In a perfect world I probably should have used my miniature jeep, and built off of that with CG for the third example, but wanted to do something unique for each approach. I’m honestly still shocked how well that miniature jeep turned out haha I’ve said it myself many times that the combination of practical and VFX is the strongest use of the art, so that’s my bad- but I hope it doesn’t detract from the larger message of the video :) love ya’ll!
Weekend ain't over yet! There's plenty of time! Jk. This was amazing, and the mini jeep looked great The craziest part in all of this, is studios under bidding to win the contract has been a thing since I started eyeballing the industry back in 2000 on CGTalk. That's at least 24 years of the same insanity. I have friends who entered and left the industry, for all the reasons being described (burnout, no OT pay, etc). It is madness
would be cool to do this again and make it a head to head kind of video! like they are “out-bidding” there shots to niko as the studio. where we could see those personality moments like the mini jeep come to light more!
It was insane and pretty impressive to see the results. I didn't have this vision of how animators are so burned out with these Hollywood movies, and unfortunately I don't know if there is an easy solution to this problem in the industry.
6:30 I'm crying. That is perfect. I want a full length feature with 5 min effects. "I haven't seen this in motion. I don't even know what I did." should be the mantra for the film.
I love the idea of editors not seeing their final work. I hope they expand on that. Maybe make a telephone type game where every editor needs to add to the video, and at the end we get to see the full results
@@DrKlownthere is a UA-camr who does that with video game development and about 5 or 6 people will work on the game after one another. It is very creative
I'm impressed with the 5 hour shot (18:20), the way Jordan recreates the light, the sidewalk and the movement of the van with a phone camera, green screens, a toy and artificial light is incredible. I like even more that shot than the final one
Agreed. Just goes to show how good practical + vfx works compared to vfx only. I found the movement of the 3rd shot to be very stale and it stopped very abruptly. At least compared the miniature jeep.
@MrMeasaftw yes, I also found the movement in the third shot to be unrealistic. It's like the wall is magnetic and the car is being sucked into it. I think simply adding some weight to the toy car (like a tiny sandbag) would have given it enough IRL momentum to make the in-shot version feel like it had real intertia.
During my work as a creative, I've found that there is a healthy, if incredibly fine, line for crunch (or more accurately, deadlines). I found that some of my better work comes from the "I don't have time. so I will just [blank]". But too much crunch... well you see from the video. I, in a strange way, think that if he only had 8-12 hours, it would have been the best in the set. He would have had the mini in use to save time, but he would still have time to clean it up. Nuances will always play a part in the entropy of existence, but this has been my experience.
@@oblivionwalker8613 The crash itself also looks unrealistic to me, and so does the final wreak. Those computer models almost never ever look completely realistic. Like lip motion its just really hard to do..
This is possibly the most important video you've ever done. It's not just the time crunch, it's the 1-man vfx team. I just discussed this problem with my supervisor and how rushing and lack of team support negatively affects the final product.
Not to discredit the awesome third attempt, but the second really had something special in there! Would love to see you guys do some model car stunts with modern comping.
That's what happens when you have too much time and budget. As some say, when you are on a limited budget and deadline you can outperform yourself. Limited I said, not so tight that you can't work under those conditions.
I agree. A mix of the approach of the 2nd attempt and the third attempt's "budget" would be perfect. There's way more of an impact in the 2nd attempt; the car feels heavier.
@@riccardopetrina4212Kinda true. The pressure does help in creativity. And yeah, just to continue from your point... It is the balance between having a little pressure and being comfortable enough to do what you want to do that makes a good VFX shot. And that includes stuff like thinking ahead and planning the VFX before even doing the filming part... And actually having everything they need available for the artist and giving them just enough resources and time to do what they planned and review it and do some corrections.
It's always the motion that does it for me. The lighting and overall comp work is fantastic, but when animation is used instead of real motion, it starts to looks fake. I have the same issue with planet of the apes. Objectively, the photorealism of the renders and comp work is amazing, but there's something about the movement of lips and limbs that break the illusion.
It's a good demonstration of why old school vfx are much more diverse and often more fun to look at. A director and crew had to come up with creative ways to approximate an effect and then commit to that process and most of the time that's that. When the only "good" CGI is perfectly realistic CGI, you either don't notice it or it lands in an uncanny valley.
yeah they got the uncanny valley wrong. The 2nd attempt with model and stuff was charming and didnt try to be too real. The uncanny valley is supposed to be the bit just before perfect photorealism where all the subtle stuff looks off in ways we can only feel.
Pro VFX artist here: A lot of VFX realism is keeping thngs subtle. Having the back of the car crumple and the tire go flying off sideways isn't very subtle. should have used take 2 as a reference for the car animation,a nd done it digitally so the wall sim interacted. He just went over the top. the blood pop was like a human sized water balloon. The explosion was like a bomb. These were artistic choices for the silly extreme stuff they do on this channel. He should have gone for boring subtle realism, because that's the assignment.
So many people skipped around and missed the wonderful documentary on industry malpractice in VFX. Incredible work yall are doing for raising awareness of these issues
Thank you so much for having me on!! It was an absolutely pleasure to chat with you guys. I really appreciate you using your platform to highlight these issues in the VFX industry (which also plague the animation industry too), and I’m glad they’re finally being discussed more openly😁✌️
I really appreciate that you brought a little bit of nuance to the whole thing about unionizing the industry (and succinctly). It's easy to just yell "we just need to unionize" and blindly believe it'll solve the issue. But you mention the hard truth that unintended consequences are a real thing. Studios who are used to cheap labor will just look to a place where the labor restrictions are more lax. The worst case scenario is that it becomes a lose-lose situation for the whole industry. But you don't just point out a problem, you provide an alternative solution. I really appreciate your take. It's well articulated and reasonable. I'm definitely going to check out your channel.
Probably the only viable solution is to split from the system. Theaters are on the way out, you don't really need the big studios to get your stuff out there. There are tons of scripts floating around that will never get used. Maybe it's time the entertainment industry looked at the "employee-owned" model that has been effective in other areas. Get the bean-counters out of the loop, put the people who do the work back in charge. I can tell you, I don't watch a movie because of the studio name or even who is starring in it. I watch because the story sounds interesting and the trailer looks compelling. You don't need $100 million to make a decent movie that people will watch.
Having a guest to talk about their first-hand experience was a very good idea. Props to Corridor Crew for addressing more serious and difficult topics.
The second one car acted so much more natural to me. If you combined the car from the second one and the wall crush from the third one, it would make the best final resul imo.
Over all the third one is A LOT better than the second one in the fact that the car does not bounce back, because that is REALLY unrealistic. But a toy car that was crashed into something that prevented it from bouncing back could have produced a lot nice result.
Industry guy here, hoping I can provide an observation I haven't seen in the comments here! I'm an animator and director, and I've also taught pipeline development for many years. The third shot proves that it is more difficult and time consuming to create a shot that sells itself entirely from scratch. The curve goes exponentially up. There are plenty of comments such as "the third one proves if you have too much time, the quality goes back down!". I think this misses the point, and shows how easy it is to think like the "big wigs". In fact, showing one success sometimes sets up unrealistic expectations for future work. The 5 hour shot used techniques that required less time. I would argue that the 5 day shot needed even more time to achieve the shot, because it was using a more expensive workflow. A workflow that is standard with many VFX asks! While this shot may have been able to be solved most economically with the practical/cgi hybrid, I hope the deeper message isn't lost. Traditionally, we would take time in preproduction to figure out the best way to tackle the shot, figure out the beats we want to hit, have a vision for what the style and tone of the shot is going to be like (whether we want blood or not, how comical, how real, etc..)but we're not always given that opportunity. And oftentimes we are working with a Director who hasn't given us a vision (a sad truth.) A lot of the time work has to be done from scratch, virtually, and that takes far more work and experience and time. The third shot was tackling a challenge greater than 5 days had time for. This was an incredible amount of work to be done in 5 days! I think what folks are commenting on is the notion that 5 days of polish on the second shot would have made a clearer example of how time spent makes things better. But I think what was illustrated here in the video was even more fascinating -- the expectation of how difficult it is to accomplish a VFX shot completely in 3D is something we often misunderstand. Because we interact with a physical world that gives us instant feedback, when we see VFX, we subconsciously expect it to be the same. And why wouldn't we? It's informed from what we know. But an expression I can do on my face in 2 seconds can take me days to pose, polish, review, reiterate, repeat, when making it from scratch. My old supervisors and directors would always underestimate how much time it'd take us to give them renders, and even now when I work with realtime Cinematics, rendering out work for review is still obnoxiously time sucking. And in a collaborative production, a shot may even be split up between experts. A shot like this could honestly take a team of 4 or so folks several weeks. It would be shown at intermittent stages, offering time for feedback and correction before going too far down the pipe. So, for one person to tackle this in a week is very impressive! Also, notice how the tools changed with each version. 5 min was Comp only. 5 hours had some practical setup time and then comp, with a little bit of render work. The final one was mostly render work. Each tool or method has a different degree of time cost and flexibility for me as a Director. If I gave Jordan feedback on the practical effect version, he'd most likely have to reshoot the entire thing. Whereas feedback on the other shot, I can request changes to the jeep animation and see those. There will have to be sim work done again, which is an example of why we do this in stages. So, while practical may have done great for something at that level, depending on the production workflow, that may not be ideal. At the end of the day, there are more considerations than simply "what can we do that looks the best, is the quickest, and the cheapest." Once a director and the idea of iteration enters the scene, we have to contemplate the impact of revision requests. Anyways, I thought this video was brilliantly done, and I'll echo the sentiment that I don't believe I've seen this industry problem as well illustrated as you've presented it here. Bravo! It brought up both good and painful memories, and we'll leave it at that, haha! Hopefully I've been able to offer a new perspective on the subject, thanks for reading!
Agreed, which ironically just goes to show their main point even more! Even though Jardanio put so much more time and effort into #3, that's still no guarantee that it will give the best results. And the audience might very well end up pointing out flaws in an overworked artist's hard work, even though most of the blame falls on the time and resources they're allowed, etc etc.
100% agree. The bounce back of the jeep is what sells it, the way the CG jeep just SLAMS into the wall and stays there totally killed the shot. Even if a car makes a hole in the wall, there will be some backwards wobble from the impact and and suspension bounce as the inertia dissipates.
Yeah, the car not crumpling at all and bouncing backwards is frankly more believable than it going into a dead stop and crumpling in an unrealistic way. Going into detail with an effect risks not getting those details quite right. It's funny how much this counters the narrative they had scripted for this video. Iionically the example that's meant to be "actually good" fell into the 2nd uncanny valley point in the graph where they had put the actually reasonable (despite being simply implemented) practical effects.
As someone with 12 years experience in the animation industry, I don't think I've ever seen a better example of how client/director expectation and crunch leads to such a rampant culture of burnout. There have been times when I've sat thinking to myself "why am I so burnt out? This should be easy! I should have been done by now!" without realizing that the measure of expectation keeps us in a constant state of rush, constantly trying to outdo the last thing we did, constantly trying to raise the bar and do it all faster than the last time. This video hit close to home in a way I wasn't expecting. Outstanding job bringing this into the light and really quantifying *why* the ever-moving goalposts has led to such a stressful industry environment. We're making cartoons. It shouldn't be something to stress ourselves to death with.
this video has taught me one major thing, the primary users of "we'll fix it in post" are the vfx artists themselves, "we'll worry about that later" is just different words
For me, the practical use of the car in the 2nd attempt and the destruction/pyro created in Houdini on 3rd attempt would have been the perfect combination.
Take away the bounce back of the jeep and it would have been way more realistic. He should have put something to cushion the impact and hold the jeep against the wall...even something like flypaper
@@FUGP72 I feel like the roll back actually added to the realism. Maybe it rolled back too far, too quickly? I think a good takeaway from this would be that, if this were in a movie, the best route to achieving the effect (without an actual car) would be to use a larger, heavier model rolled into a smaller scale brick wall. The addition on smoke and dust would really sell the impact.
This is important. I love to watch your guys' videos to chill out and wind down, but this one really hit home. The time constraints, the ridiculous demands, delivering sub par work because of people higher up 'knowing better'. I'm not from the VFX industry, but am faced with many of the same issues, even down to the general public having issue with your work, when all you can do is do your best within a tight time frame. As much as it sucks, there's a slight comfort knowing that there are many people out there, who care about their craft, facing these issues. It would be interesting to see more of the interview style of content, possibly focusing on how people overcame these issues or how they handle burnout, dealing with tight deadlines, putting out work they aren't proud of, etc.
The worst thing, Jordan, is something I've commented on many times and had seemingly ignored: if you can tell it's VFX it removes you from reality immediately. A show I've always wanted to see from you guys is a competition among yourselves to see who can deceive his colleagues with FX shots in a short video that they miss. Challenge each other to a 3 minute clip with at least 5 or more visual effect shots/cleanups/illusions etc. See who slips the most by the others! That's more impressive!
To make it more interesting: try the reverse as well - slip some shots in there that look like they should be VFX, but are filmed in camera using forced perspective(*) or slight of hand(**). (*)e.g. Bilbo and Gandalf in LotR 1, or the Terminator cutting his arm open in Terminator 1. (**)e.g. pretty much every shot in which a person magically appears or disappears from the frame
You value your own opinion more than they ever will. As far as Corridor is concerned, you're just one comment in hundreds of thousands. You yourself are literally not important to them.
"if you can tell it's VFX it removes you from reality immediately." ^ This! Just watched Deadpool & Wolverin. There was this one exctremly awesome scene, I was laughing my ass off like I haven't before. Then a monstrosity presented itself on the big screen it was like driving with 200km/h against a wall. All the joy I had with the scene was instantly gone in that very moment. Still a great movie experience overall
II'm pretty sure a _lot_ of VFX is _always_ going to be identifiable as VFX no matter the quality, on account of how it is depicting something not physically possible.
This reminds me of a quote from one of the Monty Python cast about when they were doing Holy Grail. "If we had had enough money, we would have been mediocre......but because we didn't have any money, we had to be creative".
but the movies did have money. these movies like black adam had 2x budget of jurassic park 1(adjusted for inflation 2x, not just numerical value 2x), but they didn't have to actually INVENT a render farm, they didn't have to invent a modeller, they didn't have to invent a renderer and were working with an established workflow, they rented space from an established greenscreen setup and didn't have to build their own etc. the use of money was just messed up. it's the hollywood suck up money from large payers system, you throw money at things and someone will take the money sure, but if you get something in return that's a wholly different matter. that they don't know what they're doing even at the studio doesn't help, they only know when they start something like flash that they're making something expensive that's supposed to bring back a billion dollars - and remember the vfx company and their profit line doesn't depend on if the movie does well or not, this is the outsourcing problem.
I don’t care about which car looked best. You managed to lift the biggest problem in modern movie history with a fun and educating video. Way to go, Crew! And let’s hope the business finally understands who makes the modern blockbusters possible!
oh what a video. it really nails the atmosphere on production. Makes me wanna quit and just focus on personal content like you guys :D. love it love it love it! well done through out.
Second looked so good. Third looked off with how the car sped up right before impact, and how unnatural it crumpled. Goes to show that a mix between old VFX and digital still is the best way to go. And I got say: a full Jordan special episode on CC is always a treat.
It's funny that people aren't buying the crumple of the CG car, even though it would crumple, but they buy the bounce of the miniature because they've seen toy cars bounce, even though it wouldn't bounce. The toy is using real physics, even though they're the wrong scale. The CG is using made up physics that are scaled better, but not capturing every crease in the correct spot.
@@Amber_Valentine Fancy doesn't really describe much. The car crumples too much. He put too much energy into the simulation. The car shouldn't be going 200 mph into the wall. It should be going like 30. But he wanted the blood to splat so he had to make it go very fast and that brings a dramatic explosion of car parts. A real car crash, the front would crumple up to about the door but remain mostly intact, the human would crush but wouldn't turn to mist, the wall would probably crumple though. That's not dramatic. The car wouldn't bounce cartoonishly off the wall like a toy that doesn't have the mass to do damage to humans, walls, or itself. And when he does this effect, he is thinking about that and making artistic / comedic decisions. Most people who watch this are not. They are thinking, the toy looks real, because it is real rather than thinking about what a full sized car would look like if it hit a wall. They get like 1 second into an analysis and think they understand it. And the whole point of the video is, most people who make the artistic decisions do that also because they aren't VFX people. So when they make feedback, they say "Too fancy" and the artist is like "What do I fix?"
@@rorschach775 No one said the second shot was perfect, they said it just looked better than the third one. The third one had a weird velocity, it looked like a VHS tape on fast forward. It feels like the car had no weight and momentum when it crashed, which is a very common problem in animation. The toy car, even though the weight scale is off, moved more realistic because it used real physics.
@@One.Zero.One101 that's exactly what I said. Except the reason the third car looks weightless isn't because it is cg it is because it hit the curb at like 200 mph. When a car hits a bump that fast the suspension travels a lot but the car doesn't jump very high which is what happens in the animation. The animation is correct. It's just very very fast. The better argument would be, he went too fast and not, cg looks bad, which is what everyone thinks is happening.
That final shot could really use some work. I feel like the 2nd shot was still in the realm of "So bad it's good", but the 3rd shot here hits that level of "Not good so it's bad." Especially how the car feels like it gets sucked into the wall, like it's lerping instead of driving, how the tires glitch out and pop off the car when hitting against the sidewalk, the brick wall cracks like a stone block being mined in a voxel game, and the car crumples like paper rather than... Like a car. The 3rd and final take REALLY hits that "uncanny" level on the nose. But I get what you were going for with the vid.
Yeah that 3rd shot looked like crap. The car hits the curb and just starts falling apart like mashed potatoes. Also all that motion blur looks like puke and you can not even see Ren at all. The wall fell like fresh horse shit on the farm. This video is unintentional very ironic.
The car also feels a bit too fast and the metal garage door crumbles just like the stone wall. I also missed the actor who gets run over. I think that was simply forgotten when recreating the scenes in 3D. Considering the effort involved in animating him, perhaps it was better that way. I can't understand the other criticisms of my predecessors. Only that the car crumples so strangely at the back. I think the car should still look like an intact car at the back. Maybe a few scratches but nothing more. By the way, the second shot surprised me hard. It was really good.
Thank you! It looks worse than some generic Source 2 maker code. The bricks fall at the same speed (don't accelerate aka gravity) and it looks so weird.
I do agree, I think my biggest critique with is with the animation of the car. The way it looks to me is that the car is being pulled into the wall with an unnatural force rather than the car turning into the person. In addition to this I would also say that the wall would look better if the chunks broke again on the ground and piled up on each other it would look better. The way those objects of moderate mass just gets moved out of the way breaks the immersion of it. (I will say that I dont have the best eye for this kind of stuff, its just what I've managed to piece out of the third shot) Overall though, I can see idea behind the scene and I've seen worse elsewhere.
Yeah CGI still has a problem with physics simulation. Even if let's say, the jeep had perfect texture and lighting, it would still feel fake because of how the CGI jeep moved. CGI objects having no weight and momentum is a very common problem in animation. It didn't accelerate right, it didn't come to a stop right, it didn't break apart right. It's very hard for a physics engine to solve because a car has so many parts made of different materials. So artists hand-animate the crash frame by frame but it doesn't look good in real-time.
What is easy to miss in these videos about making vfx content is just how good the Corridor editing is in the overall video. The multiple cameras, dialogue and editing that goes into these is really seamless and makes you forget that someone had to plan and execute it all.
Back when I worked as an FX artist at a video game studio, my team lead was formerly a movie industry fx artist. I had previous game industry crunch experience, and when we hit a crunch phase on one of our projects, I was worried he'd get burned or angry about it. He laughed. He said compared to working in film, game industry crunch, while still being unpleasant, was so much more bearable. This was about 15-20 years ago, I can only imagine the utter hell movie fx folks are going through now.
I do have to wonder, with E3 now being a thing of the past and individual companies doing their own venues, are crunch times to present something to the public (like a proof of concept) becoming more or less bearable to manage. Maybe there will be another regular scheduled event replacing that, like Summer Games Fest, Video Game Awards, etc.
@PotatoNinjaFreak To my understanding, the Video Game crunches are more severe during the final phase rather than the previous phases. When they set a deadline of release while having a long list of bugs and unfinished bits that need to be thrown together in short amount of time. That is why a lot of games go Alpha or Beta these days since they don't dare promise a full-fledged ship.
As a previs asset artist, this video was 100% spot on. Loved every minute of it. Especially pointing out the Ace in the whole. The vfx supervisor. When they get scans it saves SOOOOO much time. It gives you the ability to do things you just couldn't do before.
Thankyou for demonstrating this problem so good, ive heard of it but never knew this problem with time was soo bad. I wish they just asked how much time do you need to make it good? And replying with "Ok take that + 3 months in case there are problems" There is no problem for us as a audience to wait for good movies. I really hope Vfx artists get the time they deserve in the future.
Shot 3 crossed into the uncanny valley. The car sped up way too quickly before impact, in fact most of the shot was just too fast from impact, particles, etc. I wonder what it would have looked like slowed down.
@@Matt-pz4we The impact on the wall is way too much. If that Jeep crashes into that wall at 60 mph, the wall doesn't crumble and the jeep doesn't get crunched completely. The last shot especially looked like Looney Tunes, not like a realistic car crash.
@Corridor Crew I know they're rushed. They're giving me a Rotoanim task on a 700f shot with a 8h deadline. To make things worse, I have to do it Remotely, on a bandwidth limited network. And they're expecting me to use Generic models for a 99% tight match. Worst part... I'm getting paid barely 10$ per hour. With no pension or healthcare I might add. 90% of hollywood big budget movies, have their hardest Rotoanim and Matchmove tasks done by freelancers from poor countries in Europe and India. Underpaid, Overworked freelancers, that are given impossible tasks in short deadlines. It's one giant sweatshop. Screw the VFX industry. There needs to be another strike on the side of CG Artists and freelancers. These Bidding wars need to stop. This minimum wage high pressure BS needs to stop.
So glad you guys went in depth with this and talked to people that actually worked on these films! There is so much work that needs to be done to make sure VFX artists get to do work they're proud of in a workplace that respects them. The only way that artists can actually get what they need from the studios they work at is to unionize. They need more time, overtime pay, and benefits to help them avoid burnout. We can wait a few more months to see a film when it's _ACTUALLY_ ready, instead of just some arbitrary release date.
as a compositor working in the industry, i'm glad more exposure is coming up about this. if you liked this and want to see another deep dive into a similar sort of thing, check out "No CGI is just invisible CGI," it's another good look into how all the industry works
Honestly, I think the 2nd attempt was close to being the best. Touching that one up with a better CG wall and mixing in some deformed bits of the CG Jeep would have probably been perfect
Right? It had this physicality to it. 5-day one just shot straight through the curb like a supersonic jet. No bounce, no weight transfer, no inertia to it, and no sign of impact to Wren. The only weight it had was the jank, ha-ha!
@@lucbloom honestly I think that could have been fixed with some retiming. Watch it back at .75 with no other changes and the weight comes right back. It's honestly such a testament to what practical effects excel at, PERFECT physics and lighting.
Congrats Jordan, this is probably one of the best videos this channel has ever made. It's educational, entertaining and sheds a light on how crazy and unfair this industry is, everything packed in the same video. It also shows your skills, creativity and problem solving ability. This video is better than 98% of the entire Netflix catalog
No, in IT, you'd just be fired because an exec decided to outsource your work. Yu don't need IT specialists any more if you just let CrowdStrike do their job.
@@klausstock8020a good director is the difference between nothing much and millions stolen in a phishing scam. “prevention is the best medicine” and all that, it’s always cheaper to pay IT’s budget than deal with the alternative.
Yeah, this happens in literally every industry. It's the problem with hiring professional managers. All they know is how to tell others what to do, don't actually understand *what* they are asking people to do.
Another thing that can help is being able to quickly assign a dollar value to each change being made. I used to work at an animation studio where the boss would sometimes make well intentioned suggestions like "we should raise the pinky finger on this character while he sips from the cup". The shot was already locked, approved and rendered so I did some quick napkin math and to send it back through the pipeline would have cost over $5,000 worth of time for that one change. His response; "never mind".
I went through courses for project management years ago. One of my instructors was a retired Air Force officer (Retired at light Col. IIRC) So we hit it off well since I was enlisted. One day he was telling us about when he worked at Edwards back in the 80's. The engineers wanted to check for... something. Even he didn't know what they wanted. They just told him to look at the graph and mark ANY change on it. When he got the graph delivered, it was over six feet. Not one paper six feet long. But the old printer paper that was one continuous sheet that when folded up stood taller than him. I forgot how many thousands of sheets of paper he said it was. The whole thing took him and another guy a week to go through and mark EVERY change in the graph. I think he said there were two. He pointed out how much money it cost the government to have two officers sit in an office everyday for a week just looking at one thing. That's when it came out it wasn't really important, just a case of the engineers were curious about something. He never had to do it again, and never found out what he was looking at in the first place. After that they just gave it to lower enlisted to do since they're cheaper.
27:13 the jeep can't turn that much instantly at that speed without flipping over, it looks as if there's a magnet pulling, and the damage done to the jeep is not looking realistic also
A more dynamic camera movement would have helped...The image is perfectly still and it doesn't work for a crash scene. It never happens in real movies.
I watch ya'll's content intermittently and usually enjoy it and this is one of the best things I've ever seen from you guys. Fun contest hook, an interesting little documentary in the middle and lots of little humor spots. REALLY well done!!!
I love how this is a version of "5 minutes vs. 5 hours vs. 5 days VFX" but with storytelling, a villain, a clear positioning and the honest reports from the industry to back it up.
Jordan's acting is underrated here. I meean I know it's fueled by real experiences but the soul-crushing anxiety of trying to deliver quality under unrealistic timelines is spot on. It's really a gut punch to all the artists as they know they can deliver, just not with such little time.
I worked nonstop masssive OT on Thor L&T. Director would approve a version of an asset and after all the work is done and it's been comp'ed in and matched in the rest of the sequence, he asks for the asset changes. No realisation of the work this imposes on the artists who are already doing 70-80 hour weeks to finish the damn projet. This happened non stop on every scene in every sequence. Worst project I've ever worked on. This happens on every. single. project. under the disney umbrella.
@@TheMCricket I'm sorry that happened to you and I feel as an audience member I kinda contribute at least a little to it. I do like love and thunder and honestly I think most of the problems in that movie are script problems or pacing problems. Not so much the CGI. I think people will forgive sub-par CGI if the movie is well received, but not so much if it's attached to a weak script. Like I feel like the recent Deadpool had some CGI that was a little too obviously CGI wise, (especially in the tva fight), but that movie has a much stronger script and was much better received. That's not on the CGI artists, that's on the directors and the writers. It can also be really noticeable if the script is cut up somewhere. I really noticed it in quantumania. That movie felt like it had scenes missing.
@@TheMCricket I do appreciate very much the work people like you putting ideas into visuals. But appreciations doesn't pay the grocery bills. Hope you found a better way to make a living while being creative.
@@NexuJin The industry is dead at he moment, luckily a lot of skills taught in VFX translate to tech. I've left the industry for the moment, and so have a lot of people I know. Seniors have bills to pay and have no work, juniors aren't qualified enough to work in production. There will be a drought of artists in the coming years
This video is awesome. We need more videos like this. Thanks for your time and efforts to show people who have no clue what these process are. And how long it takes.
The second shot is honestly, in my opinion, the best. In the third one it accelerates to the side so quickly that it feels like the car has no momentum (with such a quick turn the car should also be leaning), the perspective just feels wrong (the underside of the jeep is visible even though the eyeline is at the height of the bottom of its windows(it also feels like the car is sliding sideways towards the direction it's turning)), there are frames where the wheels are floating above the ground, the back wheels flying off just from hitting the kerb just looks goofy and feels unrealistic, the entire chassis of the car is bending the instant the front right corner just touches the wall, the way the smoke is done makes it look like the roof turns into smoke before it even gets close to the wall, the metal deformation looks incredibly unnatural, there is a decal added to the rear window to make it looked cracked that doesn't go away once the windows are completely gone, the bricks should be preferentially breaking along the mortar lines and then shouldn't be bouncing around like they're made of Styrofoam, the vehicle comes to a stop way too quickly, and then the interior of the building just looks completely miss-matched from the view in the window. Weirdly you ended up kind of proving the opposite of the point you were trying to make; more time doesn't always result in a better product.
I’m a former 2D Animator and I totally agree with you. The 3rd one has the best Rendering of the Jeep and wall, the thing with the texture and particle effects, but the motion… the physics of the action are totally off. The Jeep doesn’t seem to have weight or mass to it. The Action curve is too linear. Like it’s going very fast then zero/stop. The motion of the jeep should decelerate in a more gradual step motion when it hits the wall. Considering it be a 4-6 ton steel vehicle, it looks more like an egg shell or a tomato when it hits. The breaking of the wall came too early, so does the jeep crumpling. I’ve worked with some Disney and Canadian cartoons in the early 2000. The rules of arc of action, slow-in slow-out, overlapping action, squash and stretch, twist and bend, ease in to stop…. etc. are some of the core principles most animators must learn. These things are observed from real and it’s due to countless hours of drawing every key frame of animation that one can appreciate how even a minuscule change of one position in one frame of film can change the speed, flow and impact of the action. No disrespect to the Corridor Crew. They are totally talented and highly professional artists in the industry and the work they’ve done is still outstanding, but like anyone in the film and tv industry we have our own specific Specialties and work on usually one specific department, and there are things we just don’t have any technical understanding at all. I think the best solution is that he should watch lot’s videos on UA-cam of real life accident Jeep or Vans hitting a wall. There are lot’s of them. Study how wall crumble and the vehicle crumple. Most of the time the vehicle does a bounce much like the toy jeep did, with its front all crumpled. Most of the time the wall would just tumble in huge sections instead of individual bricks exploding away. Nothing beats real-life references. There’s so many videos on the internet that people can tell the difference when something is off. "Collect as much references as you can!" the former Disney artist, Art Director of Lion King told me that.
@@inisipisTV you shared some valuable insight, pretty cool. Maybe i couldnt exactly put into words why the final shot wasnt as good to me but it seems you were able to.
I got unreasonably happy when you gave avatar so much credit. I don’t understand how people can call it “just okay,” it’s 3 hours of gorgeous visuals. Like, not only does it have impeccable vfx, the world is just gorgeous. The way everything glows at night, the colors chosen for Pandora, I love all of it. It was my favorite movie as a really young kid, as an adult Im not crazy about the plot but I’ll never not love the world of Pandora
Literally the most accurate "portrayal" of being a VFX artist I have ever seen, right down to thinking you are finished and being rewarded by being asked to do it again with more time.
tbh the second shot looks way beter than the third. the car moving to the wall looks very jank, almost like a rubberband pulling it to the wall instead of steering into it. the collapsing car looks like the car was made out of bricks also. thats why vfx and miniatures combined looks the best :D
Absolutely. The real world model looked far more believable and moved at a realistic speed with good physics to sell the shot. The rendered shot was too fast, poor physics, and deformed in an unrealistic way. If I was director I'd go with the 2nd shot in the final film.
Love this; one suggested variation you could maybe throw in: do two stages, first stage is pre-vis from director notes and storyboard, second stage is actual renders based on time, but maybe the director picks one pre-vis, and everyone works from that. Would make for a great group challenge video.
Yeah, they have a new series here if they want it. It's an important message to keep pushing too, with new interviews and war stories each episode about insane deadlines and crunch (on camera or anonymized).
On a more serious note, I would rather see a 5 hours / 5 days / 5 weeks challenge. The 5 minute one is no more than a joke, which is fine... so I guess keep that one as well, but I feel like a week vs month would be a more interesting and more realistic viewpoint when comparing it to production time constraints.
Abuse is the right word for it. It's a big problem in our country, it's a big problem in my own family, and they pretend it ISN'T abuse so they can keep doing what they want to do. It's shortsighted selfishness, greed, a result of cowardice. And the poor artists who are just trying to make a living doing what they're passionate about get taken advantage of and treated like they're the problem instead of the main driving force behind difficult work that is considered critical to the project. It's "ends justify the means", it's seeing what they want to see instead of facing the truth. Honesty, the truth, is the only thing that can save us. Great work on all 3 shots! No joke. Thank you for speaking out about this issue, it affects more than just the VFX industry. We all live in the same world, we are all connected.
@@ScyrousFX I'm in the USA, which currently has many work culture and other problems that I suspect come down to inability to face reality. Everyone finds their own feeds and believes the narratives that make them feel strongest instead of what's most likely true... it has been a big problem for a long time. You are correct, it's definitely a global problem.
lol the artistic industry has always been like this, go back 2000 years its exactly the same. Artists essentially work for free to get brand recognition and then sell their brand (ie becoming the business owner). If artists wanted a painless 9-5 job they would be designing powerpoints for executives and get paid much more money than 95% of their industry. Another good example is games developers, they get paid trash compared to their coworkers in almost every other IT field, because doing boring/unfufilling things ultimately requires industry to pay people competitively for the bare minimum else become uncompetitive with their piers.
@@checker297 Im not a historian, but I highly doubt it’s functioned this way since the first century. Capitalism hasn’t even been around that long, that was added in till the 16th century
Yeah I don't know why he made the car go so fast in the 3rd one it's totally unrealistic, he should have used his "previz" second attempt as a reference for the animation, honestly you can't beat real physics!
the second shot looks terrible...the only good thing was the motion of the car, otherwise, it looked bad. i dont know how you can say it was better. the third shot was nearly photoreal, and was perfect. if the car wasnt as fast and didnt get pulled like it did, it would be 100% finished.
Dude, this is the best video from this channel. I am not even in this industry, but as an artist and illustrator, I feel this resonates too. This is so responsible and respectful of the working creatives. Thank so much for posting this up. It is perfect, didactic, practical. Congrats dudes 🎉
When working on the _The Abyss,_ James Cameron gave a model maker and puppeteer directions to build just the torso of an alien for closeups, so the puppeteer did exactly as he was told. On the day of the shoot, he could tell Cameron was getting frustrated, because he couldn't pull the camera back to get the shot he wanted. Finally, Cameron turned to the puppeteer and yelled, "Next time someone tells you to make half an alien, you make a whole alien!!"
This only goes to prove that we NEED more practical effects. The 2.5h vfx edit + 2.5h shooting looked WAY better than 40h editing + a day on set measuring, scanning and hdri’ing 😅😂
Completely agreed but I think it's probably just the artistic intention that got in the way of the VFX shot. The guys at Corridor have a huge habit of making their realistic shots really cartoony. You can't go a single VFX shot from them without several litres of blood being thrown in. They're extremely talented people, don't get me wrong, but did the tire *really* need to bounce off of the car? It's stuff like this that takes you out of supposedly "serious" scenes - like the car crash. 🤔 VFX are *amazing*, it just depends on how you use them 😅 But hey, that's just my two cents 😆
Video idea: Twisters! The opening scene has a twister. A character is supposed to be struggling to not get blown away. I was looking at it and wondering why the wind effects didn't look grounded. Then I realized: **Her hair wasn't even really moving**. They just animated a bunch of wind and particle effects around her, but didn't seem to bother blowing a meaningful amount of wind on the character when they were actually shooting. The moment I'm talking about is at the end of the scene at roughly the 13 minute mark. This would be an interesting sequence to cover! Cheers Corridor Crew, you rock!
It's because of that kind of AWESOME video that Corridor Digital is SO RELEVANT! Explaining to us, the audience, the REAL reasons of thos effects and what's going on behind the curtain. Thank you so much for that!
I love this. And as an audio guy, I am 10000% happy that at least this portion of the post process is being given some attention like this. Audio post tends to be in the same kind of position with trying to squish a ton of stuff in last minute. And some of it really can't be locked in until the vfx shots are pretty close to done. Anyways... I always love the "5 minutes vs 5 hour vs 5 day" timeline kind of thing. Personally I do my best work when under a little bit of a deadline, but not so short I have to take ALL of the shortcuts.
Corridor is also not running their studio like one the bigwig Hollywood studio that has to please shareholders and 16 different executive producers who have no idea what actually goes on to make a movie. It's a tight team sho understand their craft and are using these videos as way to challenge themselves and show us what goes on behind the scenes.
That's partially the same reason as hollywood, it's a limitation from above, "we only have 2 days" is a narrative on their UA-cam videos, because the youtube algorithm won't promote them unless they keep hitting their upload schedule. If you become a member of their website, you can get much more, and in depth interviews, without the youtube rush.
The full digital version would have been better if they had kept the original shot's framing. The driving physics only look so weird because of the new animation.
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, the digital jeep did not crumple in a perfectly realistic way. However, the miniature did not crumple at all. Neither version is perfect, and both takes are compromises, but the miniature version's flaws are innate to that method. On the other hand, the main problem with the digital version having crazy physics could be corrected simply by sticking with the original camera framing, by dropping the extra animation. The digital version could easily be made to look more real. More time/effort could make the digital crumpling look better too.
Honestly as an architect, I didn't think it would be but I see much of the exact same struggles that our industry is facing. From clients and contractors constantly nitpicking at our work for small minor adjustments in their eyes which bring us hours if not days of work on our side. Architectural Studios only having a select set of jobs at one go that they can bid for. And so to differentiate themselves from others they're taking shortcuts, cutting their asking fees, reducing the time it takes to do a job and forcing us to work more to meet the shorter deadline. In a constant race to the bottom. There's so many parallels, and I'm sure it's the case across even more industries. Creative or not. Wonderful video to showcase some of the issues we face
I can already imagine "you know, I want the pillar more to the left so we can have a fireplace there. Get on it". And unlike movies you can't undo or make changes mid project because you gotta pay for the machinery, for the exact quantity of materials, the workers and every permission with relative floor plans. I noticed a lot of people for example think they can tear down walls and modify the home however they want, but you can't. Lastly, people can get hurt and buildings can collapse, and you're responsible for it. It's definitely worse.
@@bwhere45 Oh sorry, forgot I'm not allowed to express solidarity or empathy for a fellow worker. Trying to better the work we do, the work we love so it isn't actively harming us is pointless. Guess we just all have to suck it up and pull ourselves up with our bootstraps. That'll make it all better, let's bury our heads in the sand together! Thank you for enlightening me with your great wisdom
Seeing this made me realize something. The people working at studio MAPPA must be crazy to be able to work under these conditions and still drop the best animation in human history and then continue working on a Blu-Ray release that turns out even better.
@@MokoES I don't think they do. Yes, AOT animation, Hell's Paradise's fight scenes and Chainsaw Man's pacing are debatable, but as someone who hasn't read the originals, these might not be the best adaptations but they are definitely some of the best anime out there in terms of style and animation. Even the CGI in AOT (to which I assume you referred), while it takes a more major part of your screen, still looks tenfold smoother than Wit's CGI (and if you take into account the way the plot twisted, I think the new animation style fits the new tone of the series much better). I know they cut corners in some places (like some animation glitches in JJK that I found), but their anime are still god-tier in terms of animation. Side note, specifically speaking of JJK (Sukunas fight in episodes 16-17) I assume the character shapes being inconsistent was made intentionally judging by how they immediately switched to their regular style on the next episode. The reason for this is that they wanted to make the fight look ethereal (similar to how they did it in the fight between Pain and Naruto), and I think it works really well. Yes, the characters aren't smooth, but you're not supposed to look at it frame by frame either. When it's in motion, each strike makes you feel like you were hit yourself, and that's an effect that cannot be reached with standard animation.
This goes for any Art or any discipline, really. A rushed job will always be lacking and it will show. Thank you for taking the time to address this. O7
17:55 i love how he's only doing this for a UA-cam video to show how important time is to production but he's showing the real life stresses of someone in this position and truly going through with it even though his lively hood isn't at stake so I can't even imagine what a poor VFX artist would feel like when his job is at stake but they literally cant make more time show up out of thin air
Props to Corridor for bringing this subject to light to the general audience. Releasing a video like this AND working in the industry at the same time sure is a scary thing, since reputation is incredibly important in the industry, so I just want to say thank you Corridor for fighting for artists in the way that you can
The most interesting thing to me, as an IT person, is how 'crashes' are just a part of the job for VFX. Like the software devs are just so big they can't be bothered to make their platforms more stable? That would frustrate me to no end.
As a programmer let me just say- you don’t know what you are talking about. Trying to have a hundred person team all make a product that works seamlessly that can be run on any computer with any hardware with any medium being put into that may itself have data corruption is a monumental task. If a fail case only happens in a specific scenario .01% of the time, that means you would need to test it for hundreds of hours just to even know that bug exists. And then you have to test it for hundreds of more hours to analyze and fix that one bug. It’s not easy, even with the best programmers in the world. That’s even assuming that the company thinks it’s worth it to put a few devs on a bug that only a hand full of people have ever experienced. Wanna fix that one tiny bug? That’ll cost us 54,000 in dev salaries.
@@matthewjohnson3656 The problem this video illustrates also has a huge impact on the software development world. If the coders and testing was given adequate timelines (with no changes close to release date to allow time for proper testing) most software would be a helluva lot more stable.
28:41 is so real. I work at a virtual production studio in Asia where worker rights are basically nonexistent Just a month ago, the film crew went in to test out the scenes on LED. They basically deny and reject anything they cannot understand, but is essential for the accuracy and quality. After test they did a meeting and decided to drastically change the scene, with 1 day to make revisions. On the first day of shoot we worked 20hrs non-stop, 14hrs the second day, with DP ordering scene changes and tweeks constantly which he expected to fix in seconds. All while we're dealing with all the on-set technical settings required for virtual production. The executive producer often just walks to our station and ask to change some minute details, while I was taking orders from DP, and they both expect these changes in minutes at most. Our beloved manager is in his 50s, he got sent to the hospital literally the next morning from all the overtime and stress.
They are overpaying the wrong people on these projects. It’s always been that way, but now so much of the outcome is on the shoulders of some of the least paid people. These are some of the realities that really piss me off.
@@johnlucas6683 Yeah you can tell that felt weird even if you're not sure why. But I'm pretty sure is that the curb just took the wheels off without affecting the rest of the car's momentum or trajectory like we got from the toy car version. xD
And in the second one, he made a really good observation about the shadow and added a light blocker for it. But in the third one, the shadow is gone, or the lighting is so unbalanced that it's not noticeable.
Third one had a lot of advances, but the second one married together better. The physics was all in harmony. I feel the final shot the car accelerated in an unnatural way and although it had crumble physics its incredibly difficult to get Car crumble physics full CG correct. Insane effort, I would probably only have made the first video after a week.
I remember when Wren was the one _agonizing_ over when a shot was complete. I mean he still does from time to time, but in the old vids the despair was palpable. Jordan feels like a follow-up anime where the protagonist is like "now it's your turn"
When he said he was only actually nervous about the third attempt, that hit home. It's the reason I procrastinated for most of my life. I would half-ass so many projects and jobs just so that you couldn't judge me by my best effort. But when I have the time and I put forth my best effort, now my performance is laid bare. I have no excuses. It's taken a long time to view my performance as simply work and practiced skills vs. an indicator of my worth and value. Now my poor performances are simply situations for learning and progress.
Idea for a video series. As Zack said, normal people don't know, why water simulation is so difficult and expensive. You could explain how things work in detail and what they cost if they are done cheap, appropriately or extraordinaly good and how these ways compare. It'd be a good way to show the decision makers in simple videos why shots take time and money to make a good scene
A friend of mine got into VFX 6 years ago and started working as a freelancer. Last year he landed a couple of jobs for big productions. Told me the pay was laughable, like literally $7/hour and they pay only 8h a day, but he often found himself working 18+h/day in order to finish the projects they sent him. He perceviered, because he hoped those projects would help him advance further in the idustry and other studios might look differently at him with some proper titles under his belt. But nah... The best gig he landed was paid $13/hour and they wanted 2 months worth of work, done in just a single week. In that single year alone he aged 15 years at once. We are the same age (37), but he now looks like a 55-60yo dude. Absolutely insane.
This needs to be shared to every executive in the industry. And more importantly, every VFX house. They need to start charging what they're worth, and doing it as a collective so the whole industry changes
I can’t believe he posted that after 5 DAYS! If I was Niko, I would have said fix this 5day clip before we post to UA-cam. It was actually bad given what #2 looked like.
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Sponsor segments are quite long, 30 seconds would be much more digestable.
i thought this would be betterhelp, but this is also bad.
@@ironcrafter54 yah but they dont decide how long they are, the sponsor does, also they put up a timer which makes it easy to skip past
@@only_the_most_epic yeah but no, they negotiate the sponsor deals
I just found out that Americans don't know what a corridor is! Mind blown! They call them hallways
In a perfect world I probably should have used my miniature jeep, and built off of that with CG for the third example, but wanted to do something unique for each approach. I’m honestly still shocked how well that miniature jeep turned out haha
I’ve said it myself many times that the combination of practical and VFX is the strongest use of the art, so that’s my bad- but I hope it doesn’t detract from the larger message of the video :) love ya’ll!
Make that one!
@@howkel
Maybe if you ask nicely.
Weekend ain't over yet! There's plenty of time! Jk. This was amazing, and the mini jeep looked great
The craziest part in all of this, is studios under bidding to win the contract has been a thing since I started eyeballing the industry back in 2000 on CGTalk. That's at least 24 years of the same insanity. I have friends who entered and left the industry, for all the reasons being described (burnout, no OT pay, etc). It is madness
would be cool to do this again and make it a head to head kind of video! like they are “out-bidding” there shots to niko as the studio. where we could see those personality moments like the mini jeep come to light more!
It was insane and pretty impressive to see the results.
I didn't have this vision of how animators are so burned out with these Hollywood movies, and unfortunately I don't know if there is an easy solution to this problem in the industry.
6:30 I'm crying. That is perfect. I want a full length feature with 5 min effects.
"I haven't seen this in motion. I don't even know what I did." should be the mantra for the film.
Neil breen produces at about this level.
I love the idea of editors not seeing their final work. I hope they expand on that. Maybe make a telephone type game where every editor needs to add to the video, and at the end we get to see the full results
@@DrKlownthere is a UA-camr who does that with video game development and about 5 or 6 people will work on the game after one another. It is very creative
Look for "Who killed Captain Alex". 100% cgi gold! :D
@@DrKlown I would love that
I'm impressed with the 5 hour shot (18:20), the way Jordan recreates the light, the sidewalk and the movement of the van with a phone camera, green screens, a toy and artificial light is incredible.
I like even more that shot than the final one
It’s actually an incredible 5h shot
Agreed. Just goes to show how good practical + vfx works compared to vfx only.
I found the movement of the 3rd shot to be very stale and it stopped very abruptly. At least compared the miniature jeep.
@MrMeasaftw yes, I also found the movement in the third shot to be unrealistic. It's like the wall is magnetic and the car is being sucked into it. I think simply adding some weight to the toy car (like a tiny sandbag) would have given it enough IRL momentum to make the in-shot version feel like it had real intertia.
During my work as a creative, I've found that there is a healthy, if incredibly fine, line for crunch (or more accurately, deadlines). I found that some of my better work comes from the "I don't have time. so I will just [blank]". But too much crunch... well you see from the video. I, in a strange way, think that if he only had 8-12 hours, it would have been the best in the set. He would have had the mini in use to save time, but he would still have time to clean it up. Nuances will always play a part in the entropy of existence, but this has been my experience.
@@oblivionwalker8613 The crash itself also looks unrealistic to me, and so does the final wreak. Those computer models almost never ever look completely realistic. Like lip motion its just really hard to do..
This is possibly the most important video you've ever done. It's not just the time crunch, it's the 1-man vfx team. I just discussed this problem with my supervisor and how rushing and lack of team support negatively affects the final product.
Not to discredit the awesome third attempt, but the second really had something special in there! Would love to see you guys do some model car stunts with modern comping.
That's what happens when you have too much time and budget. As some say, when you are on a limited budget and deadline you can outperform yourself. Limited I said, not so tight that you can't work under those conditions.
I agree. A mix of the approach of the 2nd attempt and the third attempt's "budget" would be perfect. There's way more of an impact in the 2nd attempt; the car feels heavier.
I agree with this gentleman.
@@riccardopetrina4212Kinda true. The pressure does help in creativity.
And yeah, just to continue from your point... It is the balance between having a little pressure and being comfortable enough to do what you want to do that makes a good VFX shot. And that includes stuff like thinking ahead and planning the VFX before even doing the filming part... And actually having everything they need available for the artist and giving them just enough resources and time to do what they planned and review it and do some corrections.
It's always the motion that does it for me. The lighting and overall comp work is fantastic, but when animation is used instead of real motion, it starts to looks fake. I have the same issue with planet of the apes. Objectively, the photorealism of the renders and comp work is amazing, but there's something about the movement of lips and limbs that break the illusion.
VFX artists are being overworked and underpaid, yet studios will pay Robert Downey Jr nine figures to play Doctor Doom. Crazy.
Well RDJ is GOATed and perfect for the role.
That's life I'm afraid. The guys keeping the lights on don't get paid like a lawyer does, and it's obvious which is more important to society
@@Kevmaster2000 sure little budy
It's easier to find new VFX house.
You do realize that rdj was a major component in creating huge amounts of work for vfx artists?
The 5 hour shot actually has so much charm, since you had to make creative decisions that you wouldn't make otherwise.
It's a good demonstration of why old school vfx are much more diverse and often more fun to look at. A director and crew had to come up with creative ways to approximate an effect and then commit to that process and most of the time that's that. When the only "good" CGI is perfectly realistic CGI, you either don't notice it or it lands in an uncanny valley.
yeah they got the uncanny valley wrong. The 2nd attempt with model and stuff was charming and didnt try to be too real. The uncanny valley is supposed to be the bit just before perfect photorealism where all the subtle stuff looks off in ways we can only feel.
@@jeffh8803 the 5 day shot was the uncanny valley ngl
I preferred the 5 hour shot. I think it's the bouncy rollback that sells it. In the 5 day, the jeep look wrinkled.
Pro VFX artist here: A lot of VFX realism is keeping thngs subtle. Having the back of the car crumple and the tire go flying off sideways isn't very subtle. should have used take 2 as a reference for the car animation,a nd done it digitally so the wall sim interacted. He just went over the top. the blood pop was like a human sized water balloon. The explosion was like a bomb. These were artistic choices for the silly extreme stuff they do on this channel. He should have gone for boring subtle realism, because that's the assignment.
So many people skipped around and missed the wonderful documentary on industry malpractice in VFX. Incredible work yall are doing for raising awareness of these issues
!? I don't think anyones skipping stuff
Thank you so much for having me on!! It was an absolutely pleasure to chat with you guys. I really appreciate you using your platform to highlight these issues in the VFX industry (which also plague the animation industry too), and I’m glad they’re finally being discussed more openly😁✌️
Thank you for your service.
I really appreciate that you brought a little bit of nuance to the whole thing about unionizing the industry (and succinctly). It's easy to just yell "we just need to unionize" and blindly believe it'll solve the issue. But you mention the hard truth that unintended consequences are a real thing. Studios who are used to cheap labor will just look to a place where the labor restrictions are more lax. The worst case scenario is that it becomes a lose-lose situation for the whole industry. But you don't just point out a problem, you provide an alternative solution.
I really appreciate your take. It's well articulated and reasonable. I'm definitely going to check out your channel.
Probably the only viable solution is to split from the system. Theaters are on the way out, you don't really need the big studios to get your stuff out there. There are tons of scripts floating around that will never get used. Maybe it's time the entertainment industry looked at the "employee-owned" model that has been effective in other areas. Get the bean-counters out of the loop, put the people who do the work back in charge. I can tell you, I don't watch a movie because of the studio name or even who is starring in it. I watch because the story sounds interesting and the trailer looks compelling. You don't need $100 million to make a decent movie that people will watch.
@@benjaminmichael5719 A union is still better then non. Always.
Thank you for helping to share this message! Such a brilliant explanation
Having a guest to talk about their first-hand experience was a very good idea. Props to Corridor Crew for addressing more serious and difficult topics.
Exactly. It felt like the whole thing had more meat if it was just the vfx attempts alone.
The second one car acted so much more natural to me. If you combined the car from the second one and the wall crush from the third one, it would make the best final resul imo.
the curve on the third was uncanny
Over all the third one is A LOT better than the second one in the fact that the car does not bounce back, because that is REALLY unrealistic. But a toy car that was crashed into something that prevented it from bouncing back could have produced a lot nice result.
@@elwhagen When I play video games, the walls always feel like rubber pads.
@@NowhereBeats He did intentionally hit the pedestrian though.
The second shot had more weight and inertia. The third it got boosted to light speed. XD
Industry guy here, hoping I can provide an observation I haven't seen in the comments here! I'm an animator and director, and I've also taught pipeline development for many years.
The third shot proves that it is more difficult and time consuming to create a shot that sells itself entirely from scratch. The curve goes exponentially up.
There are plenty of comments such as "the third one proves if you have too much time, the quality goes back down!". I think this misses the point, and shows how easy it is to think like the "big wigs". In fact, showing one success sometimes sets up unrealistic expectations for future work.
The 5 hour shot used techniques that required less time. I would argue that the 5 day shot needed even more time to achieve the shot, because it was using a more expensive workflow. A workflow that is standard with many VFX asks!
While this shot may have been able to be solved most economically with the practical/cgi hybrid, I hope the deeper message isn't lost.
Traditionally, we would take time in preproduction to figure out the best way to tackle the shot, figure out the beats we want to hit, have a vision for what the style and tone of the shot is going to be like (whether we want blood or not, how comical, how real, etc..)but we're not always given that opportunity. And oftentimes we are working with a Director who hasn't given us a vision (a sad truth.)
A lot of the time work has to be done from scratch, virtually, and that takes far more work and experience and time. The third shot was tackling a challenge greater than 5 days had time for.
This was an incredible amount of work to be done in 5 days!
I think what folks are commenting on is the notion that 5 days of polish on the second shot would have made a clearer example of how time spent makes things better. But I think what was illustrated here in the video was even more fascinating -- the expectation of how difficult it is to accomplish a VFX shot completely in 3D is something we often misunderstand.
Because we interact with a physical world that gives us instant feedback, when we see VFX, we subconsciously expect it to be the same. And why wouldn't we? It's informed from what we know.
But an expression I can do on my face in 2 seconds can take me days to pose, polish, review, reiterate, repeat, when making it from scratch.
My old supervisors and directors would always underestimate how much time it'd take us to give them renders, and even now when I work with realtime Cinematics, rendering out work for review is still obnoxiously time sucking. And in a collaborative production, a shot may even be split up between experts.
A shot like this could honestly take a team of 4 or so folks several weeks. It would be shown at intermittent stages, offering time for feedback and correction before going too far down the pipe. So, for one person to tackle this in a week is very impressive!
Also, notice how the tools changed with each version. 5 min was Comp only. 5 hours had some practical setup time and then comp, with a little bit of render work. The final one was mostly render work.
Each tool or method has a different degree of time cost and flexibility for me as a Director. If I gave Jordan feedback on the practical effect version, he'd most likely have to reshoot the entire thing. Whereas feedback on the other shot, I can request changes to the jeep animation and see those. There will have to be sim work done again, which is an example of why we do this in stages.
So, while practical may have done great for something at that level, depending on the production workflow, that may not be ideal. At the end of the day, there are more considerations than simply "what can we do that looks the best, is the quickest, and the cheapest." Once a director and the idea of iteration enters the scene, we have to contemplate the impact of revision requests.
Anyways, I thought this video was brilliantly done, and I'll echo the sentiment that I don't believe I've seen this industry problem as well illustrated as you've presented it here. Bravo! It brought up both good and painful memories, and we'll leave it at that, haha!
Hopefully I've been able to offer a new perspective on the subject, thanks for reading!
Honestly thought the second shot looked the most promising and realistic. A little more time for polish and it would’ve been the best one IMO.
Agreed, which ironically just goes to show their main point even more! Even though Jardanio put so much more time and effort into #3, that's still no guarantee that it will give the best results. And the audience might very well end up pointing out flaws in an overworked artist's hard work, even though most of the blame falls on the time and resources they're allowed, etc etc.
I really like the second one too.
100% agree. The bounce back of the jeep is what sells it, the way the CG jeep just SLAMS into the wall and stays there totally killed the shot. Even if a car makes a hole in the wall, there will be some backwards wobble from the impact and and suspension bounce as the inertia dissipates.
Yeah, the car not crumpling at all and bouncing backwards is frankly more believable than it going into a dead stop and crumpling in an unrealistic way.
Going into detail with an effect risks not getting those details quite right. It's funny how much this counters the narrative they had scripted for this video. Iionically the example that's meant to be "actually good" fell into the 2nd uncanny valley point in the graph where they had put the actually reasonable (despite being simply implemented) practical effects.
These are the notes we get.
As someone with 12 years experience in the animation industry, I don't think I've ever seen a better example of how client/director expectation and crunch leads to such a rampant culture of burnout. There have been times when I've sat thinking to myself "why am I so burnt out? This should be easy! I should have been done by now!" without realizing that the measure of expectation keeps us in a constant state of rush, constantly trying to outdo the last thing we did, constantly trying to raise the bar and do it all faster than the last time.
This video hit close to home in a way I wasn't expecting. Outstanding job bringing this into the light and really quantifying *why* the ever-moving goalposts has led to such a stressful industry environment.
We're making cartoons. It shouldn't be something to stress ourselves to death with.
this video has taught me one major thing, the primary users of "we'll fix it in post" are the vfx artists themselves, "we'll worry about that later" is just different words
Not really a vfx artist knows what can be done later vs some director that thinks something can be easily done in post
"You know what I just realized, there's no driver in the window... We'll worry about it later."
He just "we'll fix it in post"-ed himself lol
"We'll fix it in post-post"
For me, the practical use of the car in the 2nd attempt and the destruction/pyro created in Houdini on 3rd attempt would have been the perfect combination.
I think the 5 hour shot was done the best. The mix of practical models and CG made it so fun and it looked more realistic than the 5 day one
I was shocked at how good this shot looked. It's a great example of why models and practical effects have so much value.
@@keithv2974 absolutely!
Take away the bounce back of the jeep and it would have been way more realistic. He should have put something to cushion the impact and hold the jeep against the wall...even something like flypaper
Hmmm, I think that was the point?
@@FUGP72 I feel like the roll back actually added to the realism. Maybe it rolled back too far, too quickly? I think a good takeaway from this would be that, if this were in a movie, the best route to achieving the effect (without an actual car) would be to use a larger, heavier model rolled into a smaller scale brick wall. The addition on smoke and dust would really sell the impact.
This is important. I love to watch your guys' videos to chill out and wind down, but this one really hit home. The time constraints, the ridiculous demands, delivering sub par work because of people higher up 'knowing better'. I'm not from the VFX industry, but am faced with many of the same issues, even down to the general public having issue with your work, when all you can do is do your best within a tight time frame. As much as it sucks, there's a slight comfort knowing that there are many people out there, who care about their craft, facing these issues.
It would be interesting to see more of the interview style of content, possibly focusing on how people overcame these issues or how they handle burnout, dealing with tight deadlines, putting out work they aren't proud of, etc.
The worst thing, Jordan, is something I've commented on many times and had seemingly ignored: if you can tell it's VFX it removes you from reality immediately. A show I've always wanted to see from you guys is a competition among yourselves to see who can deceive his colleagues with FX shots in a short video that they miss. Challenge each other to a 3 minute clip with at least 5 or more visual effect shots/cleanups/illusions etc. See who slips the most by the others! That's more impressive!
If you wanted to get thier attention just DM them. Don't wait for a reply here
To make it more interesting: try the reverse as well - slip some shots in there that look like they should be VFX, but are filmed in camera using forced perspective(*) or slight of hand(**).
(*)e.g. Bilbo and Gandalf in LotR 1, or the Terminator cutting his arm open in Terminator 1.
(**)e.g. pretty much every shot in which a person magically appears or disappears from the frame
You value your own opinion more than they ever will.
As far as Corridor is concerned, you're just one comment in hundreds of thousands. You yourself are literally not important to them.
"if you can tell it's VFX it removes you from reality immediately."
^ This!
Just watched Deadpool & Wolverin. There was this one exctremly awesome scene, I was laughing my ass off like I haven't before. Then a monstrosity presented itself on the big screen it was like driving with 200km/h against a wall. All the joy I had with the scene was instantly gone in that very moment.
Still a great movie experience overall
II'm pretty sure a _lot_ of VFX is _always_ going to be identifiable as VFX no matter the quality, on account of how it is depicting something not physically possible.
This reminds me of a quote from one of the Monty Python cast about when they were doing Holy Grail.
"If we had had enough money, we would have been mediocre......but because we didn't have any money, we had to be creative".
Limitation breeds innovation
Same thing happened in Star Wars (the first one). George had to get creative because he ran out of money to do everything he wanted.
but the movies did have money. these movies like black adam had 2x budget of jurassic park 1(adjusted for inflation 2x, not just numerical value 2x), but they didn't have to actually INVENT a render farm, they didn't have to invent a modeller, they didn't have to invent a renderer and were working with an established workflow, they rented space from an established greenscreen setup and didn't have to build their own etc.
the use of money was just messed up. it's the hollywood suck up money from large payers system, you throw money at things and someone will take the money sure, but if you get something in return that's a wholly different matter. that they don't know what they're doing even at the studio doesn't help, they only know when they start something like flash that they're making something expensive that's supposed to bring back a billion dollars - and remember the vfx company and their profit line doesn't depend on if the movie does well or not, this is the outsourcing problem.
I don’t care about which car looked best. You managed to lift the biggest problem in modern movie history with a fun and educating video. Way to go, Crew! And let’s hope the business finally understands who makes the modern blockbusters possible!
oh what a video. it really nails the atmosphere on production. Makes me wanna quit and just focus on personal content like you guys :D. love it love it love it! well done through out.
Second looked so good. Third looked off with how the car sped up right before impact, and how unnatural it crumpled.
Goes to show that a mix between old VFX and digital still is the best way to go.
And I got say: a full Jordan special episode on CC is always a treat.
It's funny that people aren't buying the crumple of the CG car, even though it would crumple, but they buy the bounce of the miniature because they've seen toy cars bounce, even though it wouldn't bounce. The toy is using real physics, even though they're the wrong scale. The CG is using made up physics that are scaled better, but not capturing every crease in the correct spot.
@@rorschach775Its not that they dont buy it
But the crumpling is too fancy, the wall is too dramatic
@@Amber_Valentine Fancy doesn't really describe much. The car crumples too much. He put too much energy into the simulation. The car shouldn't be going 200 mph into the wall. It should be going like 30. But he wanted the blood to splat so he had to make it go very fast and that brings a dramatic explosion of car parts. A real car crash, the front would crumple up to about the door but remain mostly intact, the human would crush but wouldn't turn to mist, the wall would probably crumple though. That's not dramatic. The car wouldn't bounce cartoonishly off the wall like a toy that doesn't have the mass to do damage to humans, walls, or itself. And when he does this effect, he is thinking about that and making artistic / comedic decisions. Most people who watch this are not. They are thinking, the toy looks real, because it is real rather than thinking about what a full sized car would look like if it hit a wall. They get like 1 second into an analysis and think they understand it.
And the whole point of the video is, most people who make the artistic decisions do that also because they aren't VFX people. So when they make feedback, they say "Too fancy" and the artist is like "What do I fix?"
@@rorschach775 No one said the second shot was perfect, they said it just looked better than the third one. The third one had a weird velocity, it looked like a VHS tape on fast forward. It feels like the car had no weight and momentum when it crashed, which is a very common problem in animation. The toy car, even though the weight scale is off, moved more realistic because it used real physics.
@@One.Zero.One101 that's exactly what I said. Except the reason the third car looks weightless isn't because it is cg it is because it hit the curb at like 200 mph. When a car hits a bump that fast the suspension travels a lot but the car doesn't jump very high which is what happens in the animation. The animation is correct. It's just very very fast. The better argument would be, he went too fast and not, cg looks bad, which is what everyone thinks is happening.
That final shot could really use some work. I feel like the 2nd shot was still in the realm of "So bad it's good", but the 3rd shot here hits that level of "Not good so it's bad." Especially how the car feels like it gets sucked into the wall, like it's lerping instead of driving, how the tires glitch out and pop off the car when hitting against the sidewalk, the brick wall cracks like a stone block being mined in a voxel game, and the car crumples like paper rather than... Like a car.
The 3rd and final take REALLY hits that "uncanny" level on the nose. But I get what you were going for with the vid.
But yea the final shot need to get a little rework
Yeah that 3rd shot looked like crap. The car hits the curb and just starts falling apart like mashed potatoes. Also all that motion blur looks like puke and you can not even see Ren at all. The wall fell like fresh horse shit on the farm. This video is unintentional very ironic.
The car also feels a bit too fast and the metal garage door crumbles just like the stone wall.
I also missed the actor who gets run over. I think that was simply forgotten when recreating the scenes in 3D. Considering the effort involved in animating him, perhaps it was better that way.
I can't understand the other criticisms of my predecessors. Only that the car crumples so strangely at the back. I think the car should still look like an intact car at the back. Maybe a few scratches but nothing more.
By the way, the second shot surprised me hard. It was really good.
Thank you! It looks worse than some generic Source 2 maker code. The bricks fall at the same speed (don't accelerate aka gravity) and it looks so weird.
I do agree, I think my biggest critique with is with the animation of the car. The way it looks to me is that the car is being pulled into the wall with an unnatural force rather than the car turning into the person.
In addition to this I would also say that the wall would look better if the chunks broke again on the ground and piled up on each other it would look better. The way those objects of moderate mass just gets moved out of the way breaks the immersion of it.
(I will say that I dont have the best eye for this kind of stuff, its just what I've managed to piece out of the third shot)
Overall though, I can see idea behind the scene and I've seen worse elsewhere.
Actually, the 5 hour shot looks better than the 5 days shot. The last shot represents the uncanny valley you were talking about.
For the 5 hours The wall effect was bad but the car is cool.
The 5 days one looks like a x-men shot or something supernatural
The car in the last shit looks weird
Yeah CGI still has a problem with physics simulation. Even if let's say, the jeep had perfect texture and lighting, it would still feel fake because of how the CGI jeep moved. CGI objects having no weight and momentum is a very common problem in animation. It didn't accelerate right, it didn't come to a stop right, it didn't break apart right. It's very hard for a physics engine to solve because a car has so many parts made of different materials. So artists hand-animate the crash frame by frame but it doesn't look good in real-time.
I couldn’t agree more
It’s because cars can’t turn that fast
This is one of my favourite episodes. Loved seeing what you could achieve in each time frame.
What is easy to miss in these videos about making vfx content is just how good the Corridor editing is in the overall video. The multiple cameras, dialogue and editing that goes into these is really seamless and makes you forget that someone had to plan and execute it all.
agreed, the editing of the corridor videos themselves are superb!
Back when I worked as an FX artist at a video game studio, my team lead was formerly a movie industry fx artist. I had previous game industry crunch experience, and when we hit a crunch phase on one of our projects, I was worried he'd get burned or angry about it. He laughed. He said compared to working in film, game industry crunch, while still being unpleasant, was so much more bearable. This was about 15-20 years ago, I can only imagine the utter hell movie fx folks are going through now.
I do have to wonder, with E3 now being a thing of the past and individual companies doing their own venues, are crunch times to present something to the public (like a proof of concept) becoming more or less bearable to manage. Maybe there will be another regular scheduled event replacing that, like Summer Games Fest, Video Game Awards, etc.
@PotatoNinjaFreak To my understanding, the Video Game crunches are more severe during the final phase rather than the previous phases. When they set a deadline of release while having a long list of bugs and unfinished bits that need to be thrown together in short amount of time. That is why a lot of games go Alpha or Beta these days since they don't dare promise a full-fledged ship.
As a previs asset artist, this video was 100% spot on. Loved every minute of it. Especially pointing out the Ace in the whole. The vfx supervisor. When they get scans it saves SOOOOO much time. It gives you the ability to do things you just couldn't do before.
Thankyou for demonstrating this problem so good, ive heard of it but never knew this problem with time was soo bad.
I wish they just asked how much time do you need to make it good? And replying with "Ok take that + 3 months in case there are problems"
There is no problem for us as a audience to wait for good movies. I really hope Vfx artists get the time they deserve in the future.
Disney: I gave you 3 weeks! Corridor crew was able to make this in 5 hours! With a box of toys!
And did the same as disney in the 3rd shot so give or take
Well I'm sorry... I'm not Corridor Crew.
I like the 5 hour shot more than the 5 day shot
Shot 3 crossed into the uncanny valley. The car sped up way too quickly before impact, in fact most of the shot was just too fast from impact, particles, etc. I wonder what it would have looked like slowed down.
The 5 day one is more comedic, I love it
It's the bounce back of the car that sells it for me.
@@Matt-pz4we The impact on the wall is way too much. If that Jeep crashes into that wall at 60 mph, the wall doesn't crumble and the jeep doesn't get crunched completely. The last shot especially looked like Looney Tunes, not like a realistic car crash.
@@Matt-pz4we I imagine Zack Snyder would have wanted that shot slowed down too. Release the Snyder cut!
@Corridor Crew I know they're rushed.
They're giving me a Rotoanim task on a 700f shot with a 8h deadline.
To make things worse, I have to do it Remotely, on a bandwidth limited network.
And they're expecting me to use Generic models for a 99% tight match.
Worst part... I'm getting paid barely 10$ per hour. With no pension or healthcare I might add.
90% of hollywood big budget movies, have their hardest Rotoanim and Matchmove tasks done by freelancers from poor countries in Europe and India.
Underpaid, Overworked freelancers, that are given impossible tasks in short deadlines. It's one giant sweatshop.
Screw the VFX industry. There needs to be another strike on the side of CG Artists and freelancers. These Bidding wars need to stop. This minimum wage high pressure BS needs to stop.
Need unions ASAP
@@itsd0nk You aren't getting world wide unions, not happening
lol @@itsd0nk
Strike will never happen unless you organise, you need to assume that no one is gonna do it for you
sadly too late for that striking in the ai era is choosing to be replaced
So glad you guys went in depth with this and talked to people that actually worked on these films! There is so much work that needs to be done to make sure VFX artists get to do work they're proud of in a workplace that respects them. The only way that artists can actually get what they need from the studios they work at is to unionize. They need more time, overtime pay, and benefits to help them avoid burnout. We can wait a few more months to see a film when it's _ACTUALLY_ ready, instead of just some arbitrary release date.
"I'll find somebody on Fiverr." Is like the biggest FU to your creative team. I felt that. 😂😢
Bing AI
as a compositor working in the industry, i'm glad more exposure is coming up about this. if you liked this and want to see another deep dive into a similar sort of thing, check out "No CGI is just invisible CGI," it's another good look into how all the industry works
22:49 the slight laugh of Jordan here, thinking of all things he can do with Wren now. Is very funny.
I was gonna comment the same thing
17:02 XD
why'd he have to say it like that tho 😂
Such a beautifully crafted video about the real challenges of vfx, mixed with great informative examples and awesome comedy
Honestly, I think the 2nd attempt was close to being the best. Touching that one up with a better CG wall and mixing in some deformed bits of the CG Jeep would have probably been perfect
Yupp
And maybe a less toy-like retreat. It did some funky skips.
Right? It had this physicality to it. 5-day one just shot straight through the curb like a supersonic jet. No bounce, no weight transfer, no inertia to it, and no sign of impact to Wren. The only weight it had was the jank, ha-ha!
"We'll fix it in post-post..."
@@lucbloom honestly I think that could have been fixed with some retiming. Watch it back at .75 with no other changes and the weight comes right back. It's honestly such a testament to what practical effects excel at, PERFECT physics and lighting.
Nice touch with the Big Boss not getting the Name of the Artist correct. Unfortunate but sooo true.
I wanted the names to move progressively further away from "Jordan", ending in something completely different like "Jeremy" or "Timothy".
@@malachi8154or Jimothy
Congrats Jordan, this is probably one of the best videos this channel has ever made. It's educational, entertaining and sheds a light on how crazy and unfair this industry is, everything packed in the same video. It also shows your skills, creativity and problem solving ability. This video is better than 98% of the entire Netflix catalog
guys! I love you Watching you already more than 10 years! And I'm really happy to see your grown!
Honestly you get the same issue in the IT industry where execs are SOOOO far away from the actual grunt work that it becomes a major issue
No, in IT, you'd just be fired because an exec decided to outsource your work.
Yu don't need IT specialists any more if you just let CrowdStrike do their job.
@@klausstock8020 look how well that turned out
@@klausstock8020a good director is the difference between nothing much and millions stolen in a phishing scam. “prevention is the best medicine” and all that, it’s always cheaper to pay IT’s budget than deal with the alternative.
It's everywhere. In so, so, so many places work is getting rushed because of this.
Yeah, this happens in literally every industry. It's the problem with hiring professional managers. All they know is how to tell others what to do, don't actually understand *what* they are asking people to do.
Another thing that can help is being able to quickly assign a dollar value to each change being made. I used to work at an animation studio where the boss would sometimes make well intentioned suggestions like "we should raise the pinky finger on this character while he sips from the cup". The shot was already locked, approved and rendered so I did some quick napkin math and to send it back through the pipeline would have cost over $5,000 worth of time for that one change. His response; "never mind".
This is one of the most powerful weapons in project management for any industry.
I went through courses for project management years ago. One of my instructors was a retired Air Force officer (Retired at light Col. IIRC) So we hit it off well since I was enlisted.
One day he was telling us about when he worked at Edwards back in the 80's. The engineers wanted to check for... something. Even he didn't know what they wanted. They just told him to look at the graph and mark ANY change on it. When he got the graph delivered, it was over six feet. Not one paper six feet long. But the old printer paper that was one continuous sheet that when folded up stood taller than him. I forgot how many thousands of sheets of paper he said it was.
The whole thing took him and another guy a week to go through and mark EVERY change in the graph. I think he said there were two.
He pointed out how much money it cost the government to have two officers sit in an office everyday for a week just looking at one thing. That's when it came out it wasn't really important, just a case of the engineers were curious about something.
He never had to do it again, and never found out what he was looking at in the first place. After that they just gave it to lower enlisted to do since they're cheaper.
27:13 the jeep can't turn that much instantly at that speed without flipping over, it looks as if there's a magnet pulling, and the damage done to the jeep is not looking realistic also
Thinking the same thing
A more dynamic camera movement would have helped...The image is perfectly still and it doesn't work for a crash scene. It never happens in real movies.
Gud
Are you another executive? 😂
tought of the same thing
I watch ya'll's content intermittently and usually enjoy it and this is one of the best things I've ever seen from you guys. Fun contest hook, an interesting little documentary in the middle and lots of little humor spots. REALLY well done!!!
I love how this is a version of "5 minutes vs. 5 hours vs. 5 days VFX" but with storytelling, a villain, a clear positioning and the honest reports from the industry to back it up.
Jordan's acting is underrated here. I meean I know it's fueled by real experiences but the soul-crushing anxiety of trying to deliver quality under unrealistic timelines is spot on. It's really a gut punch to all the artists as they know they can deliver, just not with such little time.
14:56 thats the craziest camera shot i've ever seen from corridor crew dude. with the pants coming off as well 😭😭
Hahaha
"We're making superhero movies. That should be so exciting for everyone envolved, but the fact, that it's not, is an issue" 25:16 😢
I worked nonstop masssive OT on Thor L&T. Director would approve a version of an asset and after all the work is done and it's been comp'ed in and matched in the rest of the sequence, he asks for the asset changes.
No realisation of the work this imposes on the artists who are already doing 70-80 hour weeks to finish the damn projet. This happened non stop on every scene in every sequence. Worst project I've ever worked on.
This happens on every. single. project. under the disney umbrella.
@@TheMCricket I'm sorry that happened to you and I feel as an audience member I kinda contribute at least a little to it. I do like love and thunder and honestly I think most of the problems in that movie are script problems or pacing problems. Not so much the CGI. I think people will forgive sub-par CGI if the movie is well received, but not so much if it's attached to a weak script. Like I feel like the recent Deadpool had some CGI that was a little too obviously CGI wise, (especially in the tva fight), but that movie has a much stronger script and was much better received. That's not on the CGI artists, that's on the directors and the writers. It can also be really noticeable if the script is cut up somewhere. I really noticed it in quantumania. That movie felt like it had scenes missing.
Being super hero is hard. So making really good believable looking super hero movies should be equally hard.
Corporate overlords are the end bosses.
@@TheMCricket I do appreciate very much the work people like you putting ideas into visuals. But appreciations doesn't pay the grocery bills. Hope you found a better way to make a living while being creative.
@@NexuJin The industry is dead at he moment, luckily a lot of skills taught in VFX translate to tech. I've left the industry for the moment, and so have a lot of people I know. Seniors have bills to pay and have no work, juniors aren't qualified enough to work in production. There will be a drought of artists in the coming years
This video is awesome. We need more videos like this. Thanks for your time and efforts to show people who have no clue what these process are. And how long it takes.
The second shot is honestly, in my opinion, the best. In the third one it accelerates to the side so quickly that it feels like the car has no momentum (with such a quick turn the car should also be leaning), the perspective just feels wrong (the underside of the jeep is visible even though the eyeline is at the height of the bottom of its windows(it also feels like the car is sliding sideways towards the direction it's turning)), there are frames where the wheels are floating above the ground, the back wheels flying off just from hitting the kerb just looks goofy and feels unrealistic, the entire chassis of the car is bending the instant the front right corner just touches the wall, the way the smoke is done makes it look like the roof turns into smoke before it even gets close to the wall, the metal deformation looks incredibly unnatural, there is a decal added to the rear window to make it looked cracked that doesn't go away once the windows are completely gone, the bricks should be preferentially breaking along the mortar lines and then shouldn't be bouncing around like they're made of Styrofoam, the vehicle comes to a stop way too quickly, and then the interior of the building just looks completely miss-matched from the view in the window.
Weirdly you ended up kind of proving the opposite of the point you were trying to make; more time doesn't always result in a better product.
True, pretty unusual how that turned out
I’m a former 2D Animator and I totally agree with you. The 3rd one has the best Rendering of the Jeep and wall, the thing with the texture and particle effects, but the motion… the physics of the action are totally off. The Jeep doesn’t seem to have weight or mass to it. The Action curve is too linear. Like it’s going very fast then zero/stop. The motion of the jeep should decelerate in a more gradual step motion when it hits the wall. Considering it be a 4-6 ton steel vehicle, it looks more like an egg shell or a tomato when it hits. The breaking of the wall came too early, so does the jeep crumpling.
I’ve worked with some Disney and Canadian cartoons in the early 2000. The rules of arc of action, slow-in slow-out, overlapping action, squash and stretch, twist and bend, ease in to stop…. etc. are some of the core principles most animators must learn. These things are observed from real and it’s due to countless hours of drawing every key frame of animation that one can appreciate how even a minuscule change of one position in one frame of film can change the speed, flow and impact of the action.
No disrespect to the Corridor Crew. They are totally talented and highly professional artists in the industry and the work they’ve done is still outstanding, but like anyone in the film and tv industry we have our own specific Specialties and work on usually one specific department, and there are things we just don’t have any technical understanding at all.
I think the best solution is that he should watch lot’s videos on UA-cam of real life accident Jeep or Vans hitting a wall. There are lot’s of them. Study how wall crumble and the vehicle crumple. Most of the time the vehicle does a bounce much like the toy jeep did, with its front all crumpled. Most of the time the wall would just tumble in huge sections instead of individual bricks exploding away. Nothing beats real-life references. There’s so many videos on the internet that people can tell the difference when something is off. "Collect as much references as you can!" the former Disney artist, Art Director of Lion King told me that.
@@inisipisTV you shared some valuable insight, pretty cool. Maybe i couldnt exactly put into words why the final shot wasnt as good to me but it seems you were able to.
At the end of it all if it turns out great, they can market it as "there's no CGI in this film" 😅
I got unreasonably happy when you gave avatar so much credit. I don’t understand how people can call it “just okay,” it’s 3 hours of gorgeous visuals. Like, not only does it have impeccable vfx, the world is just gorgeous. The way everything glows at night, the colors chosen for Pandora, I love all of it. It was my favorite movie as a really young kid, as an adult Im not crazy about the plot but I’ll never not love the world of Pandora
Literally the most accurate "portrayal" of being a VFX artist I have ever seen, right down to thinking you are finished and being rewarded by being asked to do it again with more time.
tbh the second shot looks way beter than the third. the car moving to the wall looks very jank, almost like a rubberband pulling it to the wall instead of steering into it. the collapsing car looks like the car was made out of bricks also.
thats why vfx and miniatures combined looks the best :D
you're just objectively wrong
I was thinking the same
@@jett3d I think they're right
Absolutely. The real world model looked far more believable and moved at a realistic speed with good physics to sell the shot. The rendered shot was too fast, poor physics, and deformed in an unrealistic way. If I was director I'd go with the 2nd shot in the final film.
@@jett3d Yeah, they aren't wrong. My initial though was the car was just moving too fast in the last shot and the physics where way wrong
This is one of my favorite Corridor videos. Would love to see the group do this 5 minutes/5 hours/5 days challenge.
Yeah hope this becomes a regular thing with Jordan if he likes it
I'd love this, with first place for each category
Love this; one suggested variation you could maybe throw in: do two stages, first stage is pre-vis from director notes and storyboard, second stage is actual renders based on time, but maybe the director picks one pre-vis, and everyone works from that. Would make for a great group challenge video.
Yeah, they have a new series here if they want it. It's an important message to keep pushing too, with new interviews and war stories each episode about insane deadlines and crunch (on camera or anonymized).
On a more serious note, I would rather see a 5 hours / 5 days / 5 weeks challenge. The 5 minute one is no more than a joke, which is fine... so I guess keep that one as well, but I feel like a week vs month would be a more interesting and more realistic viewpoint when comparing it to production time constraints.
As a VFX artist i am so happy you made this.
Abuse is the right word for it. It's a big problem in our country, it's a big problem in my own family, and they pretend it ISN'T abuse so they can keep doing what they want to do. It's shortsighted selfishness, greed, a result of cowardice. And the poor artists who are just trying to make a living doing what they're passionate about get taken advantage of and treated like they're the problem instead of the main driving force behind difficult work that is considered critical to the project.
It's "ends justify the means", it's seeing what they want to see instead of facing the truth. Honesty, the truth, is the only thing that can save us.
Great work on all 3 shots! No joke. Thank you for speaking out about this issue, it affects more than just the VFX industry. We all live in the same world, we are all connected.
And what country would that be, exactly? This is a worldwide problem that affects VFX houses globally.
@@ScyrousFX I'm in the USA, which currently has many work culture and other problems that I suspect come down to inability to face reality. Everyone finds their own feeds and believes the narratives that make them feel strongest instead of what's most likely true... it has been a big problem for a long time. You are correct, it's definitely a global problem.
@@SnoopSqueak The problem has a name: capitalism.
lol the artistic industry has always been like this, go back 2000 years its exactly the same. Artists essentially work for free to get brand recognition and then sell their brand (ie becoming the business owner). If artists wanted a painless 9-5 job they would be designing powerpoints for executives and get paid much more money than 95% of their industry. Another good example is games developers, they get paid trash compared to their coworkers in almost every other IT field, because doing boring/unfufilling things ultimately requires industry to pay people competitively for the bare minimum else become uncompetitive with their piers.
@@checker297 Im not a historian, but I highly doubt it’s functioned this way since the first century. Capitalism hasn’t even been around that long, that was added in till the 16th century
13:15 “if you ever felt too good about an idea, you’re not thinking straight”. WORD.
#2 was honestly my favorite. I would’ve liked to see more time devoted to that concept
The 2nd shot was the best imo the car moved more natural
Yeah I don't know why he made the car go so fast in the 3rd one it's totally unrealistic, he should have used his "previz" second attempt as a reference for the animation, honestly you can't beat real physics!
the second shot looks terrible...the only good thing was the motion of the car, otherwise, it looked bad. i dont know how you can say it was better. the third shot was nearly photoreal, and was perfect. if the car wasnt as fast and didnt get pulled like it did, it would be 100% finished.
A car would not just roll backwards after slamming into a brick wall full speed XD
@@Ila_Aras It looked better because the motion of the car looked better. Thats why my eye was drawn too. The 3rd shot the car motion looks fake af
Yah the third shot had laws of physics issues. Guess that is practical effects for the win?
Dude, this is the best video from this channel. I am not even in this industry, but as an artist and illustrator, I feel this resonates too. This is so responsible and respectful of the working creatives. Thank so much for posting this up. It is perfect, didactic, practical. Congrats dudes 🎉
1st rule of low budget films: if you don’t have the time to do it right, you will find the time to do it over!
When working on the _The Abyss,_ James Cameron gave a model maker and puppeteer directions to build just the torso of an alien for closeups, so the puppeteer did exactly as he was told. On the day of the shoot, he could tell Cameron was getting frustrated, because he couldn't pull the camera back to get the shot he wanted. Finally, Cameron turned to the puppeteer and yelled, "Next time someone tells you to make half an alien, you make a whole alien!!"
In my country we say "stingy pays twice" and that's exactly about the situations like that
@@Durwood71 but they only pay for half an alien
@@AlleonoriCat in mine, we say "what's cheap is expensive".
28:15 The dream of actually getting more time and not just being told to do a better version as fast as you did the last version
This only goes to prove that we NEED more practical effects. The 2.5h vfx edit + 2.5h shooting looked WAY better than 40h editing + a day on set measuring, scanning and hdri’ing 😅😂
Completely agreed but I think it's probably just the artistic intention that got in the way of the VFX shot. The guys at Corridor have a huge habit of making their realistic shots really cartoony. You can't go a single VFX shot from them without several litres of blood being thrown in. They're extremely talented people, don't get me wrong, but did the tire *really* need to bounce off of the car? It's stuff like this that takes you out of supposedly "serious" scenes - like the car crash. 🤔
VFX are *amazing*, it just depends on how you use them 😅
But hey, that's just my two cents 😆
Video idea: Twisters! The opening scene has a twister. A character is supposed to be struggling to not get blown away. I was looking at it and wondering why the wind effects didn't look grounded. Then I realized: **Her hair wasn't even really moving**. They just animated a bunch of wind and particle effects around her, but didn't seem to bother blowing a meaningful amount of wind on the character when they were actually shooting. The moment I'm talking about is at the end of the scene at roughly the 13 minute mark. This would be an interesting sequence to cover! Cheers Corridor Crew, you rock!
It's because of that kind of AWESOME video that Corridor Digital is SO RELEVANT! Explaining to us, the audience, the REAL reasons of thos effects and what's going on behind the curtain. Thank you so much for that!
I love this. And as an audio guy, I am 10000% happy that at least this portion of the post process is being given some attention like this. Audio post tends to be in the same kind of position with trying to squish a ton of stuff in last minute. And some of it really can't be locked in until the vfx shots are pretty close to done.
Anyways... I always love the "5 minutes vs 5 hour vs 5 day" timeline kind of thing. Personally I do my best work when under a little bit of a deadline, but not so short I have to take ALL of the shortcuts.
The irony of this video is that 80% of Corridor’s videos main narrative is “we only have two days to finish this video”
Corridor is also not running their studio like one the bigwig Hollywood studio that has to please shareholders and 16 different executive producers who have no idea what actually goes on to make a movie. It's a tight team sho understand their craft and are using these videos as way to challenge themselves and show us what goes on behind the scenes.
That's partially the same reason as hollywood, it's a limitation from above, "we only have 2 days" is a narrative on their UA-cam videos, because the youtube algorithm won't promote them unless they keep hitting their upload schedule. If you become a member of their website, you can get much more, and in depth interviews, without the youtube rush.
Yeah, a VIDEO, not a MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR FILM
“Stress level, Zero.”
Eh. It's just a narrative framework usually. Back in the day when Wren did vfx marathons for a weekly video release was the real stress deal.
the car motion of the 5 hours version looks better than the 5 days version.
The full digital version would have been better if they had kept the original shot's framing. The driving physics only look so weird because of the new animation.
@@AbjectPermanence Way too much of the car destructed in the third shot.
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, the digital jeep did not crumple in a perfectly realistic way. However, the miniature did not crumple at all. Neither version is perfect, and both takes are compromises, but the miniature version's flaws are innate to that method. On the other hand, the main problem with the digital version having crazy physics could be corrected simply by sticking with the original camera framing, by dropping the extra animation. The digital version could easily be made to look more real. More time/effort could make the digital crumpling look better too.
I love the style of this video! Great work at making it easy to watch all over
Honestly as an architect, I didn't think it would be but I see much of the exact same struggles that our industry is facing.
From clients and contractors constantly nitpicking at our work for small minor adjustments in their eyes which bring us hours if not days of work on our side.
Architectural Studios only having a select set of jobs at one go that they can bid for. And so to differentiate themselves from others they're taking shortcuts, cutting their asking fees, reducing the time it takes to do a job and forcing us to work more to meet the shorter deadline. In a constant race to the bottom.
There's so many parallels, and I'm sure it's the case across even more industries. Creative or not.
Wonderful video to showcase some of the issues we face
Exact same in Archviz too!!
I can already imagine "you know, I want the pillar more to the left so we can have a fireplace there. Get on it". And unlike movies you can't undo or make changes mid project because you gotta pay for the machinery, for the exact quantity of materials, the workers and every permission with relative floor plans. I noticed a lot of people for example think they can tear down walls and modify the home however they want, but you can't. Lastly, people can get hurt and buildings can collapse, and you're responsible for it. It's definitely worse.
@@bwhere45 Oh sorry, forgot I'm not allowed to express solidarity or empathy for a fellow worker.
Trying to better the work we do, the work we love so it isn't actively harming us is pointless. Guess we just all have to suck it up and pull ourselves up with our bootstraps.
That'll make it all better, let's bury our heads in the sand together!
Thank you for enlightening me with your great wisdom
Seeing this made me realize something. The people working at studio MAPPA must be crazy to be able to work under these conditions and still drop the best animation in human history and then continue working on a Blu-Ray release that turns out even better.
they still cut corners thoughs. Like the character models becomes more inconsistant and simpler.
@@MokoES I don't think they do. Yes, AOT animation, Hell's Paradise's fight scenes and Chainsaw Man's pacing are debatable, but as someone who hasn't read the originals, these might not be the best adaptations but they are definitely some of the best anime out there in terms of style and animation. Even the CGI in AOT (to which I assume you referred), while it takes a more major part of your screen, still looks tenfold smoother than Wit's CGI (and if you take into account the way the plot twisted, I think the new animation style fits the new tone of the series much better). I know they cut corners in some places (like some animation glitches in JJK that I found), but their anime are still god-tier in terms of animation.
Side note, specifically speaking of JJK (Sukunas fight in episodes 16-17) I assume the character shapes being inconsistent was made intentionally judging by how they immediately switched to their regular style on the next episode. The reason for this is that they wanted to make the fight look ethereal (similar to how they did it in the fight between Pain and Naruto), and I think it works really well. Yes, the characters aren't smooth, but you're not supposed to look at it frame by frame either. When it's in motion, each strike makes you feel like you were hit yourself, and that's an effect that cannot be reached with standard animation.
I'm really glad that the conversation has started to shift from blaming the vfx artists to blaming the studios.
This goes for any Art or any discipline, really. A rushed job will always be lacking and it will show. Thank you for taking the time to address this. O7
17:55 i love how he's only doing this for a UA-cam video to show how important time is to production but he's showing the real life stresses of someone in this position and truly going through with it even though his lively hood isn't at stake so I can't even imagine what a poor VFX artist would feel like when his job is at stake but they literally cant make more time show up out of thin air
Props to Corridor for bringing this subject to light to the general audience. Releasing a video like this AND working in the industry at the same time sure is a scary thing, since reputation is incredibly important in the industry, so I just want to say thank you Corridor for fighting for artists in the way that you can
I'm glad you guys made this. I'm sure many people that need to see this will. Unfortunately not everyone that needs to see this will.
The most interesting thing to me, as an IT person, is how 'crashes' are just a part of the job for VFX. Like the software devs are just so big they can't be bothered to make their platforms more stable? That would frustrate me to no end.
Same, can’t believe he said it was a regular occurrence. Fittingly, like VFX artists, software devs are put in the exact same situation.
As a programmer let me just say- you don’t know what you are talking about. Trying to have a hundred person team all make a product that works seamlessly that can be run on any computer with any hardware with any medium being put into that may itself have data corruption is a monumental task. If a fail case only happens in a specific scenario .01% of the time, that means you would need to test it for hundreds of hours just to even know that bug exists. And then you have to test it for hundreds of more hours to analyze and fix that one bug. It’s not easy, even with the best programmers in the world. That’s even assuming that the company thinks it’s worth it to put a few devs on a bug that only a hand full of people have ever experienced. Wanna fix that one tiny bug? That’ll cost us 54,000 in dev salaries.
@@matthewjohnson3656 The problem this video illustrates also has a huge impact on the software development world.
If the coders and testing was given adequate timelines (with no changes close to release date to allow time for proper testing) most software would be a helluva lot more stable.
The crashes are probably due to his plugins, when he crashed on the 5 hour version there was 3 error messages from 3 different plugins lol
It's not like that, such software is so incredibly complex it isn't possible to be perfectly stable. Still pisses us off though and should be better!
17:00 Devious editor 💀
28:41 is so real.
I work at a virtual production studio in Asia where worker rights are basically nonexistent
Just a month ago, the film crew went in to test out the scenes on LED. They basically deny and reject anything they cannot understand, but is essential for the accuracy and quality.
After test they did a meeting and decided to drastically change the scene, with 1 day to make revisions.
On the first day of shoot we worked 20hrs non-stop, 14hrs the second day, with DP ordering scene changes and tweeks constantly which he expected to fix in seconds. All while we're dealing with all the on-set technical settings required for virtual production. The executive producer often just walks to our station and ask to change some minute details, while I was taking orders from DP, and they both expect these changes in minutes at most.
Our beloved manager is in his 50s, he got sent to the hospital literally the next morning from all the overtime and stress.
They are overpaying the wrong people on these projects. It’s always been that way, but now so much of the outcome is on the shoulders of some of the least paid people. These are some of the realities that really piss me off.
The final completely lost the curb bump. It feels super weird.
Good eyes. I didn't even think about that anymore, Imy mind just went to the weird sudden acceleration like the vehicle was swatted.
@@johnlucas6683 Yeah you can tell that felt weird even if you're not sure why. But I'm pretty sure is that the curb just took the wheels off without affecting the rest of the car's momentum or trajectory like we got from the toy car version. xD
And in the second one, he made a really good observation about the shadow and added a light blocker for it. But in the third one, the shadow is gone, or the lighting is so unbalanced that it's not noticeable.
Third one had a lot of advances, but the second one married together better. The physics was all in harmony.
I feel the final shot the car accelerated in an unnatural way and although it had crumble physics its incredibly difficult to get Car crumble physics full CG correct.
Insane effort, I would probably only have made the first video after a week.
I remember when Wren was the one _agonizing_ over when a shot was complete. I mean he still does from time to time, but in the old vids the despair was palpable. Jordan feels like a follow-up anime where the protagonist is like "now it's your turn"
When he said he was only actually nervous about the third attempt, that hit home. It's the reason I procrastinated for most of my life. I would half-ass so many projects and jobs just so that you couldn't judge me by my best effort. But when I have the time and I put forth my best effort, now my performance is laid bare. I have no excuses. It's taken a long time to view my performance as simply work and practiced skills vs. an indicator of my worth and value. Now my poor performances are simply situations for learning and progress.
Idea for a video series. As Zack said, normal people don't know, why water simulation is so difficult and expensive. You could explain how things work in detail and what they cost if they are done cheap, appropriately or extraordinaly good and how these ways compare. It'd be a good way to show the decision makers in simple videos why shots take time and money to make a good scene
5hr vfx shot is so clean 😮
A friend of mine got into VFX 6 years ago and started working as a freelancer. Last year he landed a couple of jobs for big productions. Told me the pay was laughable, like literally $7/hour and they pay only 8h a day, but he often found himself working 18+h/day in order to finish the projects they sent him. He perceviered, because he hoped those projects would help him advance further in the idustry and other studios might look differently at him with some proper titles under his belt. But nah... The best gig he landed was paid $13/hour and they wanted 2 months worth of work, done in just a single week. In that single year alone he aged 15 years at once. We are the same age (37), but he now looks like a 55-60yo dude. Absolutely insane.
They need a Union! It’s inhumane for people to work like that
For every 1 American wanting to unionize there are 1,000 Asians willing to shut up and work like an honorable citizen should.
Was this in India?
@@daveweinstock No, Bulgaria.
That practical Jeep shot is unreal!
This smile at 18:33 makes me unbelievably happy
18:17 Time stamp for 2nd render.
Wren getting scared before the jeep turns is throwing off all the shots lol
This needs to be shared to every executive in the industry. And more importantly, every VFX house. They need to start charging what they're worth, and doing it as a collective so the whole industry changes
It's startling how many people actually need to hear and see this. People been blaming VFX studios way too long
Am I the only one who prefers the jeep in the 5 hr render🤣
Read the other comments lol. Everyone does
@@jekkin8972yeah. Like every other comment says that
I can’t believe he posted that after 5 DAYS! If I was Niko, I would have said fix this 5day clip before we post to UA-cam. It was actually bad given what #2 looked like.
The best 5 minute VFX ever made.
0:45 the Garry's Mod sfx are PERFECT lol
isnt literally everything in gmod from half life and counter strike
@@U_niquey not everything, and those sound effects are associated with gmod because of the wonky physics making it common to hear