Before & After Hollywood VFX Blade Runner 2049 [9min 22sec SLYT]
October 23, 2018 7:44 AM Subscribe
Spoilers for some Blade Runner 2049 Character Appearances A known VFX heavy film, it might surprise you to see just how much and how subtle some of the VFX shots / Manipulations / Whole-piece Fabrications there actually were in Blade Runner 2049.
In an interview with Deadline.com VFX supervisor John Nelson discusses how the VFX were utilised.
The AftOfVFX.com has more 'behind the scenes' VFX showreels as well as links to all eight FX companies that were involved in the final film.
The film won Best Visual Effects Category at both the February 2018 British Academy Film Awards (aka BAFTA's), and March 2018 Academy Awards (aka Oscars)
Previously on Metafilter:
- Excited (and anxious) discussions about the first teaser trailer
- A mash up of the 2049 trailer audio to the new Google Assistant advert
- Three short films that bridge the gap between the original Blade Runner Film and 2049
- An article about how pratical miniatures were used during the production of 2049
- Film and Furniture : Curated online resource which identifies and furnishes you with fascinating facts about the furniture and décor you spot in your favourite films
Enjoy.
In an interview with Deadline.com VFX supervisor John Nelson discusses how the VFX were utilised.
The AftOfVFX.com has more 'behind the scenes' VFX showreels as well as links to all eight FX companies that were involved in the final film.
The film won Best Visual Effects Category at both the February 2018 British Academy Film Awards (aka BAFTA's), and March 2018 Academy Awards (aka Oscars)
Previously on Metafilter:
- Excited (and anxious) discussions about the first teaser trailer
- A mash up of the 2049 trailer audio to the new Google Assistant advert
- Three short films that bridge the gap between the original Blade Runner Film and 2049
- An article about how pratical miniatures were used during the production of 2049
- Film and Furniture : Curated online resource which identifies and furnishes you with fascinating facts about the furniture and décor you spot in your favourite films
Enjoy.
I think it's a form of sophistication in VFX that we're seeing these exposés on Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049 and so forth showing how much CGI was actually involved. It's trivial for anyone with a computer to edit a video in Blender or similar and add models that track with handheld camera movements, manage colour balance, and do other simple tricks that affect the result without looking flashy and obvious. It's like we're finally getting compositing right after so many decades.
That said, I think it's also leading to films that come out almost as directors' cuts. The results are so æsthetically appealing that it's harder to make the tough edits, and we're given time to just soak up the visual worldbuilding. Learning to cut back on decoration in favour of character and story is something Hollywood has always been bad at, and it usually takes something else eating their lunch before they notice that it's even possible.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:10 AM on October 23, 2018
That said, I think it's also leading to films that come out almost as directors' cuts. The results are so æsthetically appealing that it's harder to make the tough edits, and we're given time to just soak up the visual worldbuilding. Learning to cut back on decoration in favour of character and story is something Hollywood has always been bad at, and it usually takes something else eating their lunch before they notice that it's even possible.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:10 AM on October 23, 2018
The thing I hate most about these behind the scenes VFX things is they need to go back to the full VFX thing again because they cuts are too fast to the BTS and I have to go back again to see what is missing and what was already there. So I think they should go 'finished scene - BTS - finished scene' each time. Or just be a scrolling list of stills maybe. I find myself having to pause and jump back and forth just to appreciate the complexity, which would seem to be a failure on the point of the video, wouldn't it?
posted by Brockles at 8:16 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Brockles at 8:16 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
I...what, rum-soaked space hobo? Sure, Blender is free, but it's pretty far from trivial to do this kind of work. The hundreds and hundreds of people who worked on BR2049's VFX are among the best in the world.
posted by higginba at 8:23 AM on October 23, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by higginba at 8:23 AM on October 23, 2018 [8 favorites]
Having watched a lot of the Frame Store / etc reels from 2049, it seems like there's quite an art in figuring out what to composite from a separate "real" source, what to build in computer, what to convey via image grading, and what to have as a physical object in the shot. All these either add together as something that has the smell of reality, or it doesn't.
The work in 2049 was so good that I was ultimately surprised at the amount of full CG present.
When I think of the film now, I really think about colors and color contrast, and I wonder just how important the grading was to gluing all of these elements together.
posted by selfnoise at 8:24 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
The work in 2049 was so good that I was ultimately surprised at the amount of full CG present.
When I think of the film now, I really think about colors and color contrast, and I wonder just how important the grading was to gluing all of these elements together.
posted by selfnoise at 8:24 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
It's a shame that it made no sense whatsoever but 2049 was definitely very pretty.
posted by mhoye at 8:25 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 8:25 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
One thing I remember thinking during the fly-over shots of the junkyard: did someone really have to individually model every little piece of junk (at least those on top) or did they use some kind of procedural generation?
I wouldn't have guessed that Joi involved so much CGI. I figured it was just old-school matte effects. I can see the advantage of CGI for the sex-surrogate scene; it would have been a nightmare getting two actresses to almost perfectly align their movements. But what's advantage in the other scenes?
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:42 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
I wouldn't have guessed that Joi involved so much CGI. I figured it was just old-school matte effects. I can see the advantage of CGI for the sex-surrogate scene; it would have been a nightmare getting two actresses to almost perfectly align their movements. But what's advantage in the other scenes?
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:42 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
The thing that separates real life from VFX (and video games) these days is usually light. In VFX people usually overspecify lighting to very tight and repeatable tolerances. In the real world, every light source is a slightly different colour and different brightness -- sometimes dramatically so. And then the radiosity of the surfaces the lighting illuminates, and the effect this has on the objects around -- is computationally almost impossible to reproduce correctly when on a budget.
When you can grade a scene to look like a "sunset" russet orange or "moonlit" blue everything gels together sure but the problem is that all the chromaticity sinks down to just a small pool of colours. That's vanishingly unrealistic in the luminous space our real eyes inhabit.
It does set a mood, sure, and that's often all they want. But it's still almost trivial to tell a synthetic scene from a real one because the lighting is, for lack of a better word, overwrought.
Maybe in ten years they'll have this licked, like they almost have synthetic skin and matchmove licked, but until then I think we'll still be seeing a lot of orange and blue.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:43 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
When you can grade a scene to look like a "sunset" russet orange or "moonlit" blue everything gels together sure but the problem is that all the chromaticity sinks down to just a small pool of colours. That's vanishingly unrealistic in the luminous space our real eyes inhabit.
It does set a mood, sure, and that's often all they want. But it's still almost trivial to tell a synthetic scene from a real one because the lighting is, for lack of a better word, overwrought.
Maybe in ten years they'll have this licked, like they almost have synthetic skin and matchmove licked, but until then I think we'll still be seeing a lot of orange and blue.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:43 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
I haven't (yet) seen the film, but I was surprised at how much they seemed to have dodged the uncanny valley with a certain actress.
I used to know a professional cgi modeller who used to use me as one of his 'heebejeeby' testers. If something designed to be seamless or lifelike skeeved me out he'd tweak it.
I know the Uncanny Valley can be very subjective, but they never said I was too sensitive when I gave feedback.
We live in wonderful and potentially scary times.
posted by Faintdreams at 8:47 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
I used to know a professional cgi modeller who used to use me as one of his 'heebejeeby' testers. If something designed to be seamless or lifelike skeeved me out he'd tweak it.
I know the Uncanny Valley can be very subjective, but they never said I was too sensitive when I gave feedback.
We live in wonderful and potentially scary times.
posted by Faintdreams at 8:47 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
I haven't (yet) seen the film, but I was surprised at how much they seemed to have dodged the uncanny valley with a certain actress.
Personally, I thought the CGI Rachel strayed a bit into the uncanny valley during the actual film. On the other hand, I never noticed all the other humans that had been replaced with CGI, so maybe expectation plays a role.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:57 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
Personally, I thought the CGI Rachel strayed a bit into the uncanny valley during the actual film. On the other hand, I never noticed all the other humans that had been replaced with CGI, so maybe expectation plays a role.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:57 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
The work on reproducing Rachael is really incredible.
See the shot at 1:48 in the video? That's them modelling - probably with help of MRI or other scanning data - Sean Young's skull, because 35 years later that bit is still the same shape, and it places the same constraints on facial shape and movements. Then you see the scan of her face around that and the de-aging morph back to her face in 1982.
And that de-aging's not an artistic process - it's got to be data driven. They reproduced her scenes from the original movie using the digital model and kept tweaking the model until it was a near-perfect frame-by-frame match to the film. That's the comparison scenes from 2:22 onwards.
And then on top of all that, they had to sync that model up to Loren Peta, who performed the new scenes with coaching from Young. That's what you're seeing at 2:15.
posted by automatronic at 9:04 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
See the shot at 1:48 in the video? That's them modelling - probably with help of MRI or other scanning data - Sean Young's skull, because 35 years later that bit is still the same shape, and it places the same constraints on facial shape and movements. Then you see the scan of her face around that and the de-aging morph back to her face in 1982.
And that de-aging's not an artistic process - it's got to be data driven. They reproduced her scenes from the original movie using the digital model and kept tweaking the model until it was a near-perfect frame-by-frame match to the film. That's the comparison scenes from 2:22 onwards.
And then on top of all that, they had to sync that model up to Loren Peta, who performed the new scenes with coaching from Young. That's what you're seeing at 2:15.
posted by automatronic at 9:04 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
I know some folks who worked on the Sean Young stuff and even to them, people who work on blockbuster VFX all the time and try to play it cool, that was a big deal.
posted by thecjm at 9:52 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by thecjm at 9:52 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
I found a lot of the VFX and world building colder and less imaginative than the original and thought that while the recreation of Rachel was an impressive technical achievement, it was a poor choice aesthetically.
With that said, I did find myself making this gif, because, damn.
posted by gwint at 9:56 AM on October 23, 2018
With that said, I did find myself making this gif, because, damn.
posted by gwint at 9:56 AM on October 23, 2018
I’d probably rate the Rachel bits just above “any bit with Jared Leto” in terms of bits they would be better off leaving out, though really it’s a two-fer.
posted by Artw at 10:50 AM on October 23, 2018
posted by Artw at 10:50 AM on October 23, 2018
I quite liked the Jared Leto stuff... I'd have loved it, if his character/plot arc was actually concluded with something other than 'vanishes from the story'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:08 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:08 AM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]
I haven't (yet) seen the film, but I was surprised at how much they seemed to have dodged the uncanny valley with a certain actress.
They did a good job but didn't really avoid the uncanny valley entirely -- when she speaks, it's pretty obvious. The state of the art isn't good enough yet for that.
posted by tclark at 12:32 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
They did a good job but didn't really avoid the uncanny valley entirely -- when she speaks, it's pretty obvious. The state of the art isn't good enough yet for that.
posted by tclark at 12:32 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
Bad dog!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:27 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:27 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]
It also bothered me that Rachel had been reduced to a corpse and a marionette in this film. If anything cinched my sense that it was misogynistic, its that the film decided Sean Young was not required.
posted by maxsparber at 2:49 PM on October 23, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by maxsparber at 2:49 PM on October 23, 2018 [3 favorites]
I just saw the film for the first time and wow was I utterly wrong about the sfx on Rachel.
The moment the face moved my brain had major heebejeebes.
Uncanny Valley turned up to 11!?
posted by Faintdreams at 1:49 PM on November 9, 2018
The moment the face moved my brain had major heebejeebes.
Uncanny Valley turned up to 11!?
posted by Faintdreams at 1:49 PM on November 9, 2018
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