VFX Artist Breaks Down Oscar-Nominated CGI

[Narrator] The five films nominated for an Academy Award

this year for visual effects were each selected

for their own unique reasons.

But what they all do share in common is

that they show technical artistry that is exceptional.

And usually they use some new techniques

that people haven't actually seen before.

[Narrator] This is Kevin Bailey.

He's worked on some of Hollywood's biggest movies.

There's some really fun stories

about how each one of these films was made.

[Narrator] Let's break down this year's

Oscar's VFX standouts.

[intense music]

Spiderman, No Way Home

has 2,400 visual effects shots in it

which is pretty much every shot in the entire movie.

And 12 visual effects studios with thousands of artists

all over the world worked to make the film happen,

you wonder why credits are so long on movies these days.

And you might have thought that Tom Holland

was wearing a suit throughout all of

his Spider-Man action in the film. And you'd be right.

What you probably didn't notice is that

that suit was actually replaced in post-production

with a suit that had a new design and had to interact with

all of the lighting environments that he was in,

with all the action that he was in,

a real technical challenge

that I think they pulled off seamlessly.

There were fully digital versions

of every character in the film that were built.

And some of the characters relied much more heavily

on visual effects than others.

Electro and Sandman are two examples of that.

And those two characters are driven by,

what we in the industry called, effects simulations.

The dust and the lightning, they're natural phenomena

that are actually simulated by the computer

using the laws of physics to make them look real.

A lot of people think about the visual effects award

as a technical award, but the Academy really considers

whether the visual effects were used for a good purpose.

Spider-Man deserves to be on this list

based on its creative and technical merits.

And it obviously killed it at the box office.

And I've gotta say that it's really, really nice

to see such a fun wholesome film

as part of the list of nominees.

[tire squeal, guns fire]

No Time To Die is the latest

in the James Bond series of films.

It's actually the first James Bond film to be nominated

for this award since Moonraker.

So it's been a while.

What makes this film really stand out amongst the other five

is that the visual effects are there to really be invisible

and to support the story rather than be the story.

A lot of the illusions in this film really came

as a collaboration between three different teams,

the stunts team, the visual effects team,

and the special effects team.

Special effects and visual effects,

they often get used interchangeably,

but they're two very different things.

Special effects happen in the real world,

visual effects happen in the computer after the fact.

For example there's a scene where a fishing troller

is sinking with James Bond trapped inside of it.

And in order to do that, when we're inside the ship

the special effects team built a giant 50 foot long version

of the boat that they could submerge 20 feet

into a water tank on a sound stage

and they could rotate it 360 degrees

to really enhance the sense of peril.

For every shot that was outside though,

it was a completely digitally created version of the ship

made by visual effects studio, DNEG.

[Ornithopters hum]

The premise of Dune relies on putting us into

a totally fictitious universe.

But every aspect of this movie works so well together

that we actually believe that it exists

and that we're there with Paul Atreides.

Everything about how they filmed Dune

was really designed to be as if they were shooting

the real scene in front of the real camera.

For example, whereas a normal movie would use blue screens

or green screens behind an actor when they're planning

to put a virtual world behind them,

they didn't wanna do that on this film

because blue screens and green screens

they kind of bounce blue or green light onto the actors.

And it sort of makes them artificial looking

and the artists have to do a lot of work to kind of

undo that artificial look.

Instead what they did is they used white

or sand colored screens behind the actors in this film.

Now that made the jobs of the compositor,

whose job it is to put the virtual background

behind the actor, quite a bit harder.

But as they say, no pain, no gain.

And as a result of it being sand colored light

bouncing onto the actors instead of green or blue light,

once the compositor was done with their job

the shot just completely natural,

as if you shot it right there in the desert.

The dragonfly inspired flying machines

that they fly on Arrakis are called Ornithopters

and the production actually built a bunch

of life size, full scale Ornithopters

so that the actors would have something to sit in

and touch and they would fly those things around on cranes,

or attach them to motion bases

which are these big mechanical hydraulic machines,

so they can move them around

and have the actors actually believe

that they're flying around in these things.

For scenes that required digital Ornithopters,

the production still went through the trouble

of shooting real helicopters in the shots

and then they replaced them with the digital Ornithopter.

Now you might say, well, why do they go through the trouble

of shooting a real helicopter?

Well, by doing it that way

we make sure that the shot looks plausible

because it was something that was actually filmed for real.

The imperfections in the camera motion

and the vehicle motion,

they all kind of tell our human brain that it's real.

The really looks plausible

because of the fact that the Ornithopter's motion

is based on a real helicopter and the camera is moving

in the way that a real camera would move.

And the imperfections involved in all of that

really would be impossible to create

by visual effects artists from scratch.

The giant city of Arrakeen was actually built

as if they were designing real city

in that real environment.

You notice that there's not a lot of windows

in there to keep the heat out.

They even went as far as to figure out

what the flow of the wind direction

given the surrounding geography would be,

and then placed sand in spots where

it would actually naturally accumulate based on that wind.

And when the visual effects studio DNEG built the city

they also had to build it with destroying it in mind

because the Harkonnen's were gonna come

and unleash missiles, and a giant laser on it

and tear it apart.

The scale of the world of Dune was incredible.

And the director Denis Villeneuve, he was telling me a story

about how when he was working with Jessica Ferguson

and she was acting in one of the final scenes in the film

where they're facing off

against one of these giant sand worms.

And he kept directing her to look higher

and higher and higher.

And you know, she's a great actress she did it,

but it wasn't until when the final movie

was on the big screen in front of her,

that she came to him and said, oh, now I get

why you were asking me to look that much higher.

Those things are huge, right?

Everything in the world of Dune is giant.

So the entire team really had to do what Rebecca

was doing on that day.

They're imagining in their heads,

whether it's the sand worms or the cities

or the spaceships, they're having to imagine in their heads

how giant all this stuff is

when they're filming the actual movie.

As the sand worms close in on us,

the sand kind of begins to liquefy around the actors.

And when I was watching the movie,

in this scene in particular,

I was wondering like, how did they do that in the computer?

It's so good.

And it turns out that they did it for real,

the special effects, the physical effects team

they buried a steel plate underneath the sand

and then vibrated it intensely.

And that created this really cool pattern on the surface

and caused the actors to really sink into the sand.

Dune was a film where not only was the directing

and acting superb, but all of the crafts, visual effects,

special effects, cinematography, sound, music,

they all work together.

And they clicked in a way that really every craft elevated

every other craft to create a work of art.

What happens if we don't stay in the pocket?

The forest eats us.

Eats us!? What does that mean?

Shang-chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings

really belongs on this list because

of the fantastical worlds that are created,

really from scratch, in the film,

along with a kitchen sink variety of characters

and natural effects that are in the movie.

Even though the worlds themselves

were oftentimes fully digitally created,

the team opted to shoot real people or real vehicles

in a field instead of creating everything from scratch.

And a good example of this is our introduction

to the mythical location of Tao Lo.

We follow a car through, you know,

a few bamboo shoots that they had there on stage,

but you look at the final film

and it's a giant bamboo forest to the lake and mountains,

right?

And the reason they do this is because

if we have reality to test ourselves against

that helps us make the end result look as real

as it possibly can.

The martial arts work in the film is beautiful

and it is augmented by swirling leaves and dust

that help to make really magical choreography

look actually magical.

One of my personal favorite moments from the film,

even though it's really short, so beautiful,

is when water starts to emanate from a room

and hangs in midair and the actors actually get

to interact with it in a way that is,

is just beautiful and emotional.

There are a lot of really fun mythical characters,

including Morris who's Ben Kingsley's sidekick.

[Shang-Chi] What the hell!

Oh, oh!

What is that?

Who it manages to somehow be extremely cute and funny

despite the fact that he doesn't have a face.

Now for animators, that are the ones responsible

for bringing these characters to life,

bringing that level of emotion across

without the character having a face is pretty tall feat.

Not all of the visual effects in Shang Chi

were of the fantastical variety.

Some of them were more invisible.

For example, some of the more elegant, and long,

stunt fight scenes involved stunt actors

and martial artists doing the fights.

And then the teams used deep fake technology,

artificial intelligence driven technology,

to take the faces of our hero actors

and transpose them onto the martial artists.

All of that combines to make Shang-chi

a fast paced, visual spectacle that really has

the kitchen sinks worth of visual effects techniques in it.

[wondrous music] [game chimes and dings]

Free Guy, which largely takes place inside of a video game

in a fictitious city called Free City,

makes some really great deliberate choices

to blend the line between reality and the digital,

in a way that the hero character,

whose name is Guy played by Ryan Reynolds,

that he doesn't notice everything that happening around him,

no matter how insane it is, buildings are exploding

people are running around on fire,

it's just part of his everyday normal experience.

And it really creates a unique concept.

And that uniqueness is something

that the Academy really responds well to

when nominating a film like this.

Towards the climax of the film Guy faces off

against a super muscular adversary named Dude.

The joke is that Dude is a version of Guy.

They actually shot a real body builder as a foundation,

visual effects artist got to work

on taking footage of Ryan's face

and swapping it onto the body builder

to create the seamless illusion that Ryan

was fighting a muscular version of himself.

Free Guy was a great example of a combination of technology

and creative choices coming together to make something

that we really haven't seen before.

It's, it, it's fake. We don't matter.

That building? That's fake, this street?

[foot slaps] It's fake.

That car-

The thing I love about this list of nominees is

that every one of films is on here for a different reason.

They all made great choices

about which techniques and tools to use

to tell their specific stories.

And I really enjoyed watching these films

and talking about them

and hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more

about how they were made.