The VFX Of Flight Of The Navigator
May 20, 2021 1:33 PM Subscribe
Captain Disillusion's intern Alan goes deep on Flight of the Navigator. You may know Captain Disillusion from his many debunkings/explanations of viral videos. His long-suffering intern Alan has made an appearance over the years, including a virtuoso talk at Blender Conference 2018.
Now, with the Captain away, Alan does a 40-minute deep dive into the 1986 movie Flight of the Navigator, specifically its effects, which as he explains in great detail are not - as many believe - all computer generated. He's brought along some props and visited some locations as well.
Captain Disillusion previously, and previouslier
Captain Disillusion previously, and previouslier
I'll definitely be digging into this when I get a chance. Flight of the Navigator was one of my favorite movies as a kid.
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:42 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:42 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
Compliance!
posted by Servo5678 at 4:00 PM on May 20, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by Servo5678 at 4:00 PM on May 20, 2021 [5 favorites]
"If that doesn't sound awesome, then you weren't a kid in 1986, and that's on you."
Reminds me of this classic comment from the David Eddings obituary thread.
posted by jedicus at 4:11 PM on May 20, 2021 [2 favorites]
Reminds me of this classic comment from the David Eddings obituary thread.
posted by jedicus at 4:11 PM on May 20, 2021 [2 favorites]
Sounds neat. Still not watching anything that shithead is involved in, though! He did personally banish me from skepticism for complaining about GamerGate, after all.
posted by Scattercat at 5:14 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Scattercat at 5:14 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
The explanation of how they filmed the ship exiting the hangar blew my mind.
posted by teraflop at 5:21 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by teraflop at 5:21 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]
1985 was a big year for Paul Reubens.
posted by fairmettle at 8:58 PM on May 20, 2021
posted by fairmettle at 8:58 PM on May 20, 2021
I like his short debunk videos, but this is above and beyond. I didn't know I'd learn that The Fugitive used a little toy train, and the filmmakers just blatantly lied about it, in some throwaway three seconds in a video about this awful movie.
He did personally banish me from skepticism
If so, maybe he did you a favor by ending your association with that culture. FWIW he did seem to unfuck his own brain a bit.
posted by fleacircus at 9:11 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
He did personally banish me from skepticism
If so, maybe he did you a favor by ending your association with that culture. FWIW he did seem to unfuck his own brain a bit.
posted by fleacircus at 9:11 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]
The thing I really liked, most acutely, was that if you think about it, this video was 35 years in the making.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:29 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:29 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't know the movie or the guy with the weird face-paint character - but this was interesting in a way I was 100% not prepared for. (And made me wonder a little bit if the in-camera techniques aren't more fun to do than just, "We'll CGI it in 'post'! Moving on!")
posted by From Bklyn at 4:28 AM on May 21, 2021
posted by From Bklyn at 4:28 AM on May 21, 2021
I loved this movie as a kid! That was pretty interesting, I love behind the scenes stuff. It seems like with the move away from DVD/Blu-rays toward streaming, we don't get the in-depth making-of featurettes like we did for a time.
I might show this movie to Fleebnork Jr. this weekend.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:13 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I might show this movie to Fleebnork Jr. this weekend.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:13 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
Ok, so where is he getting all of these props and models from a nearly 40 year old movie? I'm assuming some of those like the stop motion resin pieces are real and not just really good 3D printed replicas?
I was one of those CGI and VFX fanatics when I was a kid, and I knew Flight of the Navigator was only partially CGI because I knew that's just how it was done back then to the point I would get mad about it when movie reporting got it wrong.
And I've made a few comments about film tech and VFX, especially about how bad some props can be when seen in person and not on a set.
But there are a whole lot of shots in this dive into the VFX of the film that - then and now - I would argue all day long that there was no way in hell it wasn't CGI, in particular the hanger exiting scene. The single shot in camera mattes and mirror shots are especially clever, and there's no damn way I would have called that shot out as a miniature.
In a lot of ways making the main character and set piece be a shiny blob is an interestingly advantageous choice, because despite how difficult it was to shoot that shiny chrome surface it also offered a whole lot of room for errors that would go unnoticed, particularly in the optical matte and compositing shots.
With the ship being a round blobby object matte lines won't stand out as much as compared to something a lot more angular and detailed like an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, especially for prints where the elements had rotational or skewing alignment errors.
I haven't done any cinema composite work but I have worked with industrial film systems for graphics and still imagery and getting two pieces of film and a mask or matte to line up correctly is such a huge pain in the ass that there used to be an entire sub-industry for making tools to help manually register sheets of film for composite or contact frame photo processes.
It's not just simple X-Y alignment that's the problem. There's rotation, skew and other translations. Then there's contact and off contact, and some of it is unavoidable due to the physical thickness of the transparent parts of the film, and so you have to develop recipes to over or under expose prints with less or more layers. With almost any optical film process, once you get over about 5-10 layers you're starting to approach a quarter inch thick stack of film you're trying to photograph through in some way, and that's a significant distance for some photons.
You can keep diving down this into optical physics and photonics and how photons like to scatter around things and keep going into resolution limitations due to the wavelength of light. Keep going and you'll end up in the science behind optical masks and reticules in a computer chip fab.
The fact that they were doing this on tiny squares of 35 mm or 70mm film for tens of thousands of frames while also using anamorphic lenses and so many other steps like motion control multipass VFX shots is just mind boggling. There's so many places this process can go wrong from the thickness of a film stack to a focus pull or motion control not happening just the right way to the inconsistencies of color and tone in analog film stock.
posted by loquacious at 8:16 AM on May 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
I was one of those CGI and VFX fanatics when I was a kid, and I knew Flight of the Navigator was only partially CGI because I knew that's just how it was done back then to the point I would get mad about it when movie reporting got it wrong.
And I've made a few comments about film tech and VFX, especially about how bad some props can be when seen in person and not on a set.
But there are a whole lot of shots in this dive into the VFX of the film that - then and now - I would argue all day long that there was no way in hell it wasn't CGI, in particular the hanger exiting scene. The single shot in camera mattes and mirror shots are especially clever, and there's no damn way I would have called that shot out as a miniature.
In a lot of ways making the main character and set piece be a shiny blob is an interestingly advantageous choice, because despite how difficult it was to shoot that shiny chrome surface it also offered a whole lot of room for errors that would go unnoticed, particularly in the optical matte and compositing shots.
With the ship being a round blobby object matte lines won't stand out as much as compared to something a lot more angular and detailed like an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, especially for prints where the elements had rotational or skewing alignment errors.
I haven't done any cinema composite work but I have worked with industrial film systems for graphics and still imagery and getting two pieces of film and a mask or matte to line up correctly is such a huge pain in the ass that there used to be an entire sub-industry for making tools to help manually register sheets of film for composite or contact frame photo processes.
It's not just simple X-Y alignment that's the problem. There's rotation, skew and other translations. Then there's contact and off contact, and some of it is unavoidable due to the physical thickness of the transparent parts of the film, and so you have to develop recipes to over or under expose prints with less or more layers. With almost any optical film process, once you get over about 5-10 layers you're starting to approach a quarter inch thick stack of film you're trying to photograph through in some way, and that's a significant distance for some photons.
You can keep diving down this into optical physics and photonics and how photons like to scatter around things and keep going into resolution limitations due to the wavelength of light. Keep going and you'll end up in the science behind optical masks and reticules in a computer chip fab.
The fact that they were doing this on tiny squares of 35 mm or 70mm film for tens of thousands of frames while also using anamorphic lenses and so many other steps like motion control multipass VFX shots is just mind boggling. There's so many places this process can go wrong from the thickness of a film stack to a focus pull or motion control not happening just the right way to the inconsistencies of color and tone in analog film stock.
posted by loquacious at 8:16 AM on May 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
I used to be so obsessed over VFX in the 70s and 80s and read every book and magazine article I could find on the subject. Now that the answer to "how did they do that?" is "computers", I don't really care.
This stuff is great though; I love the bit with the multiple mirrors to hide the crane. Imagine all the math and mockups and test shots they had to do to prepare for that.
posted by octothorpe at 3:12 PM on May 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
This stuff is great though; I love the bit with the multiple mirrors to hide the crane. Imagine all the math and mockups and test shots they had to do to prepare for that.
posted by octothorpe at 3:12 PM on May 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
I used to be so obsessed over VFX in the 70s and 80s and read every book and magazine article I could find on the subject. Now that the answer to "how did they do that?" is "computers", I don't really care.
Likewise for me with CGI in general. It definitely does not hold the same appeal or fascination that it used to.
I mean it's still pretty cool and all but it just feels like there isn't anything left that's as fascinating or interesting like it was when it was brand new.
Today instead of being fascinated with something that's a photorealistic CGI render I'm more likely to be fascinated by the totally pervasive use of green screens and digital compositing where entire cityscapes are modified or wholly created and you can barely tell what's going on, and that stuff is everywhere now from A-list movies to run of the mill TV dramas to the point that the majors barely do on location shooting anymore. You can shoot in super small limited locations or entirely on soundstages and just digitally insert whatever skyline you want in the compositing.
In hindsight I have realized that I wanted CGI to advance so much because I thought virtual reality would be a pretty cool way to escape from how shitty life could be, and now virtual reality is basically here on a large scale and it gives me the heebie jeebies.
I've changed my mind to the point that I might actually punch Jaron Lanier in the nose if I ever met him for infecting so many people with the VR/singularity cult mindset.
But to his credit the current Jaron Lanier might just let me punch him in the nose if I politely explained why I wanted to punch him in the nose.
posted by loquacious at 3:59 PM on May 21, 2021
Likewise for me with CGI in general. It definitely does not hold the same appeal or fascination that it used to.
I mean it's still pretty cool and all but it just feels like there isn't anything left that's as fascinating or interesting like it was when it was brand new.
Today instead of being fascinated with something that's a photorealistic CGI render I'm more likely to be fascinated by the totally pervasive use of green screens and digital compositing where entire cityscapes are modified or wholly created and you can barely tell what's going on, and that stuff is everywhere now from A-list movies to run of the mill TV dramas to the point that the majors barely do on location shooting anymore. You can shoot in super small limited locations or entirely on soundstages and just digitally insert whatever skyline you want in the compositing.
In hindsight I have realized that I wanted CGI to advance so much because I thought virtual reality would be a pretty cool way to escape from how shitty life could be, and now virtual reality is basically here on a large scale and it gives me the heebie jeebies.
I've changed my mind to the point that I might actually punch Jaron Lanier in the nose if I ever met him for infecting so many people with the VR/singularity cult mindset.
But to his credit the current Jaron Lanier might just let me punch him in the nose if I politely explained why I wanted to punch him in the nose.
posted by loquacious at 3:59 PM on May 21, 2021
I love this, I spent many hours in high school reading Cinefex to see how all of this was done, sadly it just recently ceased publication. Had I had a bit more talent and drive I would have loved to end up at ILM. Maybe I can move to NZ and get a job at Weta as my retirement.
This ties is nicely to the work ILM did for The Mandalorian. They built a couple practical model ships and filmed them old school with some of the same techniques. Tested has a couple YouTube videos on this, here's one of them.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:36 PM on May 21, 2021
This ties is nicely to the work ILM did for The Mandalorian. They built a couple practical model ships and filmed them old school with some of the same techniques. Tested has a couple YouTube videos on this, here's one of them.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:36 PM on May 21, 2021
I miss Cinefex...
posted by brundlefly at 1:09 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by brundlefly at 1:09 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
Holy shit. Fleacircus... THAT'S ME IN THAT VIDEO. I'M Nathaniel Lee, the guy he "pwned", per his self-deprecating talk. That's the incident I've always referenced.
If he felt bad about it, he could have said something to me... I feel weird about this now. He put me in his talk and everything.
posted by Scattercat at 5:34 PM on May 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
If he felt bad about it, he could have said something to me... I feel weird about this now. He put me in his talk and everything.
posted by Scattercat at 5:34 PM on May 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
Whoa, scattercat. This is a wild thread. Do you think you should reach out to him?
posted by ckoerner at 8:56 AM on May 27, 2021
posted by ckoerner at 8:56 AM on May 27, 2021
I did a comment on the video in question. Who knows if anyone sees it after three years. But I'm also not going to, like, hunt down his e-mail or something.
posted by Scattercat at 2:10 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Scattercat at 2:10 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by Faintdreams at 1:55 PM on May 20, 2021 [4 favorites]