Hello, welcome to Sock Talk
with JNab and the Sundance Kid.
We are going to explore the frontiers of
technology, art and the human experience.
Hello welcome to Sock Talk.
This week we are going to be talking
about the history of movie
magic and special effects
vis visual effects, practical and
computing and today we
brought along a guest, Will.
Will has come up from down south and why
don't you introduce
yourself to her audience.
So my name is Will Harvey, I'm a special
effects makeup artist
from Heilferschudt north of
London and I collaborated with both Jamie
and Nicky on a project
a few months ago when
we did a short film
called Roast in Peace.
We sure did.
Yeah so, okay, where to start?
Alright, the beginning.
We kind of did this, actually I don't
want to go into too
much, I mean well it depends
how many people listened to our last
episode when we talked
with Nicky specifically on
history of technology and film and the
history of technology and film.
Movie magic has been around since the
beginning because cinema
in the beginning was special
effects, it was something that people had
never seen before so
going to a big room where
you see a big train coming towards you
was terrifying and
nobody had a concept of what
that was.
And I mean everything
was special effects.
One of the very first practical effects,
well in camera effects
I know of is a beheading
of a queen where they just did a jump cut
stop frame so you know, go like this with
a hammer, swing down, stop recording,
change it for a dummy,
start recording again.
Very very easy.
But nowadays we have all sorts of
technologies and
specifically, well where to start?
Okay maybe let's start with...
Can I suggest something?
Please.
Okay, the last time we talked about movie
magic you made special mention of Georges
Melier.
Yes.
Who is a hero of yours and of mine.
Melier was a stage magician who took
advantage of this new
technology of cameras and more
specifically of moving cameras or cameras
for moving images and started doing stage
magic special effects.
So he did a lot of stuff like double
exposure, triple quadruple
exposure, shooting the same
thing over and over again with black
background so he could
reinsert himself as a character
and appear multiple
times in a single film.
The Journey to the Moon where the moon's
face gets hit in the eye with a rocket.
I mean he did a lot of
cool stuff like that.
The man with the rubber
head where the head swells up.
So much stuff like that
was based on the illusion.
You mentioned before that big reason that
could work was
because of the static nature
of cameras in those days.
These cameras were really static and so
it made it possible for
him to put the audience
where he would want someone to sit so
that his trick would fool them.
That kind of tomfoolery I think was the
beginning of the whole thing.
That sort of playing a trick on people.
And I like the fact that the word we use
for cinema in the
English language is based on
the fact that it's just
really cool that they move.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's an interesting point there.
The camera being fixed and always knowing
where people are
going to be looking, well,
when you're doing effects and practical
effects, say you're making a head.
And I know in this example how you did
it, but do you ever
consider priority for specific
areas?
In terms of where the camera's facing.
Yeah.
Or do you just try and make them as
generic and useful as possible?
I mean, a lot of the time directors will
ask the special effects
artists thoughts on where
they should shoot.
It's not always something
you get input of though.
It depends who you're working with.
If you're working with somebody like
Ridley Scott, Ridley has
14 cameras shooting at any
one time.
So he gets every angle.
If you've got one camera, sometimes it's
good to get different
shots just to see how it
looks before you start shooting.
So get a slightly different
angle, different lighting.
This all to do with the
lighting as well, isn't it?
I mean, it's not always just the camera.
It can be to do with the lighting, the
exposure settings and so on.
So yeah, I think it's important to get
input from everybody
involved with that effect,
especially if it's a special effects
artist who's designed something.
They might have a certain way that they
think it would look better being shot.
So it's always helpful.
Yeah.
And maybe we should say what sort of
special effects you specialize in.
Well, I do a bit of everything.
So it can vary from anything from severed
heads, prosthetics, moving rigs.
So we had the great one of
Imogen from Roast in Peace.
A lot of armor, props,
helmets, you name it.
I can pretty much make it.
So it's a bit of everything really.
Yeah.
You've got a shop where you...
Yeah.
So Monstra FX is one of the UK's biggest
prosthetics suppliers.
So I supply mainly to low
budget films and people at home.
The ethos behind the business was always
offering film quality
products at a reasonable price
because back when I started it in 2014,
you just couldn't buy
prosthetics at a reasonable
price.
So I started off with a range of six
different prosthetics and
it's now grown to over 120
different prosthetics.
Wow.
Well, could you explain what a prosthetic
is for the audience?
Yeah.
So a prosthetic is an appliance that you
put on yourself to
transform the shape of your
face, arms, hands, and
pretty much anything.
So I do a lot of zombie makeup.
So prosthetics to make your cheekbones
look sunken, forehead, all
the exposed bones, wounds,
things like that.
It's giving the illusion of something
real using something fake.
Yeah.
I've seen some of the things that you can
do, which is very cool.
And okay, this is maybe
interesting to go into as well.
So you're many things.
You're at once almost like a chemist, a
manufacturer, an
engineer, but also an artist.
And what I was impressed with with one of
the rigs you did for
us was how much detail
you put into the skin.
Like you could just talk about skin and
because people just
think, you know, when you're a
kid, you're growing up, you're like, you
color impeach and you're done.
Right.
Or something or
whatever skin tone someone is.
But there's a lot more going on.
Yeah.
So what we call color matching and color
theory is actually very
difficult and it's a very
refined skill.
So when you look at the skin on your
hand, for example,
you're not just looking at a
peach color, like you're saying, there is
an undertone of which
will be a light peach
color, but then you've got reds, blues,
greens, pinks, purples,
all the different colors in
the spectrum.
So trying to get that color matching in
place is quite tricky.
So with the head that we did for Alec, I
enlisted a friend of mine
called Ashley Powell to paint
it for me and he painted it to match it
to Alex skin tone,
including, you know, the subtle
veining in his nose and
on his cheeks and stuff.
So it's really a refined art getting
color matching correct.
Yeah.
It's something that I've only lightly
delved into not
practically, but I've tried sculpting
digitally quite a few times and a lot of
the tools will let you
digitally sculpt, but then
also texture paint on top.
Yeah.
And it's a case of starting with red
because your blood
vessels are the most underlying
and then layering them up with layers of
skin and adding
imperfections all over the place.
That's something lots of people, some
people take a while to
realize is how much the real
world is all about
imperfections that makes something.
Well, that's the thing when you're
digitally sculpting, isn't it?
Because you're using a
lot of symmetry to sculpt.
It can be too perfect at times.
And then a lot of digital artists will
actually go in and create
imperfections on one side
so that the two sides are asymmetrical.
Yeah.
But it's quite a skill to
get it looking realistic.
Certainly not something
I've managed to master.
I would disagree.
I think, well, yeah, okay, maybe
digitally sculpting, but
that brings me to another part,
technology wise, interestingly.
So this is something that's changed over
time that I saw you do.
Maybe walk us through what the original
way to get a mold was
and then kind of what you
do now.
So the process of live casting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What you would have to do would be to get
your actor and if they
have hair, you'd have
to put a bald cap on
them and then cover it.
Sorry, just to preface this, what we're
talking about is if we
needed to make, let's say,
a severed head of someone.
Yeah.
A model of it.
So like not of
someone, but of a specific.
Yeah, a specific.
So like the like head
of an actor, for example.
So you put a bald cap on them and then
you'd have to cover
their head in either alginate
or silicon and make quite a thick layer
of product over their face.
Let that go off and then give them a
plaster jacket around two halves.
So it's quite a
claustrophobic thing for a lot of people.
A lot of people aren't
comfortable doing it.
So one of the beautiful things about
technology is that we've
had recent advancements with
3D scanning and you can buy a 3D scanner
off the shelf for about 2000 pounds.
Now that will give you a perfect scan,
which like the one we
used for scanning all of the
actors for Roast in Peace, it was just
incredible the level of
quality of the stuff that we
got out.
And then you can take that scan away,
edit it in software and then 3D print it.
Yeah, it was before you would have to
pour a plaster head,
sand out any imperfections
in it, fill any holes, and then you'd
potentially have to mold
it again to make your master
copy.
So we don't have to do
that with 3D scanning.
We can make the master copy in the
software and then just print it.
Much, much easier process for the actor
not having to be underneath all that.
I mean obviously it has its own
challenges because we still
have issues with 3D printers
where as you saw we got a phantom head
where there was no head
printed but it printed all
the supports.
So it's not a refined art
yet but it's getting there.
With the recent advances in 3D printing,
printers are so cheap
now, you can buy one off the
shelf for next to nothing versus what
they were five years ago
when you had to pay thousands
for them.
For decent ones at least.
The thing I was super impressed with with
the scanner that you had
wasn't just the geometry,
it also got the texture as
well which is pretty darn useful.
Yeah, because then it overlays the
texture layer over the top
of the mesh that is captured.
So it is a brilliant bit of technology
and I'm still having a
lot of fun getting to
grips with it.
I actually discovered an interesting
technique with it where
if you spray a beard or any
kind of facial hair with dry shampoo it
mattifies the hair down
so you can capture it.
Ahhh, yeah because remember we had that
trouble with the scan last
time with the beard specifically.
Yeah, Steve's beard.
Yeah, it goes C-through.
Yeah, we didn't need the head in the end
but yeah the bottom
half of the face was beard
was with the geometry was just lost.
Yeah.
So dry shampoo actually
works beautifully for doing that.
So I'm going to be using that a lot more.
If you don't ever want to get your head
scanned we can do it.
Yes, please.
Actually we're talking recently
potentially about doing some sort of
research with scanning
heads.
Useful.
Just for documentation
and things like that.
Yeah, well we'll look into that later.
I love the idea.
I used to have a scan of
my head from the early 90s.
Yeah.
And if I still had that I'd put the two
next to each other as a
warning for everyone who's
thinking about getting old.
Beware.
I thought about doing something similar
for my nephew though or
my niece and my nephews
but scanning them periodically over time
and then having all
the scans as they grow up
I thought that'd be
quite a cool thing to do.
Lovely idea.
Yeah.
It would be super-inged because even just
having SD card full.
Cool, right.
That's good to know.
That's still recording fine.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, okay.
Ignore that.
So again this is a relatively new tech.
This is our second time using this
podcast setup so still got some kinks.
Second.
Right.
It's a great bit of kit though.
I mean.
It's still right.
Yeah, about mid-market
which is pretty good.
It's a reach for us mid-market.
Mid-market, yeah.
Reaching upwards.
Yeah, reaching upwards.
To get to mid-market.
Yeah.
Previously we're just
using wireless lapels.
Oh yeah.
We've just got one.
Yeah, they're
comfortable but audio is not good.
We would be clipping them onto us and
they'd be flopping down.
Were they the GoPro ones?
No, they were Rode wireless goes.
Okay, I've got the GoPro magnetic one
which is quite good but I
haven't really used that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they're useful for
that but not great for podcasts.
It's technically better because we can
hear and modulate our
own voices and we'll.
Yeah.
Okay, so all right.
Where are we?
Practical V's digital.
I'll put this out to you both.
Why do some recent films just
not feel right with effects?
So let's say there was a lot of people
going on about the most
recent flash film for example
and how uncanny valley to the max and
just felt cheap and rushed.
I mean that's one of
the answers is rushed.
I do think rushed is one of the answers.
I agree.
If a team budgets out a schedule they
need to follow and then
you cut that at the time
that they have then you're forcing them
to do fewer iterations
and yeah it's always going
to hurt but I think there's another thing
that's going on where
a lot of folks involved
excuse me a lot of folks who are using
computers now AI assisted
and otherwise seem to forget
that the design process is an
intellectual and artistic process that
doesn't have anything
to do with the
technology you choose to use.
So I mean at some level it has to you
have to design for the
tools you have but conceptually
you have to conceptualize of these things
in a way that makes
sense to the story and
to the audience.
So you gave the
example of the flash film.
Lots of interesting things in that film.
Lots of bad things in that film.
Some really nice things in that film.
It was a mix and given how many different
producers took over
and changed things I'm
not surprised but to me one of the core
conceits of the flash is
that he is the fastest man
alive.
Why would you have him run in slow motion
to seem as though he's running fast?
So just the very concept of how they were
going to do the
illusion of him running struck
me as ridiculous.
The very first time he starts to speed up
and you get the
visual effect of the world
warping around him well he gets
interrupted by some school girls but
that's another whole
bizarre thing that we could go into.
As soon as he starts actually running
it's just hilarious.
It's like a little kid pretending to be
fast by going in slow motion.
Yeah, yeah.
It was the same in the Justice League
film though wasn't it?
Yeah, it was just a
bad design of an effect.
I see the logic.
Okay, we're seeing
things from his perspective.
If he could go really fast maybe he's
sign ups is fire up
faster or whatever and he's
everything slows down
from his perspective.
But then everything else
should be slow not him.
You could keep him moving at normal speed
and slow down
everything else around him and
that's been done with
speedster effects and it looks great.
Yeah, one of the X-Men
films with Quicksilver.
With Quicksilver.
Everyone goes on about
that scene being great.
That was one of the best
speedster scenes I've ever seen.
Yeah, because they mixed
it between perspectives.
So yes, he was doing fast things and when
I wanted to it would
slow down and he would
be running around playing
with things in slow motion.
Which is exactly the kind of thing that
you would like to think
you'd be clever enough
to do if you had super speed.
I think the lightning every time he runs
as well though just doesn't look right.
I mean you took him back to Quicksilver
and how great that thing
was because he did have
the capability to touch things that were
suspended in air and stuff.
But when you look at the Flash and all
this lightning they put
around him and stuff that's
not how I remember the
Flash comics being at all.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know my lore too much but I
believe there's some lore
thing that makes him some
Flash silly energy.
That's something I've been able to do.
At some point more recently.
That was introduced I think in the 90s.
The oldest comic I used to own back when
I owned old comics
was all Flash quarterly
from 1941.
You could say I'm a fan of the character.
He was just fast.
He got his power being hit by lightning
so lightning was the symbol.
But he didn't have lightning
powers until quite recently.
And even then if you think about it if
he's moving super fast and
running around the planet
generating lightning energy as he goes
isn't that a scorched
earth sort of scenario?
Yeah that was what I was going to say.
It's the same concession you have to do
with any superhero really.
The amount of energies that you're
playing with if they were
running that fast the air
would just super heat around them and
burn everyone around them.
Right so there have been attempts for
decades to try to
explain that kind of thing with
just enough
pseudoscience to make it plausible.
And admittedly pseudoscientific
explanations that say that he
generates a dampening field.
Who cares?
The point is he can pick someone up and
run with them and they
don't die and he doesn't
die and they don't destroy the planet.
If you go in that direction if you lean
in that direction maybe
it doesn't look as flashy.
Maybe you have to come up with some kind
of a water bubble
effect or something like that
if you even want to address it.
Having lightning all around is cool.
It's visual effects cool.
But it ruins the story because it
suggests there is something going on.
Yeah.
What would it do to all the people around
you to certainly have
lightning shooting out
everywhere?
But even the sort of shock wave generated
from him running you think it would throw
people off their feet.
Yeah.
They don't show anything like that.
That's the dampening field.
Yeah exactly.
Without the dampening field you say you
had to slow motion and
were in slow motion I just
went like this to go move my hand and
push you to it would just go through you.
Yeah absolutely.
Blood and guts would go everywhere.
Absolutely.
The boys.
The boys.
Yeah.
Which was a great
examination of that very issue.
What happens when you
run in the crowded street?
Runs through someone
and explodes the person.
Yeah.
And I thought it was funny that Justice
League and the earlier
movies in that Snyderverse
all wanted to make the
powers more spectacular.
So you see Superman put his hand on the
ground before he starts to
fly and the ground crumbles
a bit under his hand.
Yeah.
So you are telling us visually before he
takes flight that he
causes damage to the planet
around him.
He can't do that.
One of the coolest conceits about
Superman is that he's
this ultra dense being.
I love the fact that he could walk
through the ground as
easily as walk along the top
of it.
That he could walk through a building as
easily as through the door.
And he's just supposed to
be constantly in control.
Right.
That's part of how he's using his
superpowers all the time is
not killing all of us just
by being amidst us.
Yeah.
That's a really cool thing.
But if exercising his powers causes
damage, then
automatically you have to say, okay,
well then there's going to be a sonic
boom when he takes off
and the air displacement
will knock all of the
planes out of the sky.
Yeah.
You know, like you're introducing
problems you don't need
to have by having one cool
looking shot.
Ooh, let's have the
ground crumble under his fist.
Ooh, let's have lightning.
Potentially.
But then maybe a lot of
audiences are just like cool.
And then it's only us that goes.
I don't think so.
I think it comes back to is it Hiroshi
Ishii who said the
uncanny valley originally?
I think it was ran.
I pass.
It rings a bell.
I think so.
Yeah, I think so.
Anyway, so the idea of the uncanny valley
is that something is really, really close
to normal to meeting your mental model of
what the world should be.
And it's just not quite there.
And the closer you are to normal, the
more horrifying not quite there looks.
That's why if you watch The Simpsons, it
looks, you stop thinking
of it as a cartoon and start
thinking of them as characters.
And you're just
watching the story, right?
You don't talk about the writers who
write Homer, you talk about Homer.
Yeah.
Right?
So the animation is extremely simplistic.
It's completely consistent.
Yeah.
They don't violate it.
Right?
Anytime you violate the
consistency, you're screwing up.
Consistency doesn't have to
be at any particular level.
It just has to be maintained.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the both of we, okay,
this is what we always do.
We go on tangents upon tangents.
But going back to your original question.
Yes.
The biggest issue with film nowadays as
well is that because there
is so much CGI introduced
into pretty much everything, the
reactions of the actors
aren't necessarily there.
So if you look back at Michael Bay's
Transformers films, when
Charlotte Booth was interacting
with the Transformers, there was always a
slight delay with the conversation or the
reaction that he was having to this being
that he was supposed
to have in front of him
that he couldn't actually see wasn't
necessarily that real.
And that's why I love practical effects,
because if you've got a physical creature
in front of you, you're getting a real
reaction from your actors.
But you just don't
have that much anymore.
And it's unfortunate that we've kind of
gone down this route,
but it seems like practical
effects are sort of starting
to come back a bit more now.
Yeah, for sure.
And this always goes to which I still
maintain and I will fight people on this.
The most believable film is still
Jurassic Park, the original.
One, there's a few reasons, but one of
the main reasons is
that this was the start of
CGI in films, as in, you
know, quite significantly.
There have been a few things here and
there, but this was one
where it was make or break.
The art that was ILM, the guys, geniuses,
ILM, that were just like, no, we think we
think we can do it now because originally
they were going to be using stop motion.
I forget the artist specifically, but one
of the great stop motion art was going to
be doing it.
I think, oh no, sorry,
not Baker, older than Baker.
The fellow who did Sinbad.
Yeah.
Oh, that's hard.
Is it?
Yeah, it was the fellow who did Sinbad.
Harry House and Ray Harry House.
Okay, we'll make sure that we put a
footnote if we have it wrong.
But yeah, so you can still see some of
the tests with the stop
motion and it looks really
cool.
One, they were, the technology of stop
motion had gotten, this
was at its peak just before
it got cut off.
So seeing it is really, really cool
because they figured out
motion blur with it as well.
So it got in really, really good.
And you can see even the scenes with the
T-Rex biting off the
tire, the velociraptors in
the kitchen.
And it looks really good.
And it wasn't, that was also previous.
It wasn't quite there to what it would
have been finally, but it looks amazing.
But then it was the guys at ILM showed
Spielberg a test and he
was like, all right, okay.
Now I see this can work.
And then the line from the stop motion
artist said, I think, all
right, I think I'm extinct,
which they stuck in the movie as well.
But my point being is that the CGI guys
were basically, they were
like, this is our proving
point.
This is our point where we have to make
sure that this works as best as possible.
And the amount of time energy research
that they put into every
single millisecond that
those dinosaurs are 3D
animated on the screen is intense.
A lot of thought, a lot of trying to get
everything as perfect as possible.
Whereas now there's a lot
of tools makes it easier.
You can skip a few things.
The Jurassic Park era is the
golden age of special effects.
Yeah, because it's the
perfect hybrid of physical.
That's where I was
going to get to as well.
Yeah, virtual.
But I feel like we've almost taken a step
backwards now,
because you look at the more
recent films and you
can just see they're fake.
There's not really much of it.
It doesn't have as much of an impact.
And you know, films like Star Wars,
Jurassic Park and so on,
you can go back and watch
those countless times and still fall in
love with the story every single time.
But if I try and watch one of the new
Jurassic World films, I
think I've only seen them once.
Yeah, because I have no desire to
actually go and watch them again.
100%.
Yeah.
And you can just tuck the point to me how
easy and silly it had
gotten to just stick
dinosaurs in when there's a scene with
Chris Pratt just
randomly talking to someone and
there's holographic
dinosaurs in the background.
Just because, you know,
it's a future tech city.
So there's holograms of dinosaurs and
they're in the back just
being there for the sake
of being there.
And then that defies the whole original
point of Jurassic Park
was it was also a monster
movie and you don't
always show the monster.
That's one of the golden rules.
And if you're just showing them all over
the place, they lose their magic.
They're not as special.
They're just wild
animals as opposed to monsters.
And in all the recent Jurassic World
films, they've created a new monster.
Yeah.
Like the Dominus Rex,
then the Indoraptor.
And then so it'll be interesting to see
what the new Jurassic
World film has because it's
still very much under wraps with what
exactly is going on there.
But hopefully they'll do the original
film justice rather than
just continuing on with
this story of, you know,
just for the sake of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, so many points to make here.
I've lost the track of the
other point I was going to make.
I'm going to jump in
while you find your track.
I think this comes back to the same thing
I was talking about before.
If you haven't conceived of the story
really well, if you
haven't conceived of the art
that your characters are going through
really well, then it's
easier to just throw crap
at the screen.
Yeah.
Right.
And then you end up putting holographic
dinosaurs behind characters
that serve no point at all.
Right.
And maybe just take away from the points
that the characters are
trying to make with their
actual acting.
On the other side of it, there are
filmmakers who I think are
doing the 3D effects really
well.
So if you look at James Gunn's Guardian
of the Galaxy movies,
his brother plays Rockout
Raccoon, and his brother walks around in
a harness three feet tall on the set.
So he's all hunched down and walking on
his hands and feet in a
weird crouch so that they
have someone to look at
right where Rocket is.
Yeah.
So that they're interacting with his
speech in real time, and
they can go back and forth
and do that improv that's so good in
James Gunn movies where
you can't always tell what
the difference is between what was
scripted and what wasn't.
So I think that's the answer to the issue
you mentioned where
Kyle Abuff is interacting
with something he can't really imagine,
and you end up with
this broken interaction.
Yeah.
I think it comes to-- this is where I
agree with the feeling
of the premise that it's
gotten worse.
But there has always been examples of
people that are taking
the time and doing it right.
Yeah.
Anti-circus, pretty much anything
anti-circus is in, is
they're doing it right because he's
on set.
They're normally doing
it with motion capture.
They're doing it with motion capture, and
they're making sure
they're actually getting
his performance.
Real world interactions and performance,
which makes it feel much more believable.
Now, the story of some of those Planet of
the Apes films, I'm not too sure.
I kind of tapped out a while ago.
Yeah, I've not seen the new one yet.
I couldn't even tell you
how many they're being.
I guess they were just going for the
actual old school thing
that there had been-- how
many Planet of the Apes films had there
been before the new reboot?
There was a lot.
Too many.
If you count the television
movies, it would be too many.
So then I guess that enabled them to
start doing that again.
OK, but no, I was going to go back to
another reason why
Jurassic Park, in that golden era,
feels a lot better.
And one of the main reasons I would
posit-- and you can see
this direct change between--
if you get a Blu-ray of Star Wars Episode
I, and you get a
Blu-ray of Star Wars Episode
II, Attack of the
Clones, V's, Phantom Menace.
Phantom Menace looks fantastic.
Attack of the Clones looks
horrible on a bigger screen.
Reason for that, it was just before they
switched to shooting digitally.
And one of the reasons that all this late
90s, early 2000s VFX
looks great was because they
would print it out and
re-project it back on the film.
And that gives us this feeling, this
matchingness, the
imperfections that just ties the CGI with
the real world content
is really, really well.
And it's something compositors try for
ages to try and match.
And adding fake grain, adding-- taking
grain-- like we just shot
a film, there's some VFX,
but at one point I had to tell the camera
team to stick a lens
cap on and just record
high-house so it would give me a grain
plate of the camera so that it can
overlay and match it.
But it will never give you the
re-projection because it
just adds all these subtleties
of blending everything together.
And that's another reason.
But like I say, if you go again, just get
a Blu-ray, watch the Phantom Menace, P's,
Attack of the Clones, because Attack of
the Clones, I think,
was one of the very first
feature-length films
shot fully on digital.
And it was early digital.
So it wasn't as good as it is now.
And you can just see
how not nice it looks.
That whole-- sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to say that imperfection
is what's missing in modern-day film.
A lot of modern-day films, not all, but a
lot of modern-day films are
missing that imperfection.
And that's what the big issue is, is that
they're trying to
make things too perfect.
Yeah.
I guess also cinema goes through waves of
this for striving for
perfection vis imperfection,
like having clean vis dirty.
So one of the best times in cinema where
people were making one of
the best-- the very best
lenses that you possibly could, where
they thought depth of
field was an error rather
than a creative tool, if you watch
Citizen Kane, those
glasses that they made for that
are perfect.
There is no depth of field.
Everything in the front, you can see just
as clear as everything in the back.
The famous Intrudoshkari scene with the
kid's child playing in
the back with the snow.
And then you have pans
all the way to the front.
And you can see everyone perfectly in the
foreground and everyone
perfectly in the background.
Because they thought that's what we have
to strive to achieve,
is to have these perfect
lenses that will capture everything.
Then I don't know, say like when
Spielberg and that were
coming around, people were getting
more used to these perfect clean lenses
and that being cinema.
But people were still using cheap lenses
in documentary filmmaking.
So running around, because they couldn't
afford the big crazy
expensive lenses, so they would
use dirty little lenses.
And then you would have
this focus and imperfection.
But because people had started attaching
that to their minds as
documentary, and that being
reality, then when you have Spielberg
coming along and using
that tool, then it felt more
real to people because
this looks like documentary.
So it's like real, if I'm making sense.
Or even before Spielberg
slightly before, like Scorsese.
Yeah, yeah, Scorsese.
Or you could go across the channel and
talk about Godard and
the Nouveau of cinema in
France, where all of a sudden they wanted
you to be seeing
things from the perspective
of people on the street while these
things are happening.
So if you watch what's it called, Couva
breathless, a lot of the
scenes are doing exactly that.
You're looking through a dirty lens,
you're looking through a shaky lens.
You're seeing something and just the way
it's being shown to you
has emotional value to
the story.
It's a wonderful story.
Yeah, it's playing around with the
audience's preconceptions
before going in because that
changes over time.
So for example, the office, when the
office TV series original
came along, that type of
TV show had existed around that time.
But real ones like there
was one about airports.
I can't remember the name of in the UK,
but it was where they
went to airports and they
just filmed the everyday lives of people
working in these places.
And then when the office came along, they
shot it exactly like that.
So because people had understood this
kind of reality version of
it, but then when they're
making a fictional version of it, but
using all the same
filmmaking styles, it felt even
more real.
So then when the awkward cringe came
along, it added another weight to it.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing that
the capturing a style
that exists in the audience's
mind already.
Yeah.
So that you're taking them half of the
way into the story just
by doing that in a way
that they won't consciously recognize.
Akira Kurosawa did that right with his
films from the fifties.
Yeah, from the fifties
right up to the nineties.
He'd have these dramatic films and you'd
see a battle or something
having trouble remembering
the names of his films.
But for example, in the seven summer, you
go back and forth
between seeing gritty, dirty
shots, including a couple, I think that
used poll focus, people
talking to each other and
looking out across.
And then you follow their focus and focus
on what they're looking at.
But then more stylized combat where it's
almost like watching no
theater, Kabuki theater.
Everybody is in rigid poses.
There's a lot of strong lighting in the
background with
silhouettes as characters.
And it's all just different storytelling
styles and it immediately
lifts you into a certain
mood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's something that I think a lot of
modern films get wrong
because they aren't trying
to do that or if they're trying to do it,
they're trying to do it with a video game
sensibility.
Let's make this like a video game.
And most video game movies you watch
don't feel like a video game at all.
Maybe a rare exception is a free guy.
Yeah.
Right.
Which really feels like a video game by
not trying to replicate
any particular video games
visual style.
Yeah.
But the ingredients and the interactions
instead, I think, of
course I could be wrong.
It wouldn't be the first time today.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Where do we go with practical views?
So we made a film recently, Will.
We did.
That's one of the reasons we found you
because me and Nicky were
adamant that we were doing
practical effects on this one.
My last film before that I had done VFX
and spent two years of my
life sitting down trying
to make visual effects for the film.
We very quickly decided there was
absolutely no way we're
doing CGI or visual effects for
this one.
So then we searched for it and we found
Will and then
immediately click and we're like,
okay, boom, perfect.
Let's go.
But maybe, yeah, let's talk about some of
the things you made
because they're really
cool.
So we talked about Alec
getting his head scanned.
But then we had another crazy request.
And we figured I set it
up of what her request was.
So her request was we want to have one of
her characters head snapped back and then
an arm to come out of her throat or
something to grow out of her throat.
So when you hear a request like that,
what's your process?
I love it.
Yeah.
I love it.
It's like, great.
We can do that.
So it involved a lot of R&D around an
effect actually, which
has been done in CGI a lot.
So if you think about things like
Constantine, where the son
of the devil is trying to come
out of her neck and he's pushing through
and his face is coming through.
And it led me to go down a bit of a
rabbit hole with it and
try and find whether anybody
had really done that practically.
Not a lot of people have.
Or if they have, they've
overlaid over the top of it.
So then it led to the thing that I love
the most, which is doing
some tests with different
layers of silicon to try and determine
what would work most
effectively to have a hand
not only coming through the silicon, but
coming through and it
being visibly a hand and not
just something stretching
the silicon from underneath.
So how I actually did that was I had to
make a, I think it was four
or five layers of silicon,
but different softnesses of silicon.
So the center of the actual mold or the
center of the cast,
sorry, was completely liquid
or fluid, if you will.
So it had firmer layers on the outside so
that it had a
membrane, which encapsulated
the really soft silicon in the center.
So you could push through it and actually
get that stretch and actually visibly see
a hand coming through.
But the other challenge of course was
with the head snapping
back, the neck had to be
rigid enough that it wasn't going to
stretch and tear as soon as
the head snapped backwards.
So the way to combat that was to put a
mesh around the area
where the hand could come
through so that it strengthened the size
to stop it from tearing.
What was the mesh made of?
It's just almost a see-through mesh
called tool, T-U-I-L-L-E.
So it's a fabric that we inlay into
silicon all the time
when we're doing any kind of
masks that have to be stretched over the
face or anything like that.
It just gives it
extra strength basically.
Okay, it's the actual fabric tool that
you can buy and make clothing out of.
Wow, isn't that something?
I remember when we were doing it because
I had been playing
around with some previous
on just different
variations of how things could look.
And I had figured out just by doing it
virtually when things are
coming up, like the idea of
a hand poking through skin like that, the
problem is when you
see it, yes, you'll see
the surface on the skin, you'll see the
shape of it, but you
won't see the silhouette of
the hand.
And then I played around by putting
lights underneath and everything.
And then you'll notice that we remember
on the day when we
started doing it, it was like,
yes, it was poking
out and kind of working.
And I was just there and then like,
someone grab a light, grab a light.
We put it underneath and then, yeah, all
of a sudden, boom, you
start just shining this
light at certain points and you could
really see the silhouette of the hand.
It would look great.
There's a great, beauty-ish shot of
myself, Jamie and Joss, the
creature actor, all laying
underneath this rig in a line.
We're all looking at the screen, trying
to make sure that I'm
shaking it to make sure
it looks like she's shaking and Jamie's
making sure the light's
in the right place and then
Joss is moving his hand around.
That's lovely.
It's a really good picture.
And you know what I noticed?
Because we did this and we shot all that.
Then a couple of months later, I saw a
trailer for Alien Romulus.
And I noticed they'd start doing that.
It's the only one I've seen of all the
Alien films, but when
it's inside the chest, they
have a kind of glowing, so you can see
the silhouette of the
alien creature inside about
to burst out.
Makes sense.
It's an improvement on the shot.
Well, the other thing about Alien Romulus
is that all of the
facehuggers are practical.
Yeah.
So Weta Workshop actually designed all
these radio-controlled
facehuggers and puppeteered
facehuggers that were
running around on set.
And a couple of my colleagues who I
worked with out there
have got these really cool
videos of them
puppeteering these facehuggers.
So it just looks incredible.
And I think that is a classic example of
them kind of going back
to the practical aspect
of it, because you get the fear on
people's faces when this
thing's running across the
floor.
And it also just gives you a feeling.
I remember seeing horror films when I was
a kid, just glancing
here and there and seeing
things I'm not supposed to.
And it would always just be this absolute
terrifying, horrific
space, like this tangible
space where these things are actually
existing and seeing it and feeling it.
And that was because everything I was
seeing was like the thing.
And having this real practical, there is
something there that exists in reality.
And it's horrible.
And it's there.
Yeah, you just lose when it's bad CGI.
Some of the later Alien films just like
say, I don't know, Alien
vs. Predator or whatever,
there's just CGI running
around all over the place.
Yeah, sure.
You can make them look much more
acrobatic and they can do
all these things, but you
don't need that.
If you do, why not intercut?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, it's a movie.
You're not performing on stage.
If you need to have 75 different actors
and models and other
technology to portray the
monster, then use 75.
Yeah.
And you don't need to get a young Jean
Claude Van Dam
overheating in a rubber suit.
Yeah.
It's kind of one of those
things, though, isn't it?
Where if you have to talk an actor
through the process of
what's happening in front of
them, so you're going, okay, so this
actor is going to have
something burst out of their
chest and you need to react as if it's
the most horrific thing
you've ever seen versus
the first Alien film where they kind of
told them it was going
to happen, but then they
made it much more graphic.
So the looks of horror were real almost.
You know, the people
were disgusted by it.
And this thing bursting out of the guy's
chest really had an
impact on the audience as well
as the actors that were there because the
thing you miss with CGI
is the real reactions.
Yeah.
And I think that's why we get this
perception that things
aren't as good now because you're
not getting real reactions.
Well, that's why we specifically in our
last film, Rust in Peace,
we had our actors having
their eyes awkwardly closed for about
half an hour while we
had just all in his Will's
prosthetics coming out.
So keep your eyes closed, keep your eyes
closed, stop grilling like
gooing him up and everything,
getting them all ready.
And Joss couldn't see anything because he
had these beautiful contact lenses, which
a colleague of mine made from a company
called Counter and Nistle
to make him look completely
blind, but they did
actually make him blind.
So we had to guide him around the set to
make sure that he was
in the right position.
And then was it you or Joss who came up
with the idea of having
the duct tape that he could
run his foot along so he knew he was
walking in a straight line.
So as long as his foot was on that tape,
he knew he was going
in the right direction.
He just worked brilliantly.
That's like a Melly style.
The audience won't see it, but we will
use it sort of idea.
I love that.
Yeah.
And it's great.
I mean, we've been saying editing parts
of it so far and it's
just it's just all of Will's
work and Joss's performances.
It's a bit we're going to be iterating
like a hundred times
because we want to make sure
that it's one showing how good your work
is, but two, making
sure that we're getting
the very most out of
it for that story beat.
But we should probably mention that you
did put VFX into it as well.
Yes.
But the cut scene between when we had the
practical head of Imogen and then Joss in
his full form was actually digitally
designed by yourself.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, the previous was.
Yeah.
So I did a bit of
concept artwork here and there.
But then you actually did the projector.
Oh, that part.
That part.
Yeah.
Sorry, forgot about that.
Yeah.
No, because yeah, because this whole
transformation we're having, this
spoilers for our film,
but it doesn't matter.
There's people there is a crop there.
See the film anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Watch it anyway.
Yeah.
The when when Imogen's head snapped to
the Imogen's the actress
head snaps back and the
hand comes out.
That would that would have been it would
have been impossible.
People could definitely have done it,
figured out how to do the whole thing.
But we only had a certain budget and we
only had a certain amount of time.
So we had to focus on no, just make this
part like focus on that part.
Get that really, really good.
Get the head snap and
the hand coming out.
We originally talked
about getting a full.
Yeah.
Silicon body that Joss could stand inside
and then have it come
off of him and it was
just yeah, it's going to be complicated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was a project creep
or what's the name of it?
Feature creep.
That's in the tech terms, but.
Project creep.
Project creep.
So instead what we did is I did it in CGI
where I had a 3D model of the actress run
roughly the same as the actress falling
over and then having it
come out of fully come
out.
So hand coming out and
then the skin falling off.
But obviously that I hate that.
That wouldn't look very good for all the
reasons that we've just discussed.
So our workaround was, well, hold on.
Let's go old school
horror of shadows on the wall.
So I'd read, I rendered it out so that
that would be a shadow.
And then we used a real projector,
projected on the big back
wall so that there that we
see them in the foreground reacting to
it, the standard kind
of that, that trope shot
of the creature coming in on the shadow
and projected down the back wall.
It turned out pretty good.
Like a tribute to Nosferatu.
Exactly that.
Isn't that wonderful?
I'm really looking
forward to seeing the film.
Before we go any further though, you
mentioned the name of your
friend's company that made
the contact lenses.
Yeah.
Would you please say that name
again more clearly and slowly?
Cantor and Nissl.
I'm sure they appreciate that.
So do I.
So they do all of the contact lenses for
all of the big feature films.
So Guardians of the Galaxy, pretty much
anything that warrants the
need for hand painted contact
lenses for big actors.
They're the ones that
they go to in our industry.
Well, in that case, they probably don't
care that you said
their name on our podcast.
They'll appreciate it, I'm sure.
Yeah, they were fantastic.
And then I remember we were about to
struggle figuring out
because we had a sword that Joss
needed to interact with,
but it was a real sword.
Real sword, it was kind of sharp.
So we're about to try and
figure out ways of doing this.
And we're like, hold on, wait, the
camera's on this side.
Just take one of the lenses out.
The easy work around.
You can only see this lens.
So let's not put that one.
Nice.
Simple things sometimes.
Yeah, Millie again, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It took us longer than it
should have to figure that out.
But to me, that's one of the joys of
working on any complex
project that's for a different
audience than the people working on it.
You get to find those solutions.
And if you do it right, it's
seamless for everybody else.
They'll never know what you did.
Yeah, there's problem solving.
That's the key.
My job is problem solving.
People come to me with a challenge, and I
have to give them solutions.
And that's what I love about it, is the
problem solving aspect
and coming up with something
that sort of ticks all the boxes.
I wonder.
Yeah.
The problem solving never stops, and half
of the problem
solving is on set with five
minutes to go.
You have to figure out how we're going to
work around this problem.
Now, what do you think would happen if
you suddenly had 1,000
times the budget, if you
were looking at not having to say, "We
need to solve this in
the next five minutes"?
Do you think you'd want to still go on
for solving things live on set?
Or would you like to be
able to say, "You know what?
Wrap for the day, everybody.
Catch the helicopter to the Caribbean,
and I'll call you back
when we're ready to shoot
again"?
I think it's a case of
more money, more problems.
You're going to have that much money.
It's always a case, it doesn't matter how
much your budget is, you're putting every
penny of it to get your
production value out of it.
More budget equals more people, which
equals more problems.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, it wouldn't be a
case of we're doing...
Because that would be moving...
You just said, "Let's
take a flight back to the..."
That's a massive part of the budget that
you're now not putting into the film.
It would be a case of every penny, it
would just be the same,
but larger scale, ultimately,
I would think.
Okay.
Well, what I was thinking was that it'd
be really cool if
somebody like Scorsese made
a film now in his old age that he shot
the same way he shot Taxi Driver.
If they were to give him 100 million more
or 500 million more
than the original budget,
that could go to charity.
There's a whole lot of towns up in Canada
that need clean water.
About 5,000 bucks a pop will do that.
I'm sure there are many other places that
need fundamental
resources in the UK and everywhere
else.
A whole lot of refugees in the world.
I think it'd be awfully cool if Scorsese
or somebody else just
did that, said, "Yeah."
So we raised 600 million from the studio
to make this film and
we shot it for 150,000
and the rest of it
all went to good works.
Congratulations, we
have solved world hunger.
That would be a fantastic thing, but at
least I have stepped into
the world of film financing
enough to know that you would absolutely
never get the money.
There are examples where that's been
done, where they've gone
into indigenous parts of
the world and built infrastructure for
the local communities
while they've been filming.
Like even rainwater tanks to get fresh
water and then gone, "Here you go.
This is now yours."
I just say that that's not the case, but
that's literally our
pitch for half of the things
that we're going to try and do is to try
and genuinely make
the communities better.
Not by just some token things, but by
raising the skills and
everyone trying to build an
infrastructure so that when you leave,
there is a legitimate
infrastructure for them to
be creative and continue
the industry and make things.
Yeah, and that does seem to be exactly
what you folks are doing here.
It seems to me that you're focused very
much on the personnel
infrastructure, the skills
in the community, the experiences in the
community, but there's no
reason I can't combine with
the kind of things that you were just
talking about where,
"Okay, gee, well, we're shooting
here and we absolutely need to build a
prop that it just so
happens is the perfect design
spec for what this community needs to
have when we leave."
There's no reason you couldn't do both.
This lovely office space
that we're in now, for example.
There's a whole lot of empty office space
around the city of Aberdeen.
It would be lovely if some of it was
being converted into soundstages.
Yeah, yeah.
Or workshops.
Or workshops.
There is, well, the company that we post
this space, Outer Spaces,
that's one of their goals
is taking empty office spaces and then
their charity and then
having artists come in and
use the space until the company that owns
the premise has tenants.
Wouldn't it be cool if it
was longer term than that?
It would be fantastic if it was longer
term because that's one
of the problems is we have
seven days notice at any point.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
If anybody comes in and says they're
paying for this
office, we have seven days.
And that can be any time.
The city of Toronto had a really great
alternative film
scene in the 60s and 70s.
It got better and better in the 70s.
Old friends of mine won, I think it was
the Palmdor at Cannes
for a film they made in
and around Toronto.
This became a major filmmaking mecca
because people started saying, "These
abandoned warehouses
near the old shipyard really only used by
the police to beat up people they pick up
now and then."
This could be a filmmaking area.
And so it became one.
That could happen here.
It could.
That's part of our plans is
to try and make that happen.
The problem is even we're focusing on the
skills because one, if
you don't have a filmmaking
community and skill
people, it doesn't work.
Even if you get a building, it doesn't
work unless there's projects and money.
Right.
No, skills first.
Absolutely.
Skills and experience first.
We need to attract projects and money.
We've got a bunch of projects down the
line that we're
developing and we're very excited
by and positive by and we think they're
going to be great, but
we have to raise the funds
to be able to shoot them.
That's going to be a case.
Basically, our strategy of getting there
is we have to prove to
people that there is a
strong community and there is talent.
That's why we're making
these charts is to prove.
Look at all these people.
Look at this great project
that we're putting out here.
Now, just let us keep going.
Go along the path.
Give us some money.
We'll give you a return and then you will
actually develop an industry here.
It's a case of trying to think about how
we can actually happen.
It's very easy to get caught up in
wishful thinking, but
it's hard to keep it grounded
in what an actual
strategy is going to be together.
It's something I've been thinking about
with the video game
industry as well, trying to
develop a video game industry here.
Lots of people will talk about it, but no
one has actual
strategies or roadmaps on how
to get there.
Aren't Universal Studios developing
something in Scotland now, though?
They had a rumor they'd bought some land.
There could be.
Most of it's always
Central Belt down south.
There's been a few
studios pop up down there.
It's hard for us to try and make a case
that, no, just come a little bit further.
The only way we can do
that is by offering something.
Yes, we have really
competitively priced space.
If we have an infrastructure of talented
people, then we become more attractive.
Until we have that, it just costs them
money to shoot up here.
If there's no infrastructure of people
who can do the work
here, they have to fly people
up, they have to put them up, and then it
just becomes more expensive.
That's why we have to try and build an
infrastructure of talented people here
that they can actually
use.
It becomes competitive.
At the same time, the way you're doing
it, you're building the
potential for not just
the people, but the businesses
they might start on their own.
Exactly.
It used to be, I think I could be getting
this completely backwards, but I think it
used to be that when they started
shooting films in Toronto,
they still had to ship the
film to LA where
they're about to be developed.
How much money are you saving if you're
doing daily shipments back and forth?
To get your dailies.
You need to build both.
You need to have that.
Also, the personnel with the experience
and the skills, you
need to have the supporting
infrastructure in other ways, the
ancillary businesses.
You're not going to run a film set if
there's no one to cater it.
That's the easy part.
There's plenty of
catering companies here.
Lots of catering companies, vastly fewer
companies that can do
professional set building and
knocking down.
Yeah.
That's one of the arguments that we've
been saying is that there
are a lot of very talented
people here in different industries that
it really wouldn't be
much of a thing for a good
engineer to switch from engineering oil
and gas products to
engineering fund rakes and
things like that, or just general rigging
and prop set design.
That's one of the cases we're making.
The first thing that popped in my mind is
the movie It and how
they remade it and use
a lot more digital
effects and stuff like that.
Yeah, that's original.
Well, obviously the original was one of
my favorite and why I'm
actually scared of clowns
as well because I've watched a really,
really young age and
then I've watched the remade
version of it.
Fair enough.
It's cool and that, but it's not.
It's not as scary.
It doesn't.
Yeah, it doesn't get me scared.
Because it's not real.
And it's the old style
of shooting, isn't it?
Yeah.
And Tim, you can't compete with Tim Curry
being a scary clown.
He was terrifying.
Although the actor in
your one, he was pretty good.
Is it Bill Skarsgard?
I believe so, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was great.
It's different,
different, great in different ways.
But very, very, the whole look was very,
very different to the
original, wasn't it?
Yeah.
It's a shame that they didn't sort of pay
more homage to Tim
Curry's version with the
new version, but I think
they just made it too different.
Yeah, that's always, I wonder if you're
ever tasked to do a remake.
I always wonder if I was given a
franchise that I love
and I had to redo it.
How much would I try to make it like the
original and how much
would I try to do my
own spin on it?
I guess that's what people are saying
about Alien Romulus is
I've not seen it yet, but
I hear it's, yes, there's a love letter
to all of the old
school practical effects, but
some of the story kind of got lost in the
weeds and I don't
know if that's the case.
I've not seen it.
Well, is it going back
to Transformers again?
All of the Michael Bay Transformers
films, they changed a lot.
They changed Megatron's entire look.
They changed Optimus Prime to be able to
have his faceplate open
up so you could see his
mouth.
But then if you look at Bumblebee and how
they shot the first
two minutes of Bumblebee
like an old school Transformers cartoon,
and it's visually
stunning if you haven't seen
it, those first two minutes are stunning
and it's like, why could
they not have done them
like that?
Megatron looks like he should do.
Yeah.
All the others, just the way they shot
it, even though it was
all CGI, it's just shot
in such a way that it looks more cartoon
like and it's brilliant.
That's funny.
So another recent example would be the
character of Wolverine in the new
Deadpool movie film.
Deadpool literally makes the joke before
you see Wolverine in his yellow costume.
Like, oh, it's taken you
over 20 years to see this.
For 20 years, they had made Wolverine
films without ever putting
him in a yellow jumpsuit.
The first one, they even joke about it.
Cyclops looks back.
Wolverine's like in his standard 2000s
leather jumpsuit that's
black and they're like, he's
like, you guys go out in these?
He's like, what would you prefer?
Yellow spandex?
It's like the fans would actually.
Yes, as a matter of fact.
Yeah.
And I think they did that very well in
the most recent
Deadpool and Wolverine films.
Especially when he puts the hood up.
Yeah, they go.
The chairs that people had in the cinema.
And that's another thing.
So there's way, I guess it's just waves
of what people think
they should be doing.
And in some films, there's this need to
try and make things look
too realistic or plausible
or realistic.
You'll have someone wearing a costume and
they have to make it
grimy and like it's existed
in this world and it's
all dirty and everything.
And I was one of the things I actually
stayed away from in my
film, Children of Chronos,
which was I wanted it to be feel like
Kurosawa, or no, no
Kurosawa, Ghibli, specifically Ghibli
is with this character.
So she had a bright pink scarf and I was
saying the whole time,
no, don't dirty it up.
I want it to be bright pink because I
want it to feel like a cartoon.
So don't add any texture to it.
Just keep it as flat and pink as possible
because on the screen it
will look more cartoony
like that.
And they did that with Debra Wolverine.
They had much less texture on things so
that when those
costumes are on screen, that is
yellow, that is red as
it would be in a cartoon.
Yeah, that's a balance of
what are you aiming for?
Are you going for stylized?
Do you want it to feel real and gritty?
Yeah, it's an interesting thing to tie
that together with
something else that you were
saying a moment ago
about the expectations.
It's what the audience wanted for a long
time and they never
got it and now they did.
You don't want to give too much fan
service to the audience.
You don't want to do whatever every
fanboy argues about online
or fangirl, but especially
avoid what the fanboys say.
Stupid, stupid boys.
But what they want and what they think
they want might be different things.
Yeah, for sure.
Definitely, seeing Wolverine pop the
claws in the yellow and
blue suit is something that
got a great fan reaction when I saw the
film as well, including
from deep within the cold
confines of my own old heart.
That just felt wonderful to see that.
It also felt wonderful when he was
skipping through the
multiverse spoilers for a film
lots of people have seen and encountering
many different versions of Wolverine.
Henry Cavill.
Yes.
Right.
Like Cavill-Rine.
He really liked when he showed up and
said, "Oh, John Byrne era, a brown suit.
Hey, didn't you fight the Hulk?"
Yeah.
Right?
That was just lovely.
The callback to one of my favorite comic
book writers and artists
who hasn't been in a good
relationship with Marvel for a long time,
who really helped
define Wolverine when he
was co-writing and
drawing the X-Men comics.
To call back to that era, that's not the
costume he wore when he fought the Hulk.
He wore the yellow and blue one when he
fought the Hulk, but it
was a chance to call out
John Byrne.
It was a chance to
talk about it that way.
They took full advantage of that.
Then they did the short Wolverine.
Yeah.
Right?
Because in the comics, he's probably feet
tall or in a five-foot-two.
They did him as child size and child
proportion, which made it
hilarious to see him that small.
He created a joke that he could be that
small and then treated
him as the meanest badass
version of Wolverine.
Playing with the expectations, playing
with the wants, playing
with the desires, giving
us visually things we have only dreamed
would someday happen
with a major film budget.
Yeah.
That's what I love about Deadpool though,
is because Ryan
Reynolds breaks the barrier
with the audience multiple times.
It adds that sense of comedy that we all
want in a Deadpool film.
Yeah.
You see him talking
about it before they made it.
I think it was an interview while they
were doing the X-Men,
no, Wolverine origins or
whatever, the one
where he first appeared.
Right.
With a room out.
You see Ryan Reynolds there just saying,
"It would be my dream
to make a proper Deadpool
film where he's breaking the fourth wall.
He knows he's in a film, knows he's a
comic book character."
Oh, so when he goes back in time and then
shoots himself in the head.
Yeah.
I also love that Ryan Reynolds gave
Channing Tatum the
opportunity to play Gambit because
he wouldn't play that role for so long.
Did you hear about the post-credits scene
that was not included
in the final release?
No.
Major spoilers for the film.
If you haven't seen Deadpool and
Wolverine, stop listening
now, I guess, or accept that
you've got lots of spoilers.
You've probably heard this elsewhere.
When Cassandra Nova comes to Deadpool's
Earth to kill everybody
at the end of the film,
can't believe I'm saying this out loud.
But yeah, spoiler, spoiler.
When she shows up, when the big bad shows
up to kill everybody, there's that portal
that she's created using, I guess, the...
Sling ring.
The sling ring that she's stolen from Ned
in some alternate universe.
There's a post-credits scene where Gambit
is walking amongst all of
the other dead characters.
And he looks up and he sees the portal.
And he turns towards the camera and the
camera drops down and you
see the sling ring circle
on the irises of both of his eyes.
So his eyes look like they do in the
cartoon and in the comics.
Oh, that's cool.
And you just know, yeah, he's going to
come through that portal.
He's going to be in another world.
They talked about that a lot, actually,
why they didn't give him
the eyes like the comic
until he activates the cards.
But there was a reason behind that.
I can't remember what
the reason was, but...
I don't know.
But it was just a
lovely post-credits scene.
And I'd like to think that they're going
to do a Gambit movie now.
I hope so.
Yeah.
I think that's his Cajun accent.
I think it's hilarious.
But I'd pay money to
see him in that role.
I'm done with comic movies for a while.
There's my interjection.
So do you not have an opinion on Robert
Downey Jr. playing Dr. Doom then?
I couldn't care less.
I'm done.
I tapped out.
Like I say, I tapped out a while ago.
After Avengers Endgame, there was maybe a
couple that I was OK.
I was semi-interested.
I was like, that's fine.
But to me, there's nothing new anymore.
I agree with you.
I think they went on
too much with Avengers.
They didn't grow the group
like they should have done.
They kept it quite the
same across all of the movies.
But I still love Guardians of the Galaxy.
If they come out with another Guardians
of the Galaxy, I'll happily watch it.
If they come out with another Deadpool,
I'll happily watch it.
Like you, I wouldn't go out of my way to
go through and watch a new
Avengers film at the cinema.
I'd probably just
wait for it to come out.
See, for me, it entirely
depends on who's making the film.
Not the studio, because the studio makes
a very wide range of
quality of films in terms
of writing and production, in terms of
casting and performance.
But if the Russo brothers are making
another Avengers film, I
really liked what they did.
I don't recall who it was who directed
the first Avengers film.
Yeah, it was just...
No, that was the first Avengers movie.
Oh, sorry.
I mean, the first Captain America one.
Oh, fucking, fucking.
Captain America, first Avenger.
And I should remember his name, but I'm
not recalling it right now.
If he made another Captain America film,
I'd love to see that,
because I really liked what
he did with the first one.
I disagreed with half of his creative
choices, or his or the
studio's creative choices, but
they made an entertaining film that took
the character
somewhere I wasn't expecting.
So yeah, if the Russo brothers do the
next two Avengers movies, I'll see him.
Or like if John Favreau directs a Star
Wars film, we'll all watch
him, because The Mandalorian
is a work of art.
Yeah, 100%.
I haven't enjoyed anything Star Wars that
much in a long time.
And I liked the solo movie.
And yeah, I did as well.
There have been a few Star Wars projects
I've really quite liked
since the original three
films, which changed my
childhood and everyone else's.
I almost liked the solo movie.
What I didn't like about it was that they
felt the need to
explain every single specific
thing that Han Solo ever says or does.
100%.
And I'm sure that wasn't Ron Howard.
I'm sure that was the studio.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, if they could just wind back a
little bit, pull on the
reins just a little bit for
that kind of nonsense, I think that would
have been a great film.
I thought the casting was fantastic.
He didn't have to meet Chewbacca.
He didn't have to end up
with the Millennium Falcon.
We didn't have to see Lando Calrissian as
great as the
performance of Lando Calrissian
was thanks to Childish Gambino.
Tonal Clover.
Sorry, called him by the wrong name.
Yeah, I liked Roy Gwynn as well.
Roy Gwynn.
I really liked Roy Gwynn.
Great film.
Yeah, some people
hate him, but I love it.
Yeah, in fact, that was one of the rare
times when Darth Vader
has been used in a modern
Star Wars film.
And I thought that was really well done.
Speaking of silhouettes to be able to see
things, in that last
scene where you see Darth
Vader, they've got fancy new lightsabers
that actually light up.
But the problem was every time you light
it up in a dark room, all
you see is the lightsaber.
You don't see anything else.
So yes, to get a silhouette, you have to
light up things behind people.
So they made the light up behind.
Not how reality works, but
how you expect reality to work.
Exactly.
And that's what matters, right?
It's like telling a story.
If you want to bore everyone with your
stories, tell it as a linear experience.
The minute you start playing with the
experience, you can
make a story entertaining.
Even the most dull and even the story I'm
telling right now
could be entertaining in
the hands of a good storyteller.
Not by recreating reality.
What's that?
Who was the first?
Don Graham, I think, right?
The first teacher of animation, hired by
Disney when they were
first going to start mass
producing cartoons.
He was an instructor at an art college,
and he came up with the
flower sack test and some
other stuff like that.
And one of the famous quotes from his
teaching is, "Animation
is a caricature not just of
form but of movement."
Right?
And I think that's what film is.
Film is a caricature
of visual storytelling.
It has to be a caricature because if you
just show exactly what people see all the
time, we see a lot.
But have you ever seen the documentary
with Walt Disney going into
detail about the multi-layer
camera they developed when they wanted to
keep certain
perspectives the same for like
the moon in the background?
But they were struggling with early
animation to actually get
it because it was all flat
plated.
And then coming up with the multi-layer
camera where they could
zoom in on the different
plates was just phenomenal.
Yeah.
So you've never seen this before.
This is a big massive device, about the
size of this table but
high as well, I think, where
they'd have different layers of glass
that they could paint foreground,
mid-ground, mid-ground
two, mid-ground three, background, paint
those different layers
in and wind little spinny
wheels.
Spinny wheels.
You see, I'm good of an engineer.
I am.
The plates can move in
relative to each other.
So you get parallax effect.
And Snow White had it.
Yeah.
Snow White had it for the first scene.
Snow White is the first one.
The first one, the first feature.
And now it's also the first movie that's
considered 2.5 animation.
Yeah.
Because of that machine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The idea of the technology came from a
guy from Montreal whose
name was Barre and he's
the guy who invented the pegboard, which
is supposed to be called the pegbarre.
That pegboard was the thing that allowed
animators to hold their paper
in exactly the same position
as they drew the next picture.
And the idea was that you could peg some
pages for each character
and some pages for background,
then getting that parallax effect, so
having the effect of
having them move at different
speeds.
The relative speed at which the
background changes shows
you how far away things are
or how close they are.
So yeah, Barre is the guy who made up the
original version of
the machine that became
that and what's his name?
Little Nemo in
Slumberland and Gertie the Dinosaur.
This is horrible.
One of the great newspaper cartoonists of
all time and maybe the
best hand-drawn animator
in the era before Disney
became famous the second time.
Not his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and not
his Alice in Wonderland stories.
I guess it was around the time of the
Alice in Wonderland
stories, this guy whose name
was Little Nemo in Slumberland.
If you could look that up, it's terrible
that I can't think of his name.
Jackie doesn't have her
look up in the future.
Sorry, Jackie.
Somebody's recording
the future of itself.
No good reason at all.
Sorry about that.
I should recall his name, but he was the
first person who did
multilayered animation
on hand-drawn paper.
So if you look at his cartoon of Gertie
the Dinosaur, he is
live on stage in front of
an audience doing what's essentially
supposed to be a chalk
talk and he's showing drawings
of...
Windsor McKay.
Windsor McKay, thank you.
And so he's doing drawings of a dinosaur
in a prehistoric swamp
and then the dinosaur
looks up and looks out at the audience
and looks down at him
and eats from his hand
so he can throw it a watermelon or
something and it catches the watermelon.
So this was, I would
say, the beginning of 2.5D.
That's great.
You just said a dinosaur in that
interaction and that reminded me of
Jurassic Park at the
start with John Hammond.
Do you think that was purposeful?
Absolutely, 100%.
Mr. DNA.
Mr. DNA, yeah.
Yeah. A lot of what they did in the first
Jurassic Park movie was
tribute to Windsor McKay.
Some of it to other people but a lot of
it was Windsor McKay.
One of my favorite scenes from that first
movie is the one, they're galloping right
towards us.
Oh yeah.
Right.
You get all of those
two-legged dinosaurs.
Gallimimus.
Yes.
And one of them trips over the tree.
Do you know the story of that?
I've heard it once
but it's, you remind me.
So they got the animators, they took the
animators off to
Africa and let them see wild
animals running around in that.
Then they had them in the back lot with
their arms strapped
close to their chests running
around as though they were dinosaurs.
And they had them jumping over hurdles
and one of them tripped
and fell down while all
the others were running.
And so they liked the look so
much they put it in the film.
They did that with The Hobbit as well.
You know the original
cartoon story of The Hobbit?
The actor playing Aragon tripped when
they were captured,
doing the capture and then
they kept it.
He tripped over the
sword or something didn't he?
And then they kept it in because it just
added a little bit of realism to it.
Yeah that was Ralph Bakshi's cartoon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So well done.
Yeah.
Drown over the rotoscoped.
Yeah.
That was the same right?
Great scene in an interview with him from
decades ago where he
was trying to explain
to the Italian crew on set that yeah yeah
they're wearing
medieval costumes but it's
okay that a jet is flying overhead and
it's okay that you can
see the telephone wires
because it's going to be rotoscoped.
And he couldn't get them to understand.
They kept calling cut and wanting to wait
while other stuff was happening.
And finally he said, "Fellini."
And they oh okay Fellini okay.
You left it in line?
Oh Fellini was a
semi-surrealist filmmaker.
Oh okay.
This film is here.
Fidrico Fellini.
So it's just like yeah
yeah this is just abstract.
Yeah.
You know it's art above our heads.
And then all the crew
went oh Fellini Fellini okay.
Yeah so you can have medieval people with
telephone wires in the back.
That reminded me of another I just keep
interjecting of why
Jurassic Park was great.
One of the others of the team the ILM CG
team I should really remember names but.
It's been this long since
I've talked about it properly.
They basically so in VFX when my mistake
I made with my film.
It's a lot easier if
you don't move the camera.
It's really easy.
You see just a layer of things over the
top of each other and then you're good.
When the camera moves you've got to do a
whole process called
match moving which can be
difficult especially depending on what
era you're doing this.
There are a lot of tools now that make it
a lot easier but
Jurassic Park they initially
suggested that.
It's like any CG scenes keep the camera
fixed and Spielberg
was immediately like no.
If you're telling me I can't move the
camera you can forget it.
I'm not.
I'm not.
We're not we're not doing CG.
So that was when they basically had to
come up with the
technology for match moving.
They had to there and then come up with
all the trigonometry
required to translate the
camera the camera's position in space so
that you could get all the CG elements to
match up.
That seems specifically with the
galleymime that's running
along you can see the little
golf balls they get.
Well tennis balls they pop on the ground
at different points so
you know when where and
when they are.
But do you feel also like if you look at
the original Jurassic
Park film versus Jurassic
World.
The original Jurassic Park from the sets
was so huge that they
I don't know what it is
about the new films but especially when
they've got like spoiler
alert but the pterodactyls
attacking all the people in the village.
It just all looked fake to me whereas the
scene with the
Tyrannosaur and you know Dr.
Grant holding the flare it just felt so
real but it's because
that set was so vast that
they were actually shooting something
that wasn't all blue
screen or green screen.
I have a few theories.
These will be my explanation.
One there's just storytelling.
The pacing up to that moment is some of
the best editing
you'll ever see in a film.
The T-Rex just doesn't appear.
There is about four minutes of suspense
until it appears and it's
building up and building
up and building up.
The other thing that completely draws you
into that scene is the rain.
And it's not just it's raining.
You hear and feel the rain on those cars.
You feel like you're in those cars
because you can feel the
rain above you and dripping
down on the sides.
And if I can add to
that if you don't mind.
We've all been there.
We've all been in a car in a rain and we
automatically have a
visceral reaction to the idea that
I don't want to get out of the car.
I really don't want to please get out of
the car and that just
helps set that tone.
You combine that with like you were
saying that shaking of the water.
Yeah.
Well I think that that effect was
actually accidental.
They discovered the thing with the water.
It was it was completely
accidental than discovering that.
But what a pivot.
It wasn't.
It wasn't accidental.
No they were trying to get it to work for
ages and it just
wouldn't look right until
they figured out if you put a guitar
underneath and struck a string.
It did it perfectly.
That's what it was.
Right.
But they were trying to bang it for ages
and just would be weird.
Everything else would shake.
But if you just plucked the guitar string
underneath it just vibrated it.
That suspense with that glass of water.
Yeah.
So that was a trope for ages.
Just remember being a kid we would like
bang a table and be
like oh dear X is coming.
You and me and
everybody else did that for you.
The Simpsons.
How many times did they use that
trembling of the glass of water?
Well in adverse we're using it for ages
as well weren't they?
Yeah.
So it got immediately into the collective
unconscious as this
is how you know danger
is coming.
It was exactly like
the theme music to Jaws.
Yeah.
Right.
Half an hour after the film
is released everybody knows it.
And then as a kid whenever you're in the
sea that's almost like.
Other films still if I'm remembering
correctly I'm pretty sure
maybe it's Independence Day
before the ships are coming over you see
things shaking and people
looking at the things shaking
too.
Seeing the they're not direct threat but
the what the threat is affecting.
Yeah the pending threat.
I think you're right with the
storytelling element and
the buildup of suspense which
you don't really have much of anymore.
So that's so yeah so
that that's part of it.
So it's it's if you're making a moment it
has to be a moment and you've got to have
quiet before the light.
Narratively it has that as a whole layer
but also has a design as well.
Yeah.
Because if you if you look at the levels
of that scene it's
just it's just little bits
here and there a little bit here and
there like goats leg on
the roof like there's these
moments like something won't feel loud
unless you have a lot of quiet before it.
But it's not in with Jurassic Park 3
didn't they with the the
pterodactyl enclosure where
they're walking through them it's just
fog and then they
suddenly feel something land
on it.
Yeah yeah.
It's closer closer but
yeah that's that's it.
It's pacing it's it's I think a lot of
new films that just
tried to be a thrill light
ride too much.
Yeah I think that's that's a very good
point because they are
often designed as thrill
rats.
Yeah.
Not not just a film that's like a thrill
ride but this Disney is
going to make a thrill
ride of this.
That's why they put the scene in the
movie that's why they
spent the money on developing
it so that people will pay
to go on the thrill ride.
Yeah.
As opposed to just a
bit of good storytelling.
We can call it back to that scene from
the first Alien film
that you guys were talking
about earlier.
He survived.
It was scary there was a face hugger
nobody knew what he meant
nobody knew what was going
on but it it fell off.
He's okay.
Yeah.
And we can all have dinner.
Yeah.
And we can laugh at the
table and they've set the tone.
We know this scene we've all been in this
scene in a hundred movies.
We know he's holy fuck we
did not expect that right.
All of a sudden he's contorting and it's
horrible and it's terrible.
And then like you were saying practical
effect the other cast
members suddenly have crap
all over their faces.
Yeah.
Right.
And absolute abject horror.
They built that moment.
They built that moment so
carefully with a level of emotion.
Yeah.
Similar to the level of sound
that you were talking about.
And it's a pretty simple easy theory.
It's so easy to get caught up and forget
the basics but it's
essentially if something's
not landing you haven't earned it enough
is what we say which is
you've show it to other
people if they're if they're just feeling
a bit about something
you've got to earn it
more.
So then yes you have to spend more time
with suspense build up or
you've got to plant little
seeds about what's going to happen
beforehand so that people
in the audience who are a bit
more switched on and engaged feel a bit
of joy like oh oh oh
it all makes sense now.
So yeah you've got to earn those moments
and you can't you
can't just start with them.
There's so many films now that just start
with an action piece.
This was one of my favorite.
I'm sorry.
No no I was just going to say there's so
many films that start
with an action piece now
just like I don't care.
I don't know who these people are.
I'm not invested.
Okay it's flashy and cool.
You feel like you have to thrill me and
introduce me to your world
but I don't care about anything
happening here.
Yeah I think a big reason for that is the
way films are marketed.
Films are almost always now
targeted at a young audience.
Research in Hollywood a couple of decades
ago showed that 15 year
olds really want to know
how things turn out before they see them
so that they can feel
that they're in the know.
So you have to do advertising that shows
how every important scene turns out.
That becomes the advertising standard.
They make sure that that footage is given
to the totally
independent team that makes
the trailers for the film and the
advertisements for the film
and all of a sudden every film
is a series of exciting moments with
easily recognizable
resolutions so that you can
cut these resolution moments together.
It's marketed for people who don't
understand that there
should be a story leading up to
these things and that
there would be greater impact.
The other issue you've got is that a lot
of films nowadays are
telling the same story
so Star Wars we all
know that universe already.
Alien we know that universe already
Jurassic Park you know that
there's a lack of original
stories and I think that's a big issue as
well is because you
go into the cinema now
and you watch Alien Romulus but you know
what's going to happen.
You know that the facehuggers are going
to escape and they're
going to impregnate the
people with the chestbursters and then
they're going to turn into a xenomorph.
But there is a complete lack
of original storytelling now.
I think it was Tarantino was saying
something vaguely along
the lines of that Hollywood
goes through cycles like this where
established IP is always
safe so it's where all the money
goes until it doesn't work anymore.
So Marvel it's stopping working, Star
Wars it stops working.
People just get franchise fatigue and
don't want to see another
Planet of the Apes films.
Sometimes they take the wrong lesson from
it and try and reboot the franchise again
but the correct lesson is give new
filmmakers with new worlds
and stories the opportunity.
That's the correct
thing to do in these cycles.
And you see it in certain waves so like
the late 90s early
2000s there was a wave of it
where you have the Matrix come along.
You have like all these different
franchises just pop up and
appear and it feels like yes
we're not getting that as much right now.
I was about to say there's almost some
and every time I was
about to try and think of
one note so it's literally a product or
an established character
that they're just trying
to bring into like there
was pixels or there's Barbie.
Barbie was interesting and good but it's
not a new original concept.
Well Prometheus and Alien Covenant were
both supposed to be
original films in the same
universe but completely different.
So it was set in the Alien universe but
it wasn't supposed to be
a story about the aliens
and the engineers just so happened to
look like the original
dead character they find
in the first film.
Yeah the space truck.
Yeah but they weren't supposed to be the
same story which is why
the creature comes out
the back instead of the chest and so on.
But everybody gave them hate because they
were like oh this is nothing like Alien.
But Ridley always says it was never
intended to be alien it was
supposed to be a completely
different story.
And that comes down
to the marketing again.
That should have been the clear message
before anyone saw the film
they should have understood
that if you wanted to work.
One of the reasons I love the fact that
John Byrne was called out
by a lot of great writers
and artists have touched Wolverine in the
past and have done
some beautiful work with
the character.
John Byrne was someone who famously at
the height of his fame was
given a chance to reinvent
most of the big American comic books.
So when they decided to totally reboot
Superman for the first
time he's the one who did the
reboot and he did a very successful
reboot of the character.
Changed a whole bunch of facets took from
all throughout the
previous 70 years or 50
years of the characters existence and
created a really cool new
mythos that could be Superman
going forward from there.
Man of Steel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought that was incredible that film.
Yeah.
Oh no I mean the comic book series.
Oh sorry.
Some of that was based on a lot of that
came from other comics
that were written and drawn
a decade later.
But no just the idea that Luthor instead
of being a mad
scientist would be a corporate
billionaire that comes from there and a
whole bunch of other stuff.
Being Lois Lane as an intrepid reporter
again instead of just a
gushing fangirl of incredible
lack of vision.
And a whole lot of other things.
His mother and father lived to adulthood
instead of dying when he was a kid.
Anyway lots and lots of stuff.
He did the same thing
with the Fantastic Four.
He did the same thing with Wolverine.
He took these characters
and just added a depth.
So when the task was just make the
character exciting again
he did it by adding depth to
them and not saying hey we'll make him 20
years old again and that'll be cool.
Let's make a flashier
suit and that'll be cool.
So there's a lovely scene in one of the
X-Men comics from the
first or second year that
Wolverine was in them.
They knew X-Men.
Where they've landed somewhere on Earth
after being in space.
And they don't know where they are.
And then Wolverine says we're in Japan.
They're like what?
And he's picked up a newspaper and he's
reading a Japanese newspaper.
And no one in the world had any idea that
Wolverine might have a history in Japan.
And John Byrne is the
co-creator of these stories.
Just drew it without talking to the
writer about how it would happen.
Chris Claremont was writing the scripts.
They were co-plotting.
According to Byrne most of the plotting
was by him and Claremont
would write the scripts
afterwards but
Claremont disagreed with that.
Anyway it just added this fantastic depth
that 30, 40 years of
other writers have built
on since then.
With like in the X-Men movie where he
goes to Japan and now we
have an explanation for
why he was in Japan and
what was going on there.
Very different from
the one Byrne intended.
But still built on that idea.
Anyway I think that's part of it.
If you are going to keep an IP going
because your corporate
overlords refuse to let the
IP die whether it's Superman
or Wolverine or Mickey Mouse.
Do something to it that makes it richer.
Not just more visually exciting for what
this generation thinks
is visually exciting.
Add some dimensions to it.
That's one of the fun dimensions that
they've been playing
around with Deadpool where he
100% wants to die all the time and he
hates it but he can't.
To the point where he figures out in one
short comic book series
that all he needs to do
is kill his fans because the only reason
he exists is his fans won't let him die.
So while you're reading this one you see
him walking into a house.
He's like slowly figuring out like I can
never die what can I do
blah blah blah and you see
him breaking into a house and then the
last pain is just
someone reading that comic part
and the company in his head.
Nice.
Nice, nice.
Right?
That I'm advocating that anyone should go
out and murder Deadpool fans.
That is not a good idea.
That's ultimately it is the only way
things can die like that
is if people stop caring
and making a fuss and
paying to go see it.
That's the other part.
That's the easiest way to make a comic
book hero die is don't
go and watch their films.
Don't buy their comic books.
That's the only way.
I guess there are original films still
coming because while we
were talking about that I
was like what's the most original film I
saw recently that I
really enjoyed and everything
everywhere all at once was
one that popped out to me.
What a great film.
And it's its own IP and its own thing but
it's a commentary on
films as much as it is
a great film.
Did you see it?
I don't see it.
No, please go see it.
Fantastic.
A lot of fun
practical things in there too.
Their whole special effects team was five
guys and they were
using After Effects and
other things.
It was literally a team of five.
So you see there's a really cool effect
where she's bouncing
around universes and she kind
of bursts back.
The way they did it was so simple and it
looks more convincing
than half of the crazy stuff
you'll see in a comic book hero film.
Because in the comic book hero
films they have all the tools.
So the standard
pipeline is Bootup Houdini.
Houdini is a VFX software that's very
complicated and can do a lot of
simulations and particles
and all sorts of other things.
But they'll do an R or D thing where
they'll make these
scripts and well not scripts, I
forget what they're called in Houdini but
you can make these
custom things that will
work.
And they call this whole pipeline of
where they're going to
make these effects and blah
blah blah blah and do all this.
So that okay what's the standard process?
Get them in the green room.
Get the lighting, do
all this, record that.
Bring it in, put it through all the post
pipeline and you would
have some sort of weird
effect with lots of particles and
interesting energy whatever.
But it kind of just
feels flat and interesting.
Whereas in everything I remember was how
did they tackle that?
The director, I think it was literally
one of the directors
figured out with their camera
that they could do a low exposure video.
So you could expose it for a second, I
don't know, say two
seconds is one exposure and
he just walked around the
city with this recording.
So we'd take these low exposure shots and
he just kept walking,
kept walking, kept walking,
kept walking, kept walking.
So they've got this video plate where
there's this kind of long
motion blur of going through
space.
And it looks really cool.
And then okay how do we
composite that onto the actress?
I forget her name.
They got a big TV and two other big TVs
next to her because TVs
emit light and especially
new big new ones and
they just shot it real.
So they put the video behind her and made
her go like this and
it looks so convincing.
It's because they also got
the TVs at the side as well.
So it was like a very cheap volume.
So it was like a cheap volume.
Volumes are these big new crazy ones that
Disney have with the domes
that project all the lights.
You can do it if you just get TVs at the
side as well and it works.
But they had so much like I was watching
a couple of videos and
doing other effects and
it was just that problem solving as you
were saying earlier.
Just when you sometimes when you have a
very expensive smart
useful tool you think you
have to go to that very expensive smart
useful tool when
sometimes a hammer would have done
it.
Yeah.
Thank you Mr. Maslow.
Yeah exactly.
Can you recall the name of the directors?
There's something brothers.
It's just a man's name but it's the and
then a man's name with an S at the end.
It's like Daniel Brothers.
The Daniels.
I think it's Daniels.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Check that.
Anybody who's listening to this please I
won't describe it at all
but go find the music video
they made before they made that film.
I think they only made one and if you
enjoyed that film you
will enjoy that music video.
If you are under legal age do not do that
or listen to this podcast.
I have to look that one up.
I've not seen it.
But yeah that's bringing it comes back to
why are you making a
film in the first place
as well.
If you're just I guess a lot of people
are in this industry
where it is their job then
you have people like me who have another
job but still do all this for the love of
it and even have it you know I'll be
doing it either way.
For now.
Yeah.
You'll get to a point
where you'll do it full time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah we'll get there.
Will okay let's end on one story.
Yeah because you've got
about 20 minutes or so.
Will talk to us how you got
into this in the first place.
So where do I start anywhere you want.
So I've always loved film you know
growing up gremlins used
to terrify me but I loved
it and films like the Dark Crystal
Labyrinth and so on you
know the magic behind creating
these worlds always fascinated me.
But being quite technologically minded I
ended up going into IT
full time as an IT consultant
and I just got to a point where I didn't
feel like I was making
much of a difference working
in IT because you never got to see the
end product because I was
working for big insurance
companies and big big companies where
you'd be building a
solution for them but it would
be for their behind the scenes team to
work facilitating
customers and stuff like that.
So I never really felt like I was
contributing much in that sense.
So always having a love of Halloween as
well I kind of started
up the shop because I used
to buy prosthetics but you couldn't
really sell them any you
couldn't find them anywhere
sorry so that's how it kind of started
but then through a very
fortunate series of events
I ended up going to New Zealand in 2020
for a holiday to visit
my uncle and I got stuck
due to Covid because I think a week after
I got there Covid shut the world down New
Zealand shut the borders you couldn't
leave you couldn't come in
couldn't go out and after
about a year of being there I managed to
get a job at a workshop
working on the Rings of
Power.
For me it was an absolute dream you know
walking into that space
where so much story telling
has happened was a dream you know rows of
weapons down the walls
and the guns from district
nine and everything else you know so much
magic happening there and getting to work
on a Lord of the Rings universe series
for me was just I felt
like that was a dream come
true.
So after going to New Zealand working on
the first season and
then coming back that kind
of cemented my decision to step away from
IT in 2019 and do this
full time it was like
this is what I want to do I want to bring
you know I want to
make magic and I want to
watch people's reactions seeing the work
that I do and not just
from a disgust of working
on a horror film but just the magic of
creating creatures and
creating these worlds that people
fall in love with for me was everything
and it still happens
now you know I still watch
films like or even series like the Dark
Crystal series on Netflix
I loved it absolutely loved
it and it's such a shame they didn't do a
second season but I've
watched that countless
times and I still will continue to watch
it because I love the
the amount of work that
some of my colleagues in the industry put
into that and the
passion that they have for
that universe just shows throughout the
whole thing in my
opinion so yeah for me it was
all about making a difference and I feel
doing this really does make a difference.
Yeah that's that's great that's beautiful
that's yeah purpose is always a big thing
that helps drive people in that makes a
lot of sense not seeing.
And I get to make really cool stuff.
Yeah that's a big part of it if you put
all this time and
energy ever into something in
your life you want to be able to see.
Well there's a really famous saying if
you do what you love you
never work a day in your
life I feel like that now you know I get
to make lots of crazy
things and a lot of people
don't think it is a proper job but what
do you define as a proper
job do you define working
behind a desk day in day out seven days a
week as a proper job just because there's
a stable income that doesn't mean it's a
proper job if you're doing
something you love I think
that gives you purpose yeah and I think
that's what a lot of
people lack in our world is
purpose 100% and watching film gives a
lot of people purpose
because it helps bring out
things in their imagination so you know I
feel like my purpose
is to help people live
the magic in the world and see the
wonders of things you
know like for example Avatar
everybody came out of that theater after
watching Avatar looking
at our planet and going oh
my god what are we doing to the world and
that was what James Cameron intended with
that film was to say look at the synergy
that this species have
with their planet and look
at what we don't have with ours yeah that
that's that is the power
of films to take a simple
concept like hey we've completely lost
touch with this whole experience of
nature and industrializing
and then hyper stylize that as much as
you can that's a power of tools and
narratives yeah take
a simple concept or feeling like that and
then hyper stimulus make
it over the top beautiful
different planet and so you can really
really feel the obvious deep emotional
connection behind it
a caricature a caricature that's the
proper phrasing exactly
yeah that makes a lot of sense
to me unfortunately I think it's
unfortunate that I'm not working a proper
office job because I think
if I was doing an office job with this
like an idea would be a
much easier for me to jump but
the problem is I actually do enjoy
teaching for all the same reasons that
you tell me which is I
I do have an output product because I
take a bunch of people into the start of
my course who have no
skills and then at the end of them I help
them make a project and I
see all their projects I
grade all their projects and it's always
producing something for that
it's not me producing it but
it's I've helped them make something so I
see I see the growth that
purpose is there which is
annoying because it drives me it would
have maybe were driving
much more if I was just doing
something else well I'm glad you're doing
it and I'm sure there's a
lot of students who are glad to
yeah yeah all right okay so let John do
you want to finish on
anything else anything to add
very good that's the only moment of
silence I will ever give
this podcast yeah so so I think
that's a good place to end on what is the
magic we say moving magic
what is a magic and it's yeah
it's a simple act of creation and being
able to communicate
thoughts feelings and stories and
the hyper stimuli is characterized way in
order to inspire not just
to do not just to do it for
the sake of doing it on just because we
can do it but because it can have an
impact on people and
yeah and we've just solved the answer of
all of the bad VFX and bad
things we're talking about in
film that's that's probably the path the
problem is people making
decisions that aren't at the heart
of it it's probably where things go wrong
100% 100% glad we solved that now
everyone can get on and
only make good stuff yes and studio execs
of you were watching this
podcast take note do it for the
love do it for the message don't do it
for the profit or do it for
the profit based on the love
and the message yeah you can have all of
them just don't make the
profit the only motivator yeah
yeah all right everybody if you've
listened this far as always thank you
very much for listening
we hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you
next time thanks well
thank you thanks well thanks
thanks thanks Jackie thanks Jackie
Salk Talk is a production from the Robert
Gardner University School
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