

one of the biggest challenges.

Hi, I'm Todd Vaziri a visual effects artist

and this is VFX Support.

[upbeat music]

Rahat asks, Texas switch alert!

Do music videos with Christopher Walken dancing count?

And this is the music video

from Fatboy Slim Weapon of Choice directed by Spike Jonze.

What is a Texas switch?

Texas switch is a gag an onset gag

where a stunt person or a stunt performer

gets switched out in the middle of one seamless shot

with the actor.

Typically this is done with a stunt performer

doing an elaborate stunt in front of the camera

falling or hiding behind a set piece.

And emerging from that set piece is the actor

in the exact same clothing and everything

pretending like they just did this amazing stunt.

Christopher Walken who was a trained dancer

does a lot of his own dancing

but there are certain acrobatic moves

that he couldn't actually pull off.

So there's a switch there between

let's call them a stunt dancer and Christopher Walken.

And when the stunt dancer falls and tumbles out of frame,

Christopher Walken was sitting there

and waiting for just the right moment to pounce up

and you see his face.

The effect is that it's one fluid movement

and the illusion is created.

But that isn't just the only Texas switch in that video.

A third and last shot

when the character is flying around in the hotel lobby,

this very elaborate shot of the character swooping down

toward camera leaves frame the character falls through frame

and then Christopher Walken emerges.

And I think that's actually a double Texas switch.

I think it's one stunt performer on wires,

there's another performer waiting to drop

and go through frame and Christopher Walken

is waiting to emerge at the very end.

So there's a lot of gems in that video, go watch it.

Twenty-something more asks

anyone have any suggestions for movies very of their time

but with solid FX?

Could be VFX or practical,

just looking for some cool stuff to watch.

Some of the films that really inspired me

and still the work holds up really well

is 1933's King Kong combining live action with animation

and 1941's Citizen Kane.

Nobody was doing miniature work on that level

with that kind of flexibility and fidelity

moving the camera through bits of miniature

to have scene transitions using deep focus.

Those movies are a gold mine of the techniques

that were available at that time

and also were revolutionary for that time.

One little gem that is not on a lot of people's radars

is Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

It's a Disney movie from 1959

that has some of the most astounding forced perspective work

that has ever been put on film even to this day.

Alfred Hitchcocks love using camera tricks

and visual effects.

One of my favorite movies of his is North by Northwest

particularly because of all of the invisible visual effects

that he uses in the film.

There are some establishing shots

that they keep cutting back to of the villain's layer

at the end of the movie is a complete matte painting.

There are tons of matte paintings in this movie

he wanted a flair to certain shots of buildings

of Mount Rushmore

that you literally could not capture with a camera.

There was a particularly great run in 1982

for three films that are very, very different

but had amazing creature and practical effects.

One, I wanna point out is The Dark Crystal

directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

absolutely stunning puppet work, environment work

and opticals and miniatures and net paintings.

Everything that was available at that time

is thrown into that movie.

And it is an absolutely beautiful movie and worth study.

The same year Poltergeist

which was the first ILM production that was not

a Lucas film production.

The work in Poltergeist serving a very different purpose

than say the work in The Dark Crystal is remarkable.

Also in 1982 is John Carpenter's The Thing

which has some amazing creature effects by Rob Bottin

and combined with the location photography

and the stage photography where you don't really even know

where you are and how seamlessly that all works.

The creatures in The Thing are still terrifying

and still are just absolutely exceptional

and add so much to that movie.

Even though it won the Oscar

for best visual effects in 1989, I have to save The Abyss

The Abyss took every single technique that was available

to the filmmakers and put that on the screen

with an amazing fidelity and had

the fully computer generated pseudo pod

that enters the oil rig which was designed by Cameron

to be a sequence that if the effect did not work,

he could lift it from the movie

and the movie would still work.

Another movie from the nineties

that I think people may overlook is Death Becomes Her.

Yes another Oscar winner for visual effects

but the way Zemeckis used computer graphics in that film

was not necessarily for creatures or environments

it was for body hoer.

And the work in that movie advancing upon

what he had learned on Forrest Gump

and what ILM and Ken Ralston developed for that film

they took it to an extreme on Death Becomes Her

also has a great Texas switch in it.

Finally another movie that's worth studying is

Bram Stoker's Dracula

which came at a time when digital was just taking off

as a technique to add computer graphics

or digital compositing.

But Francis Ford Coppola specifically wanting to make a film

that used techniques that

could have been used 40 or 50 years previous to that.

Forced perspective, double exposures,

experimentations with frame rates, filming in reverse,

filming things on their side

so that your perspective is different and gravity changes

in a way that you don't expect,

building sets on their sides.

Bram Stoker's Dracula highly, highly recommended

wonderful movie.

Bacon Hotdogs asks watching The Queen's Gambit

and I'm always in awe of these time period series.

Not only the clothes and hair

but the cars and buildings are all on point.

Did they build an entire Las Vegas from 1966

or is CGI just that good nowadays?

Yeah, computer graphics and visual effects

they're really good.

In fact, the opening shot the establishing shot

where the big graphic comes up it says Las Vegas 1966

is entirely computer graphics.

I believe that helicopter shot going over

the Las Vegas strip that cuts to a tracking shot

of the lead character walking in the courtyard of the hotel.

We follow the character going in through the lobby

and it's actually this beautiful uninterrupted

over two minute long shot

which has a lot of invisible visual effects

scattered throughout.

But at the beginning of the shot

you look over the main character and you see the strip,

you see signage, you see cars,

you see people in period appropriate costumes,

the area directly surrounding the actress

and the front lobby, that's all a set piece

that's all a location that has been set dressed

with period appropriate cars and extras

in appropriate costumes and garb.

But everything beyond that is a set extension.

All of the major signs, the lampposts, the cars

and the buildings and the sky itself

is all computer graphics.

And one thing in particular about Queens Gambit

and some of these other Prestige TV shows

that are period pieces or set in fantastical worlds,

the line between the literal quality

of the visual effects of TV and film, that's just gone.

Now they can actually create these synthetic environments

of whatever period piece it is

to their exact art directed specifications

rather than relying on a single shot of stock footage.

It's super exciting.

Patrick Willems asks I've always wondered

how do they match the film stock and grain

for CG elements composited into footage shot on 35mm?

What Patrick is really asking about is

the idea of film grain when elements are shot on film

and on digital cameras you get a similar type of thing

it's not exactly film grain, but you get digital noise.

When you add synthetic elements

on top of anything that's photographed

how do you match that exact pattern of film grain

or digital noise to the background?

We get the actual cameras that were used

during the films production

and we film a bunch of test patterns

in front of various colored blank pieces of cardboard,

under different lighting conditions,

using all of the film stocks

that were used on the particular show

or all of the digital cameras that were used on the show

and the different lighting conditions.

Then we take all of that pristine footage

of nothing but film grain

and we use it to generate our noise pattern

that will be matching what has actually been photographed.

We can then use that to create film grain profiles

and add it to just the dinosaur or just the robot

so that it all blends in seamlessly

with the rest of the shot.

Jacob Earl asks

The Mandalorian looked so good

because it was rear projection?

Some of the shots were achieved with rear projection

but it's not your grandpa's rear projection.

It's an evolution of projection techniques

that is really remarkable.

And to me is one of the most exciting things

that's going on in cinema and visual effects today.

Since the beginning of cinema

there have been projection techniques

used to simulate worlds and situations

that can't really exist in front of the camera.

Front projection, rear projection

which usually involves a projector

projecting imagery onto a screen or onto the actors

or onto special screens and capturing all of that imagery

at once to make it seem like these two disparate things

are happening at the exact same time.

And The Mandalorian takes it to the next level,

ILM stagecraft technique which utilizes LED screens

to completely surround with the actors

is a leap forward in projection technology.

And it's not just the LED screens

which are super bright and super crisp and super accurate

that is making this look so authentic,

it's the real time computer graphics

that are being projected behind there.

When you use rear projection in the classic sense

you have a static screen and you have a static projector

that may have footage with a camera moving in it

but all of that is fixed

and therefore it limits the amount of motion

and flexibility you have when you're filming your actors

in front of that screen.

What The Mandalorian and stagecraft does that's different

is it's a live computer graphics world

and it's tied into the motion picture camera.

So when the motion picture camera moves around

the imagery behind the actors is moving appropriately.

So you're getting proper parallax

you're getting proper perspective

and it opens up possibilities with camera movement

and experimentation that you just couldn't have before.

Kevin asks, how is it that Jurassic Park

was made in 1993 and still looks better

than every film that uses CG in 2019?

Well, that's an arguable statement

but I think I understand the sentiment

of what Kevin is going for right here.

When Jurassic Park was in production

at the start of production,

they thought the large-scale dinosaurs

were gonna be handled with stop motion animation

supervised by Phil Tippett.

And in the middle of production

the computer graphics team at ILM said

we're gonna try to make a fully digital T-Rex

for all of the full body shots.

And that is what made it in the movie

at the dawn of basically modern computer graphics.

There were only I think 60 or 65 fully digital shots

in Jurassic Park each of which had to be designed

to the latter every single moment, every single beat

had to be completely planned out ahead of time

because of how much work and effort

would have to go into it.

We can't just throw out a dozen shots in the sequence.

We cannot just create all this volume in the time allotted

with technology that is being built as the train is going.

It's a little bit different now

where there's literally 1500 to 2000 visual effects shots

in major modern blockbusters.

I've recently watched Jurassic Park with my kids

and it still holds up it totally does the job.

The shot design is absolutely amazing.

If you look very carefully at those shots in Jurassic Park

each of them have a beginning, middle and end.

Each of them have a reason for being there

of connective tissue from one bit of sequence

to the next bit of sequence.

Your original point Kevin is arguable

but I think you're reacting to the amazing shot design

of Jurassic Park.

Eric Alba asks,

what do you think was the single best VFX shot or sequence

in a film, TV or a spot this year?

I'm gonna revert to 2019, 1917 by Sam Mendez

was absolutely extraordinary to have the audacity

to basically make it almost an entire movie

a non-interrupted shot.

You're following these characters

with these steady cam asks shots right over their shoulders.

You are right there with them.

There's nowhere to hide there's nowhere to duck.

As part of the cinematic vocabulary

we are constantly expecting a cut.

And when those cuts don't come it builds tension.

The work that was done to get those to look like

they were all one take was extraordinary.

Crazy huge set extensions

and the stitching of different takes

seamlessly right in front of your eyes.

Most audiences just watch that and just believe

what was happening in front of them

when there were these dramatic synthetic transitions

to make it seem like one interrupted shot.

Lisa Mc.Rad asks I have a dumb question for VFX peeps,

do studios ever have people that do Photoshop edits

frame by frame?

Is that a thing?

The answer is yes.

These amazing digital artists do paint frame by frame.

Some may look at that and go I've dabbled in Photoshop,

I've used the clone tool,

I can make a steel frame look really amazing,

I can paint out a prop that I don't like in the set,

that's great you did a great job.

Now understand that motion pictures

are 24 frames per second.

That paint work that you did has to be completely consistent

from one frame to the next, 24 frames in a second

and most shots are three, four, five seconds long.

You've got a giant challenge

so every single paint stroke that you did

for the frame that you really like, you now have to mimic

for the next frame and for the next frame.

And sometimes the camera move makes that a little bit easier

with motion blur and parallax and things like that.

And sometimes it makes it all a lot harder.

So all around the world, there are talented paint artists

whose job it is to remove props, to remove wires,

to remove entire actors, to remove set pieces,

to remove the reflections of the camera crew in a mirror

that accidentally got into shot.

Sometimes we can use procedural methods

to get rid of those things

like painting certain still frames and tracking them in.

But other times it requires frame by frame painting.

And these paint artists are absolutely amazing.

And my hats are off to them because it is very hard.

Jessica Chandler asks question for VFX folks,

if I have a handgun firing in rapid succession

should the muzzle flash be the same each time

or should each shot produce a slightly different flash?

Muscle flashes I've done many over my career

and there is an art and science to muzzle flashes.

Some of the movies that I look at for visual reference

are the movies where the filmmakers

really wanted to make a statement with their muzzle flashes.

movies like Brian De Palma's Scarface

or John McTiernan's Predator or DieHard

where the muzzle flashes

are almost a character in the movie.

So for reference, go look at pre-digital motion pictures

like Scarface like Predator like DieHard

which have muzzle flashes in various environments.

And all of those are really captured in camera.

And it gives you a really good sense as to the visual cues

as to what muzzle flashes should look like in real life.

One of the typical stumbling blocks

is forgetting about exposure.

When you're shooting out in daylight

your aperture is really close so those muzzle flashes

which may have been photographed in a dark stage

against black, they may be completely overexposed

super hot white.

In real life in the daylight

they wouldn't be that hot, super bright.

So you have to treat them more like fireballs

like you might actually see little tendrils of fire.

There are a lot of trip-ups

that can happen with competitors adding muzzle flashes.

And one of the questions is, do you use the same texture?

No you don't.

Because each muzzle flash is a snowflake.

Each one is slightly different

because these are organic fireballs

that are happening in front of the prop gun.

My tip is, please be aware of your exposure values

for your shot, go easy on the glow

and take cues from the rest of the film

and see what kind of diffusion and filtration

is happening in the rest of the movie

because if that isn't happening in the rest of the movie

you don't want to have all this diffusion

in your muzzle flashes.

And three, take it easy on the interactive light

especially on dark scenes

because you have to nail the interactive light

which is painting, pretend light onto the frame

or onto the actor, on the edge of the gun

or various set pieces

that is being illuminated by the muzzle flash

because that can get out of hand really fast.

And it can look really fakey.

iSawitFivetimes asks,

so here's a question for animators and animation studios.

When working on theatrical, long-sequenced

visual effects projects,

are you given a certain amount of pages

or minutes to work through

and then another studio gets a certain amount and so on?

In the best case scenario

one visual effects house would be working on the entire film

that way the director and the visual effects supervisor

can work directly with the teams.

That's how a lot of the movies

right up until about the year 2000's were accomplished

but movies became much more complicated.

No one facility could take on that much work

in that particular timeframe.

So the work started to get broken up.

With superhero movies for example,

we can split up the work in terms of characters.

Let's say there's five superheroes in the movie.

They each have five very distinct powers.

We can safely, in most cases,

split up the work of each individual character

to a different facility.

What that allows is that facility can focus on

the atmospheric effects of somebody who can control weather

another person is handling

the flying effects of another character

another one is handling the creature effects

where this character is an entire creature.

Another way is locations and environments.

If you're having a big sprawling science fiction movie

where you're visiting a desert planet

and you're visiting a jungle planet

in the middle of the same movie,

one facility can handle all the shots in the jungle

and then separately the desert battle sequence

another facility can handle that

but it's a tricky thing and it requires a great deal

of scrutiny from the film's visual effects supervisor

to make sure that stylistically all of these shots

which are done by many different studios

from around the world

all feel like the same movie stylistically,

from the same vision, serving the director's needs.

Britt asks I'm matching Civil War

I'm assuming they mean Captain America Civil War

for the first time and how did they de-age Robert Downey Jr.

what is this devil magic?

One of the techniques is what I call the grafting technique.

The actor in present day their current age

performs the scene just as they would any other scene

with the other actors, under the regular studio lights

with the movie camera

and they perform as the younger version of themselves.

Then a very carefully cast body double comes in

and is photographed sometimes saying the same lines

and going through the scene

to see how shadows and light work on them

how bounce light is affecting their faces.

When you come back to post-production

artists go in and find frames and sequences

that are appropriate to graft and remove and graft

and put onto the recipient.

It is a laborious frame-by-frame artists driven technique.

Other techniques that you could use

are a partial computer graphics version of it.

Where instead of using the grafting technique

of warping real photography onto the actors

you go completely computer graphics for parts of the head

or parts of the face.

Then the next step would be full computer graphics

from head to neck or the head to toe in some cases

including the costumes

because at that point you may wanna change the performance

or you may have to change the performance.

So there's a lot of different routes.

There's a lot of different ways to get there.

Most importantly it's what is driving the performance

and how to maintain the integrity

of the director and the actor

and what they're trying to get across.

Finally deep fakes, the tech and the techniques

and the workflow is still in its infancy.

It's going to be used in feature films.

And there are other techniques that are on the horizon

that are showing incredible promise

machine learning AI driven deep fakes.

And it's just a matter of time till

this becomes a tool in our chest that we can use them

use all of these tools or interchangeably even right now

to get the shot across.

But it is still very time consuming.

It still has to be filmed

with a level of planning and detail

that is really, really extensive.

And even in the near future,

these things require an army of artists and technologists,

a great deal of planning,

there's also performance level considerations

that have to come in mind.

Do you want the older actor performing as the younger actor?

Does the older actor in the present day

know how the younger actor moved physically?

Is it going to be driven

by the literal performance on the day?

Is there or is it going to be driven by a performance

in a studio in a more controlled environment?

There are still so many questions.

It is hard for me to envision a time

where it's as easy as casting a younger actor

and filming your movie and framing your movie in such a way

to have another actor play the younger version

of your main character.

One thing that we'll always be coming up against

and battling is the human being's ability

to recognize human beings.

Our emotional essence of how our eyes work,

how our brains work, how we relate to one another

is built upon this vast memory bank

of understanding how real humans look, emote and act.

Why we praise the best actors in the world

usually isn't because of all of their gesticulation

or some you know, sometimes that is the case

where a break brash performance gets a lot of acclaim

but in other times

it's because of the soft, subtle movements

and facial tics and gestures that to untrained eyes

like that's not acting, that's just being human.

Aha, yes, that is being human.

Doing this stuff, simulating this kind of stuff

is very hard and that's why some call it the Holy Grail

of computer graphics or visual effects.

It is very hard to convince humans

that the synthetic human is a human

because of the massive amounts of complexity

that is required to convince you that this is real.

Will McCrabb asks

VFX artists who are parents:

when you watch movies with your kids

at what point do you let them see behind the curtain

and tell them how it was done?

I have two kids we show them a lot of movies.

It's similar to, if you go to a really great magic show

and you're just wowed by the magician

and you know of course human nature is how do they do that?

If someone came up right next to you

and told you immediately how they did that

it would ruin a little bit of the fun.

In cases where the kids like the movie more,

the more likely I am to wait to tell them anything about

the making of the movie, but the older they got

the more interested they would get

as to how these things were done.

I would slowly introduce them

to the techniques that are used.

But in the cases where they do ask like literally,

hey dad how'd they do that?

I will walk them through it.

Sometimes it's really eye opening and they really love it.

And they think that's really, really interesting

or sometimes I will lose them entirely

and they'll just walk off and wanna play Minecraft.

These were really great questions.

Thank you for letting me answer them for you.

This has been VFX Support.