VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 128

Sam, Niko, and Jordan break down some of the best (and worst) visual effects in some of your favorite Hollywood films!

Creative Tools ►

Chapters ►
00:00 Welcome to VFX Artists React
00:35 The Curse
04:48 Ridge Wallet
06:07 Black Sheep
08:29 Hidden VFX in Behind the Scenes
13:30 Starship Troopers
17:04 The Tomorrow War

[ProfArmitage]

Another fun fact about Starship Troopers - amputee stuntman Casey Pieretti got his big break when the movie's stunt coordinator hired him for a limb-loss scene. Prior to that, nobody would hire him because of his missing leg. He now has 67 stunt credits listed on IMDB.

[tobias]

I'm from Buenos Aires and I say Starship Troopers deserves his own video.

[OracleCura]

The thing that made that scene in starship troopers feel so frantic and dangerous was that you'd see a couple of bugs get over the wall, and it would take like three dudes focusing each one to bring it down. You see bits of the bug break and fly off and the bug keeps going. It makes the bugs feel deadly and unstoppable *as individuals* . Then we're shown that there are more, and more, and way, way more. If you show a thousand tiny blurs from afar, and then you show a bunch of guns shooting, and you never see how those things stack up against each other, you have no notion of "yeah those guns can take care of that" or "oh shit, those guns aren't even going to dent that horde, those guys need way more guns".

[RandomNPC]

The Curse clip was an awesome reveal, it completely got me. The thing about Starship Troopers vs The Tomorrow War that stands out the most to me is how extremely visible the bugs are in Starship Troopers, you get such a clear view of the whole 3D model center frame, steady camera, , close up, no fast cuts - The Tomorrow War, at least from the clips you showed, I don't know what the monsters look like even after the close up doorway shot. It's fascinating how older movies seem more proud and willing to show off their creations than modern movies.

Also please react to Canadian House Hippos!

[kyleg]

For animating the bugs, they built essentially a mo-cap glove. So when you see the warrior bugs walking so organically like that, it is because you are seeing a human's hand walking across a table, and that data was then applied to the CGI models.

[ScyrousFX]

Imagine spending months on a project as a VFX studio (hundreds of people, thousands of hours, dealing with crunch), only for the lead actor and studio to pretend your work barely mattered or doesn’t exist. It’s such a huge middle finger to everyone involved.

[theSarge]

The amount of creativity and sheer brainpower at Tippett at the time was unparalleled in my experience. I would come home every day just on fire from what I would have learned that day. My ex (art history major) compared my experience to being an apprentice in a master artist's shop. The Whiskey Compound (I called it Fort Zulu in reference to "Zulu") swarm reveal I can tell you this: it was done in three sections - distant, midground, and heroes. Each section had 3 layers to comp, like shadow pass, specular, and base model pass. Each frame per layer took, if I recall properly, _24 hours to render_ on the farm. And that's just for the basic animation pass. Comping was more time on top of that (back then we had the full line - matchmover, animator, TD (lighting and texture application), art department (for textures), roto, comping - all distinct. Which is one of the reasons we had about 2 weeks a shot. Also of note: they spent a year in pre-production before we compers came on board, part of which was developing a form of procedural animation with intelligent collision detection - so the bugs could react to the 3d model of the landscape based on highly detailed USGS topo data, as well as each other. They also developed an aid for the old stop-mo animators (of which Phil was one): an erector-set style armature with potentiometers at the joints that would feed positional data straight into the 3d software. It also had a live mode allowing for manipulating the model: like grabbing the front claws and manually doing the attack motions in real time. A Craig Hayes (art director and builder of the full size semi-working ED209 from Robocop 2, who ended up in the lobby of the shop standing over the receptionist - so you basically had to face down ED as you entered the building) invention if I recall. Phil was very hands on. You'd see him roaming the bays - stopping to pantomime a performance for an animator, or drawing on someone's monitor with a sharpie (they were CRT's, so not in any danger, nonetheless we all kept a stack of essentially cels to tape on our monitors). He brought in a water balloon to use as reference for the guys doing the brain-bug, since fluid dynamics were still kinda kludgey . He gave us one of the BEST pieces of advice: I'm paraphrasing. You have a personal problem, walk away, deal with it. Take a long lunch, take the day off. Settle it. DON'T blow up in here, because everyone else is majorly stressed, and you could set off a chain reaction that could bring the shop to a halt. Be kind. Be help[ful to each other - no one is moving up the ladder if we don't help each other get our jobs done. So we were all invested.

[ashleysaini]

Yes deeper dive into Starship Troopers. The CGI and special effects still look incredible and that's not the nostalgia talking.

[kennyg]

Between the "BS in BTS" line and the Twix analogy, Jordan was on fire this day

[Palvader]

Thank you guys so much for mentioning Jonas' "No CGI is really just hidden CGI" video series!

[callanhulett]

Starship Troopers deserves it's own full episode.

[thefincheranalyst]

David Fincher: "My roommate when I was a teenager working at Lucasfilm was Craig Barron, who is a great visual effects supervisor in his own right, and he, I think, always had the right idea, which is you don’t want to do just one thing because then the audience starts to look for that one thing. You want to use split-screens, you want to use doubles, you want to use face replacement… You want to change it up so they don’t get used to looking at the same gag over and over."

[xwilliammeex]

Speaking of Helldivers 2, an Animators React to the opening cinematic, particularly of the narrator on his front lawn and his facial animations. It looks so awesome.

[ReaperMan]

The explosion at the end of Tremors 2 is a thing of beauty. If you ever look at pyrotechnics, it’s definitely one to look at. Same with the Jeff Bridges film Blown Away.

[ZEROGRAVITY]

This movie reminds me of the good ole days. I turned 17 the year Starship Troopers came out. I took a couple friends from school. We were not prepared for that amount of awesomeness. Can't forget about Dina Meyer and the locker room shower scene...I was in high school😂

[cjkalandek]

Since you talked about _Starship Troopers, _ here's a fun fact.
The design for the main Arachnids was actually an unused design for the Shriekers in _Tremors 2: Aftershocks, _ but they didn't use it due to the low budget. But seeing as Tippet Studio worked on both movies, they used the unused Shrieker design for the Arachnids.

[TheBClark]

Great to hear a shoutout for the ‘No CGI’ series. Jonas’ work is superb and his channel - though quite new - deserves a lot more than 60k subs.

[DannyWood]

You gotta check out more Starship Troopers. It's filmed like you're tagging along with everyone else so the scenes are quite close which makes the combat scenes really intense. The sheer scale of everything is just enhanced along with the difficulty and emotions. There's a genuine urgency/panic when the bugs start breaking over the barrier and you're seeing the effort that goes into killing just one of them. It's aged incredibly well, it has heaps of famous faces some established others on their way up, and it's got some great one-liners and quotes. The music is absolutely on point too. Check out Klendathu Drop by Basil Poledouris.

[fredfredburger]

For me, the best shot in Starship Troopers is when the escape pod from one of the ships hits a body floating in space with a "thunk".

[ChaosPootato]

Starship Trooper being filmed at close to human height adds a lot to the action I think