I LOVE when they look at the way things were done in the old days and are amazed/impressed/confused. As someone that does Practical stuff that makes me SO happy.
Yeah. And I think, instinctively, it makes sense that a moving rock face would have very jerky, blocky movement. With the light in the scene running at 24fps, the whole scene becomes very convincing.
I love it when you guys geek out over old school effects and talk about how they were done. I think what we can do with computers nowadays is truly magic, but what they did back then with clay and mirrors and other trickery was so clever. It's amazing what special effects have been able to do for movies for over a century and how it has evolved. I don't think I could ever get tired of learning about this stuff with you guys. Thank you.
The old CG (Clay Graphics) has always blown my mind, imagine what people must have thought when they first saw something like that, I don't think we'll ever experience that kind of thing nowadays.
I remember watching Jurassic Park in the theatres and the first shot of the sauropod was really mind blowing, it was amazing. It's obviously cg but the sensation would be the same, nothing like that had been seen before
Unpopular opinion: While I appreciate Ray Harryhausen's legendary artistic skill, this type of CG (Clay Graphics) just looks so jerky to me that it takes me out of the scene.
Wallace and Gromit is the nearest you get to it these days, although there is no interaction with live actors. In fact there is a new one coming out this Xmas called Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
@@hggdgdgfgg He basically realised he can do it on his own, they're still friends. Clint has created a really cool 3D community over at his channel Pwnisher
What I find impressive about Harryhausen that's never mentioned is the fact that the stop-motion puppets are standing on _something,_ but it blends into the live-action plate so well that it's hard to see. If it were a composite, one could fiddle with the grading until they matched, but this was done in camera.
The fact that people genuinely believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is testament to how great it is (also how stupid people are, but I won’t go there).
The stop motion puppets where shot in front of of a screen projecting the frame of the film , the actors are usually standing on something completely different, to what you see on screen .
The projected images were exposed separately from the animated model elements; Harryhausen would project the film onto a screen behind his models and position them to line up, then he would make two exposures on each frame, one with the models lit and the projector off and then another with the models in silhouette with the projector on, this allowed for control over the exposure levels so that the lights on the models did not wash out the projected images and the light from the projected images blended with the edges of the models to create seamless double-exposed in-camera composites.
I know one of the team that did the "fingers-through-the-head" scene. As soon as I got out of the theatre, I messaged him and told him of horrifically creeped out I was during that scene. He did great.
I introduced them. First I met Denis on a trip to Italy. It was a particular sad trip because my wife left me and we had to go together. So one day I was sipping sad Negronis on the Amalfi coast and a guy came up to me asking how I got such fantastic and phat calves, this guy was Denis. I told him how my ex wife and I bonded because she loved my calves. After that story we became the best of friends, and one might say, almost lovers. When it was time to fly back we coincidentally took the same flights home and realized we lived in the same neighborhood. So the following week I invited him and other friend to dinner. My other friend was the VFX guy that made this effect. Denis and Lex (the VFX guy) became friends after also bonding over my calves. And yeah, that's the story.@@bennettphotography08
@ We live in the same city and he has a table at an art festival. He was there the next year again, and the next and we just got to know each other, only meeting once a year. Then we connected on Twitter and kept in touch with all things nerdy. We've both dropped Twitter now, so hopefully I'll bump into him again soon. He's just a nice guy, and my kids and I love his personal art projects.
3:34 My late father was a stop motion animator and a regular faux pas in the 16mm Bolex days (When the eye piece was on the side of the camera rather than through the lens) was spending all day animating frame-by-frame, before realising they had left the lens cap on all day.
@@tihomirvrbanec9537 Not really, you had to put the lens cap on whenever you stepped away from the camera (Toilet/food/break/admin) to prevent light leaks, so was done several times a day with no monitor to look at and only one person operating the camera and animating so no second pair of eyes.
You'll want to get a little further into Harryhausen's Dynamation setups. Note that he doesn't just have his puppets in front of a rear-projected plate, but that the FOREGROUND is also part of the same plate, exposed separately, so it looks like the puppets are standing within the space of the original shot. You can see a slight realignment in one of the dinosaur-attack shots just after 18:51.
I’m a digital animator. A not very good digital animator. I have more tools and tips and tricks and techniques to help me work now than any animator in history and I still suck. The people that do stop motion, and in particular old stop motion and in particular old stop claymation have my undying and ultimate respect. They are the absolute GOATS in the animation world along with the old original 2D masters. Respect.
You guys should do a whole episode on Harryhausen. 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad' is my favorite. Fight with the 6-armed Kali statue is so awesome. Plus, Caroline Munroe (better known as Stella in 'Star Crash') is absolutely beautiful.
Oh man 7th Voyage and Golden Voyage are two amazing Harryhausen movies. The Cyclops and dragon fight in 7th Voyage was awesome, and yes the six-armed Kali statue was phenomenal looking! But my all-time favorite is the Valley of Gwangi. I remember watching that for the first time as a lil tyke in late 70's and just loved Dinosaurs immediately!
@@ItsFreakinHarding. - Ray did so many amazing f/x during his career, CC could do a 1+ hour episode on him and just scratch the surface. Even if they only focused on his 3 Sinbad films, there’s plenty of ground to cover.
The guy in the robot in Return to Oz was a presenter from a famous UK children's TV show, Blue Peter. You should be able to find a clip from him explaining it. Pretty sure he was walking backwards so that the legs kicked up properly.
@@isaackim7675 They did Chicken run too, I guess. Their style of stop motion is so accessible, still it feels like a fairy tale or something from a comic book you read ages ago.
Ray Harryhausen is just the absolute GOAT for creature effects. I'd hate to think what things were like if he hadn't done the films he did. He inspired so many of the great FX studios.
Growing up, Will Vinton, one of the creators/pioneers of claymation was my sisters best friends dad. His original claymation projects from when he was in college can be found on TH-cam, he founded Will Vinton Studios (now known as Liaka studios) makers of Coraline)) before it was bought by Phil Knight of Nike. Anyways, I highly recommend looking into his Closed Mondays, one of his early projects. Really freaking cool dude RIP Will
My layman guess for how they would've done the rock-face claymation animation, would be they had a pre-made hand-drawn animation they would project onto the clay to see how it should look like, and adjusted the clay accordingly, turning off the reference to record each frame.
@@ActionMan153 I don't think it was an optical illusion; would probably be harder to make it look good with an optical illusion than actually doing it for real.
@@tiagotiagot no offense but where did you get they said optical illusion? Their message hasn't been edited either as far as I can tell. Relief/carving isn't optical but practical.
@@GalactusTheDestroyer Felt like there could've been a misunderstanding since I never said anything about it being not 3d and they still felt the need to specify it was; so I decided to make clear I did not expect the depth to be illusory.
Whenever I see you guys talk about old time effects my brain literally hurts coz the amount of effort it took for those guys to achieve a particular shot is incomprehensible to the modern mind
SO glad you guys did some more of Harryhausen’s work. _One Million Years B.C._ is such amazing attention to detail, especially regarding the integration with the plate photography. I watched it all the time as a kid and it holds up amazingly well looking back at it now.
3:36 This Halloween I animated a Lego Stopmotion Film, based on Scream ("STOP SCREAMING" on TH-cam). In one shot there is a girl walking through the frame and behind her is a TV pictures, for which i used a Phone as a screen. I was so focused on the walking animation, that I didn't notice, that the Phone turned off, halfway in the shot, so I had to some how fix it in post😅 That was so frustating
For guys that know so much about effects, it's always fun when you don't know how things used to be done. (I feel so old!) Just FYI, Claymation is not a generic term for stop motion animation. Claymation (animating clay figures) was popularized by Art Clokey (Gumby and Pokey), Will Vinton (the Nome King in Return To OZ, TV commercials for The California Raisins), and Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit). Harryhausen used latex foam puppets on metal armatures to animate, not clay. His filming process was called Dynamation.
Man, I loved those California Raisin commercials/movie. Really fun stop motion with great VA. The California Raisins movie/shorts are on YT I'm pretty sure. Worth a watch if you've never seen them and are interested in stop motion/claymation etc.
Niko pointed out the one thing that I hated about Deadpool & Wolverine: the guns on the high ground firing down into a pit and hitting nothing. It's so stupid.
In the Cinefex article on RETURN TO OZ, there's a great bit where they talk about developing the look of the Nome animation. (paraphrasing) "We studied how to make the characters look like rock and determined that one of the main features of rock is that it doesn't move..."
The actual quote from Vinton, because I'm obsessive this way: "One of the first things we dealt with all along was, 'What is the nature of rockiness?' -- and one of the primary answers was that rock doesn't move. Yet the whole thing was to get that rock to move. The idea was that the Nomes were in this kind of plasma of rock, a sea of rock."
I loved the Deadpool breakdown and the Return to Oz stuff….but you really killed it with the Master - Clay Grafix genius Ray Harryhausen. 👏🏻👏🏻 my first experience of the masters work was OG Clash of the Titans and you still don’t see anything more compelling today than a stop-motion Medusa. Thanks, fam.
17:14 I don't think it is said enough but THANK YOU to all the artists who create these movies. I cannot imagine the amount of hours put in and I hope the support from Marvel and Disney has gotten better. Once again THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU.
18:19 The Harryhausen stuff has issues with scaling, total genius though. A total joy to watch as a child. Thank you so very much for all the fond memories Mr. Harryhausen. R.I.P.
I went and watched Deadpool in the theaters when it came out and when i watched the scene of her hands going through his face, I immediately thought about how i was excited to see when you guys cover it!
Back in uni, I did some animation work with stop motion, but not clay. We used cardboard cutouts, sand, etc. We all joked about sneezing all sending the whole thing flying off. What no one accounted for was when someone sneezes, their body jerks around - a lot... And back then, we didn't have an easy way to previz, so... yeah...
5:50 If I recall correctly the contortionist in the suit is actually walking backwards and viewing everything upside down since their head is sitting between their legs
Yes, they determined that the walk looked bouncier in reverse. I believe he used a video monitor for reference and couldn't actually see out of the rig at all.
The level of detail on these guys is unreal-Sam's practically photorealistic at this point. I mean, if you squint, you can almost see the rendering budget in his pores. And don’t even get me started on Nikos’ hair-that fidelity.
the guy in the robot suit for "return to oz" was michael sunden. he was a presenter on a childrens tv show in the uk (blue peter) for a while, before his "racey" past caught up with him
I came here to say just that. I'm not sure about his 'racey' past as Richard Bacon was fired for the same reasons. I remember the guy in the robot suit was a short-lived Blue Peter presenter that came onboard after a segment discussing the film. Apparently, he walked backwards in the suit to give the robot that side to side waddle.
Harryhausen visited us at Pixar and told how crazy making it was when he was animating Medusa, keeping track of all of those serpent figures, and someone would knock on the door. He'd come back and try to remember where he was.
After seeing that excellent disembodied head work in Return to Oz, I have an example of a VFX _mistake_ with a disembodied head for y'all to check out. The movie is Ice Pirates. (Starring Robert Urich, Angelica Huston, and John Matuszak.) About 1/3 of the way through, the main characters go to visit a character with a detachable head, played by Bruce Vilanch. They knock his head off, and when it lands and he starts to talk to them some more, you can see the actor's shoulder sticking out from under the masking. On the flip side, I think you might enjoy the "time-dilation fight" at the end of the movie--it's obvious how it was done, but they're also obviously being silly & having a lot of fun doing so.
3:31 - Drawings for each frame basically. Then Polaroid photos of each frame shot and then they work off a bunch of Polaroids as their previous frame reference. The only other option would be to pre sculpt hundreds of face shots and swap them in one at a time.
Exactly my thought, with the shooting guys in the battle, when I watched the movie today. Had the same kind of thought in the first Suicide Squad, when they rained down bullets on the cast from every level of the building.
The projected light onto the clay might be a really big clue as to how they did it. If you asked me to animate something like that, I would do the whole thing on paper first, every frame, so you can flipbook it and make adjustments on the fly until it looks good. Then you transfer those drawings onto cels, slap those cels on a projector, shine the projector on the clay and use it as a blueprint to sculpt. If the cool lighting was planned to be there from the start, you could even set up the projector for that from the get go. Every other slide alternates between cel and effects lighting. Sculpt, shoot, sculpt, shoot.
Might've been cheaper to have a second projector and roll of film than intercalate the animated reference frames with the fire light animation, I imagine....
@@tiagotiagot That's most likely the simplest solution, yeah. I don't know anything about projectors, so I figured maybe they had some fancy tech back then that could switch between two sources on the fly or whatnot, but I think I'm imagining a slide projector in that scenario and you probably wouldn't use one of those for hundreds of frames of animation! Or maybe you would, I have absolutely no idea.
To animate on 1's is an time consuming, hours of work just for seconds of video However it looks awesome even 50 years later and that is why you put in the hard work.
For anyone wondering.. the garbage behind them was all from Wrens desk.. for years he's been sneaking into the office after hours and eating up all the food like some deranged gremlin.. sam put CCTV up in the office space to identify what or who has been eating all the food.. once Wren was outed Sam confronted him about it.. Wren broke down crying insisting he's got a problem, he opened up his desk drawers and a mountain of trash spilled out.. Sam just slowly nodded in shock and awe and instructed him to clean it up..
Either you wrote this like a fanfic but it's real, or this shit's made up. How big is his desk that he'd have *that* much garbage in it? Not to mention Sam "nodding in shock and awe."
The more natural obstacles there is - the more amazing is the result. Even modern stopmotion amazes me, as a digital (wannabe) animator - I just can't fathom how they are able to animate EVERYTHING AT ONCE, straight forward, without adjustments or passes!
This is definitely my favorite react video! Love how you guys are so comedic and sociable even though we aren't there! Love it so much you guys! Thanks for the reactions and your passion for genuine creativity making magic happen!
I‘m having a bad time with love right now. I just opened my phone and hoped to see a notification from her. But instead i saw the notification for this video and i thought to myself: At least i have that. Thank you guys for making me happy every week. And thank you more for getting that job done even now ❤
Lyle Conway, creator of Tik Tok said in an interview, "Michael was about five five and Tik Tok's about four four. So Michael had to bend with his head between his legs, bolted in, and he did the actual walking around in the thing--BACKWARDS. Sometimes, in the morning, he wouldn't be able to fit, so it was just a matter of forcing him in. Then everything loosened up, and his body settled into it. When you took the suit off of him, this rush of hot air hit you and there were pools of sweat at the bottom of the thing."
Back in the 80s, I produced a lot of plasticine stop frame initially on 8mm film where it was difficult to gauge any light changes and you had no playback until weeks later. Video made things easier as you had playback....but it also had massive issues....using an HB Umatic recorder (this was before 1" so quite high end!) It would pre roll back 30secs, drop the frame, post roll forward 30secs So every frame took at least 60secs just to record. It was rarely frame accurate and would drop black frames into the video....and....after 500 frames the tape would start to stretch and warp so stop playing! On those nights when renders are taking too long or AE keeps crashing. I smile and think how great the tools were now using really are.
At least with the DP&W big fight, they take care of at least a good number of the people with guns fairly quickly. Also, they are either super powered or supernaturally trained and can dodge/tank bullets/lasers while fighting.
You should react to "Walking with Dinosaurs" the BBC documentary series from 1999. I remember being amazed by the "realistic" Dinosaurs as a child and I think you would find a lot to talk about.
I've worked as a VFX artist on multiple stop motion films. I wouldn't say anything went horribly wrong, but certainly there have been challenges, ranging from things that were just mistakes, to things that were hard to plan for. Most of the mistakes were stuff like this: Animators forgot something in the shot, like leaving a screwdriver in the shot or something else that needed to be painted out. Animator stood in front of a light, or put down a cellphone with lights on or wore a different color shirt from one day to the next that affected the bounce light, which had to be fixed in comp. Most stuff you do on a stop motion isn't really mistakes though, its the stuff you have to deal with on all productions like Set-shifts: These happen when something changes the set over time. either were parts of the set slowly become softer and bend (like flowers) when they are under heat from lights for a day. Or moisture changes from one day to the other makes the whole wooden table the set is standing one shift and contort (often in the middle of a shot since most animators will only do 3-5 seconds per day). deflickering the shots because of natural power grid differences during the day, which makes all the lights flicker all the time. The stuff that came more out of the blue was when we animated stuff that was flying on two's and realizing it looked way to choppy, so we had to manually reanimated all the in-between frames of the character flying to ease out the animation (this is quite tricky cause you have to actually understand how its supposed to move, you can't just go 50% on all frames, cause animation curves should ease in and out etc..) Roto of anything is suddenly not as easy cause normal interpolation doesn't work on two's, but at the same time, suddenly an animator will do something on ones or three's because that makes it flow better so you can't just reduce the framerate an roto on 12 fps either. I guess the biggest curveball was on a film called "In the Forest of Hucky Bucky" where there's a Old bear whose son has been kidnapped by some farmers who are gonna sell him to the circus, and he was supposed to have a sad face, but the two heads we had for him (it was animated with a rig instead of the printed head swap like skellington) which was happy and sad, was more in the lines of happy and sociopath. So we had to manually warp his face in comp to make him look sad about his son instead of a serial killer :P
It's the same reason I am fascinated by old analogue machinery, it's amazing to see (and figure out, if you're clever enough) how it works with the limitations they had. The same can be done for modern things as well but there's a real charm to older practical stuff.
im an animation student at uni and we had to do a stop motion project in first yr and i genuinely have ptsd from that shit. basically i had 1 day to film the entire thing and my tutor who knew how to 3D print everything was away until the last week and i was filming on the friday. thursday night i got finally had everything printed and needed to not only glue it all together but paint it all and create the wires for the joints as well as use miliputt to stick the wires to the printed model parts for the characters. basically nothing went right most stuff didnt stick together and i got there friday morning with a shit show and my tutor accidentally broke the leg piece for the main character when drilling the whole to make it bigger for the wire so i ended up only using the top half of the character and angling the camera up. not only that but dragon frame (the stop motion software) wasnt working and my tutor couldnt help me till after lunch(2pm) and the stop motion room was being closed at 5pm. oh and the arm joints were so scuffed they would slowly fall down if they were raised so it was literally a race against time to take the pic for each frame before the arms would drop again and i only had 3hrs to shoot the whole thing and learn how to use after effects to edit out the thing i used to keep one of the characters (a flying pig) in the air over the main character. in the end i got it all shot in like an hr and edited by the end of the day but the amount of stress i felt almost gave me a panic attack multiple times that day and i refuse to ever touch that shit again. 3D digital animation all the way
Old shots like these are awesome because they are practical and i feel confident that i might pull it off myself - since it already clicks way before explanation
I remember reading an interview with Ray Harryhausen several decades ago where he talked about doing the hydra scene for (I think it was) Jason and the Argonauts. He'd been working on it about 4 to 6 hours, animating a creature with 7 heads and necks(!) when the phone rang. He answered the call, went back to work and could not remember where he was in the move sequence. So he had to scrap it and start all over again. When I was a kid/teenager, Ray Harryhausen was my hero. At 16 or 17 I had a Super-8 movie camera and was doing stop motion animation, inspired by him. As a note, Ray didn't do Claymation (tm). His puppets had metal armatures for skeletons and foam rubber "skins" over them. No clay involved.
I've always loved Ray Harryhausen's work, I grew up watching a couple movies he worked on, and even a couple recently and I'am always blown away by his Claymation
The performer inside the Return to Oz character Tik-Tok was (all due respect to @NotThatOneThisOne) was BOTH Michael Sundin AND Tim Rose, who also played EVERY ITERATION of Admiral Ackbar in Star Wars, but also Howard the Duck!
13:48 Deadpool makes a joke about how Wolverine was still stuck in his CGI form, that’s the point of that part, I thought you guys would catch that it was on purpose tho lol
When he says "I blew it, the only thing they'll remember is that godawful dismount" he's talking about the fact he just fell out of the bus after a sick fight scene. Why do so many people assume he's talking about the cgi lmao. He's clearly making a joke about himself screwing up, he literally says I
I love how some of this old stuff, the “trick” so often boils down to, just be a stone cold monster at whatever the thing is. That claymation stuff is insane.
If you guys like stop motion, I'm once again recommended "The Wizard of Speed and Time". The filmmaker basically did all the effects in the movie himself, which is impressive because it's a movie ABOUT special effects (and also about trying to get a movie made). Charming stuff. Also! Speaking of guys in robot suits: for something to really blow your mind, look up how they did the robots in Silent Running. And re: Sam saying "you still need a guy inside" for robots, I'd look at Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. Incredible work for basically an RC rig.
21:23 The clay arm takeover was the ultimate animated practical limb replacement flex! Try and find another movie where this exact thing happens to compare this too, I dare you.
Liking the continued love for Harryhausen. And yeah, the Casandra Nova hand-in-face sequence was astounding!!! You do truly forget that that sequence is CGI, and on top of being good, incredibly faithful to the comic (check out the X-Men comic, E is for Extinction). And the inventiveness of 80's SFX is just so innovative and weird, Return to Oz was a masterpiece.
I'm surprised they didn't point out the cgi mistake in deadpool where wolverine and deadpool jump out of the back of the bus and when deadpool stands up and puts his sword away the sword clips through wolverines left arm.
In the late 80's at high school we were doing a stop motion film project. We did several hours of work, moving the items, taking frames, then realised the old Super-8 camera appeared to work correctly even though it had no film in it.
Ray Harryhausen was a LEGEND. There's no person in the VFX industry that doesn't have the outmost respect for that man. Incredible artist and technician.
My guess for the layered stoneface: They created clips from a default state into all kinds of emotional states or mouthposures for speaking and then just "scrubbed" back and forth from the default state into the various transitions. It´s a hell lot of work but once you have all the frames photographed, you can play around and see what looks best. It´s not linearly created, it is reusing a lot of frames when basically doing pingpong loops on some sections like vinylscratching back and forth the footage and then transition back to a state which allows for transitioning into different expression.
With that stop-motion clay wall face, the only way I can think of to be able to animate that would be to first do a 2D animation to act as a blueprint, and then recreate each frame using clay. It's a lot of tedious work, but the end result is honestly brilliant. And Ray Harryhausen, well, he's just an absolute genius. Absolutely no denying that. A true master of the craft.
I LOVE when they look at the way things were done in the old days and are amazed/impressed/confused. As someone that does Practical stuff that makes me SO happy.
Oh yes, you are so special
@@OfficialTH-camAlgorithm Rude....Who hurt you?
@@OfficialTH-camAlgorithm unnecessary
@@OfficialTH-camAlgorithm Imagine being that PATHETIC over someone else's joy
@@OfficialTH-camAlgorithmwhen did he say that?
The lighting effect on the 2.5 D rock face is genius. Simple in execution, genius in conception.
Yeah. And I think, instinctively, it makes sense that a moving rock face would have very jerky, blocky movement. With the light in the scene running at 24fps, the whole scene becomes very convincing.
I love it when you guys geek out over old school effects and talk about how they were done. I think what we can do with computers nowadays is truly magic, but what they did back then with clay and mirrors and other trickery was so clever. It's amazing what special effects have been able to do for movies for over a century and how it has evolved. I don't think I could ever get tired of learning about this stuff with you guys. Thank you.
This their most low effort videos and it must've killed them knowing how popular it is
Clay, Mirrors, Trickey, and torture/suffering XD
The old CG (Clay Graphics) has always blown my mind, imagine what people must have thought when they first saw something like that, I don't think we'll ever experience that kind of thing nowadays.
I remember watching Jurassic Park in the theatres and the first shot of the sauropod was really mind blowing, it was amazing. It's obviously cg but the sensation would be the same, nothing like that had been seen before
Avatar anyone?
@@kingcosworth2643 It was only when Jurassic Park came out that I thought that they'd bested Ray Harryhausen.
Unpopular opinion: While I appreciate Ray Harryhausen's legendary artistic skill, this type of CG (Clay Graphics) just looks so jerky to me that it takes me out of the scene.
Wallace and Gromit is the nearest you get to it these days, although there is no interaction with live actors.
In fact there is a new one coming out this Xmas called
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
One of the coolest things about Cassandra Nova’s design is her slightly too long fingers - it’s super subtle but unsettling
I've watched the movie twice and I NEVER noticed that... wild lol
she built her entire body from scratch is why that's the case.
For her live stuff, she actually had prosthetic extended finger tips and nails.
@@CodeDonutIn a cave! With a box of scraps!
After watching the movie I had to double-check and look at the actor's actual fingers from red carpet photos because they felt just wrong lol
Jordan's knowledge and enthusiasm is such a great addition, after Clint left it was concerning but Jordan really cares and knows his stuff
When did he leave??
Taking up the mantel of the young lion prince we lost -_-
@@hggdgdgfgg he left 3 years ago bro where you been
@@betterbaulball why tho? 😭😭😭 Also sorry
@@hggdgdgfgg He basically realised he can do it on his own, they're still friends. Clint has created a really cool 3D community over at his channel Pwnisher
What I find impressive about Harryhausen that's never mentioned is the fact that the stop-motion puppets are standing on _something,_ but it blends into the live-action plate so well that it's hard to see. If it were a composite, one could fiddle with the grading until they matched, but this was done in camera.
That's what confuses me too, he nails that blend
The fact that people genuinely believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is testament to how great it is (also how stupid people are, but I won’t go there).
I was just thinking that - anything that's off the ground is supported by some kind of armature that he has to camouflage into the background footage.
The stop motion puppets where shot in front of of a screen projecting the frame of the film , the actors are usually standing on something completely different, to what you see on screen .
The projected images were exposed separately from the animated model elements; Harryhausen would project the film onto a screen behind his models and position them to line up, then he would make two exposures on each frame, one with the models lit and the projector off and then another with the models in silhouette with the projector on, this allowed for control over the exposure levels so that the lights on the models did not wash out the projected images and the light from the projected images blended with the edges of the models to create seamless double-exposed in-camera composites.
I know one of the team that did the "fingers-through-the-head" scene. As soon as I got out of the theatre, I messaged him and told him of horrifically creeped out I was during that scene. He did great.
How did you get to know him? Like how did yall meet
I introduced them. First I met Denis on a trip to Italy. It was a particular sad trip because my wife left me and we had to go together. So one day I was sipping sad Negronis on the Amalfi coast and a guy came up to me asking how I got such fantastic and phat calves, this guy was Denis. I told him how my ex wife and I bonded because she loved my calves. After that story we became the best of friends, and one might say, almost lovers. When it was time to fly back we coincidentally took the same flights home and realized we lived in the same neighborhood. So the following week I invited him and other friend to dinner. My other friend was the VFX guy that made this effect. Denis and Lex (the VFX guy) became friends after also bonding over my calves. And yeah, that's the story.@@bennettphotography08
@ We live in the same city and he has a table at an art festival. He was there the next year again, and the next and we just got to know each other, only meeting once a year. Then we connected on Twitter and kept in touch with all things nerdy. We've both dropped Twitter now, so hopefully I'll bump into him again soon. He's just a nice guy, and my kids and I love his personal art projects.
@@DenisRyan What a great friendship story. ❤
@@DenisRyan Cool! I hope one day I'll be on the team with them lol (I'm an aspiring filmmaker)
3:34 My late father was a stop motion animator and a regular faux pas in the 16mm Bolex days (When the eye piece was on the side of the camera rather than through the lens) was spending all day animating frame-by-frame, before realising they had left the lens cap on all day.
Oh nooooooooo that must have set him back days lol😂 condolences about your father. Same here last year 😢
but thats not faux pas, its just lack of concentration or stupidity XD
@@tihomirvrbanec9537 Not really, you had to put the lens cap on whenever you stepped away from the camera (Toilet/food/break/admin) to prevent light leaks, so was done several times a day with no monitor to look at and only one person operating the camera and animating so no second pair of eyes.
@@grantpowell4135 Yeah they only had two weeks to shoot an episode too so was always heartbreaking and frustrating! Thank you - hope you’re doing well
@davebrainvfx the pressure was on for sure and same to you sir. Head held high
You'll want to get a little further into Harryhausen's Dynamation setups. Note that he doesn't just have his puppets in front of a rear-projected plate, but that the FOREGROUND is also part of the same plate, exposed separately, so it looks like the puppets are standing within the space of the original shot. You can see a slight realignment in one of the dinosaur-attack shots just after 18:51.
That's really just amazing that Cassandra and Paradox were fully CGI. That is without a doubt the best face cgi I've ever seen.
I’m a digital animator. A not very good digital animator. I have more tools and tips and tricks and techniques to help me work now than any animator in history and I still suck. The people that do stop motion, and in particular old stop motion and in particular old stop claymation have my undying and ultimate respect. They are the absolute GOATS in the animation world along with the old original 2D masters. Respect.
Keep at it man, you'll see you'll be good.
@ Thanks. Been at it for 17 years 🫡🥲
What's that saying, something like 'comparison is the thief of joy'... Try not to see it as 'suck vs good' but instead as your own style.
@@greenplasticgun you are much better than us armchair generals here.
@ 😄👍
You guys should do a whole episode on Harryhausen. 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad' is my favorite. Fight with the 6-armed Kali statue is so awesome. Plus, Caroline Munroe (better known as Stella in 'Star Crash') is absolutely beautiful.
Oh man 7th Voyage and Golden Voyage are two amazing Harryhausen movies. The Cyclops and dragon fight in 7th Voyage was awesome, and yes the six-armed Kali statue was phenomenal looking! But my all-time favorite is the Valley of Gwangi. I remember watching that for the first time as a lil tyke in late 70's and just loved Dinosaurs immediately!
@@ItsFreakinHarding. - Ray did so many amazing f/x during his career, CC could do a 1+ hour episode on him and just scratch the surface. Even if they only focused on his 3 Sinbad films, there’s plenty of ground to cover.
Woah... I didn't know they were chill like that...
The guy in the robot in Return to Oz was a presenter from a famous UK children's TV show, Blue Peter. You should be able to find a clip from him explaining it. Pretty sure he was walking backwards so that the legs kicked up properly.
Sam is THAT chill dude today
Finger shot
I also absolutely adored Jordan’s “Go on, get them” 😊
Speaking of claymation, please do a vid about Kubo and the Two Strings
Or anything from Laika Animations...
it would be neat to compare to old stop motion. since laika incorporates cg tech with stop motion
@ Also with the studio for Wallace and Gromit
@@isaackim7675 They did Chicken run too, I guess. Their style of stop motion is so accessible, still it feels like a fairy tale or something from a comic book you read ages ago.
0:35 Let me guess, They are preparing a mountain of garbage next secret santa gift for Clint.
(I was wrong) I’m pretty sure they’re trying to do the snow effect from Dark Matter they reacted to a couple of weeks ago. But don’t quote me on that.
Isn't this part of the stage for that Spider-man trick they did?
They said on the podcast that it was part of Niko's Greymatter 2 set design
Ray Harryhausen is just the absolute GOAT for creature effects. I'd hate to think what things were like if he hadn't done the films he did. He inspired so many of the great FX studios.
Growing up, Will Vinton, one of the creators/pioneers of claymation was my sisters best friends dad. His original claymation projects from when he was in college can be found on TH-cam, he founded Will Vinton Studios (now known as Liaka studios) makers of Coraline)) before it was bought by Phil Knight of Nike.
Anyways, I highly recommend looking into his Closed Mondays, one of his early projects. Really freaking cool dude RIP Will
I met Ray Harryhausen in 1981. My 14 year old self wasn’t ready for someone his is awesomeness
My layman guess for how they would've done the rock-face claymation animation, would be they had a pre-made hand-drawn animation they would project onto the clay to see how it should look like, and adjusted the clay accordingly, turning off the reference to record each frame.
There is definitely some kind of relief/carving involved due to the features having what appears to be actual depth.
@@ActionMan153 I don't think it was an optical illusion; would probably be harder to make it look good with an optical illusion than actually doing it for real.
@@tiagotiagot no offense but where did you get they said optical illusion? Their message hasn't been edited either as far as I can tell. Relief/carving isn't optical but practical.
@@GalactusTheDestroyer Felt like there could've been a misunderstanding since I never said anything about it being not 3d and they still felt the need to specify it was; so I decided to make clear I did not expect the depth to be illusory.
Whenever I see you guys talk about old time effects my brain literally hurts coz the amount of effort it took for those guys to achieve a particular shot is incomprehensible to the modern mind
SO glad you guys did some more of Harryhausen’s work. _One Million Years B.C._ is such amazing attention to detail, especially regarding the integration with the plate photography. I watched it all the time as a kid and it holds up amazingly well looking back at it now.
3:36 This Halloween I animated a Lego Stopmotion Film, based on Scream ("STOP SCREAMING" on TH-cam). In one shot there is a girl walking through the frame and behind her is a TV pictures, for which i used a Phone as a screen. I was so focused on the walking animation, that I didn't notice, that the Phone turned off, halfway in the shot, so I had to some how fix it in post😅 That was so frustating
Not actually cringe @ 0:25
For guys that know so much about effects, it's always fun when you don't know how things used to be done. (I feel so old!)
Just FYI, Claymation is not a generic term for stop motion animation. Claymation (animating clay figures) was popularized by Art Clokey (Gumby and Pokey), Will Vinton (the Nome King in Return To OZ, TV commercials for The California Raisins), and Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit).
Harryhausen used latex foam puppets on metal armatures to animate, not clay. His filming process was called Dynamation.
Man, I loved those California Raisin commercials/movie. Really fun stop motion with great VA. The California Raisins movie/shorts are on YT I'm pretty sure. Worth a watch if you've never seen them and are interested in stop motion/claymation etc.
Niko pointed out the one thing that I hated about Deadpool & Wolverine: the guns on the high ground firing down into a pit and hitting nothing. It's so stupid.
It's a storm trooper reference.
@@balsalmalberto8086dude what
I'd just think of it as a comedy homage to all the times it's been done before. Looked like some 80s thunderdome type stuff there.
Yeah, that was one of the many things that was really stupid about that movie. It's easily the worst Deadpool movie. I did not enjoy it.
In the Cinefex article on RETURN TO OZ, there's a great bit where they talk about developing the look of the Nome animation. (paraphrasing) "We studied how to make the characters look like rock and determined that one of the main features of rock is that it doesn't move..."
The actual quote from Vinton, because I'm obsessive this way: "One of the first things we dealt with all along was, 'What is the nature of rockiness?' -- and one of the primary answers was that rock doesn't move. Yet the whole thing was to get that rock to move. The idea was that the Nomes were in this kind of plasma of rock, a sea of rock."
Speaking of stop motion. Wallace and Gromit R rated would be a fun twist on the series. Would anyone go full stop motion or would it all be cg?
I loved the Deadpool breakdown and the Return to Oz stuff….but you really killed it with the Master - Clay Grafix genius Ray Harryhausen. 👏🏻👏🏻 my first experience of the masters work was OG Clash of the Titans and you still don’t see anything more compelling today than a stop-motion Medusa. Thanks, fam.
17:14 I don't think it is said enough but THANK YOU to all the artists who create these movies. I cannot imagine the amount of hours put in and I hope the support from Marvel and Disney has gotten better. Once again THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU.
I will always have the utmost respect for stop motion artists! So much manual labor!
Speaking of hands going through faces, Fringe had some pretty top-notch effects from what I recall.
18:19 The Harryhausen stuff has issues with scaling, total genius though. A total joy to watch as a child. Thank you so very much for all the fond memories Mr. Harryhausen. R.I.P.
Honestly, I like it way more when you cover the old stuff ❤
I went and watched Deadpool in the theaters when it came out and when i watched the scene of her hands going through his face, I immediately thought about how i was excited to see when you guys cover it!
Back in uni, I did some animation work with stop motion, but not clay. We used cardboard cutouts, sand, etc. We all joked about sneezing all sending the whole thing flying off. What no one accounted for was when someone sneezes, their body jerks around - a lot... And back then, we didn't have an easy way to previz, so... yeah...
Will Vinton was an absolute genius. I had the honor of meeting him at San Diego Comic Con in 2007 and he was the nicest guy. RIP to a legend.
A bunch of trash on the floor? Obviously someone is getting Clint’s secret Santa gift prepared
I remember seeing return to Oz in theaters when I was five years old, and it was terrifying!
5:50 If I recall correctly the contortionist in the suit is actually walking backwards and viewing everything upside down since their head is sitting between their legs
Yes, they determined that the walk looked bouncier in reverse. I believe he used a video monitor for reference and couldn't actually see out of the rig at all.
The level of detail on these guys is unreal-Sam's practically photorealistic at this point. I mean, if you squint, you can almost see the rendering budget in his pores. And don’t even get me started on Nikos’ hair-that fidelity.
Please react to Alien Romulus! The weightless scene or the end near the ring has some REALLY good CGI
the guy in the robot suit for "return to oz" was michael sunden. he was a presenter on a childrens tv show in the uk (blue peter) for a while, before his "racey" past caught up with him
I came here to say just that. I'm not sure about his 'racey' past as Richard Bacon was fired for the same reasons.
I remember the guy in the robot suit was a short-lived Blue Peter presenter that came onboard after a segment discussing the film. Apparently, he walked backwards in the suit to give the robot that side to side waddle.
Harryhausen visited us at Pixar and told how crazy making it was when he was animating Medusa, keeping track of all of those serpent figures, and someone would knock on the door. He'd come back and try to remember where he was.
After seeing that excellent disembodied head work in Return to Oz, I have an example of a VFX _mistake_ with a disembodied head for y'all to check out.
The movie is Ice Pirates. (Starring Robert Urich, Angelica Huston, and John Matuszak.) About 1/3 of the way through, the main characters go to visit a character with a detachable head, played by Bruce Vilanch. They knock his head off, and when it lands and he starts to talk to them some more, you can see the actor's shoulder sticking out from under the masking.
On the flip side, I think you might enjoy the "time-dilation fight" at the end of the movie--it's obvious how it was done, but they're also obviously being silly & having a lot of fun doing so.
Claymation and stop motion will always be cool!
3:31 - Drawings for each frame basically. Then Polaroid photos of each frame shot and then they work off a bunch of Polaroids as their previous frame reference.
The only other option would be to pre sculpt hundreds of face shots and swap them in one at a time.
Ray H. was next-level.
Exactly my thought, with the shooting guys in the battle, when I watched the movie today. Had the same kind of thought in the first Suicide Squad, when they rained down bullets on the cast from every level of the building.
The projected light onto the clay might be a really big clue as to how they did it. If you asked me to animate something like that, I would do the whole thing on paper first, every frame, so you can flipbook it and make adjustments on the fly until it looks good. Then you transfer those drawings onto cels, slap those cels on a projector, shine the projector on the clay and use it as a blueprint to sculpt. If the cool lighting was planned to be there from the start, you could even set up the projector for that from the get go. Every other slide alternates between cel and effects lighting. Sculpt, shoot, sculpt, shoot.
Might've been cheaper to have a second projector and roll of film than intercalate the animated reference frames with the fire light animation, I imagine....
@@tiagotiagot That's most likely the simplest solution, yeah. I don't know anything about projectors, so I figured maybe they had some fancy tech back then that could switch between two sources on the fly or whatnot, but I think I'm imagining a slide projector in that scenario and you probably wouldn't use one of those for hundreds of frames of animation! Or maybe you would, I have absolutely no idea.
To animate on 1's is an time consuming, hours of work just for seconds of video
However it looks awesome even 50 years later and that is why you put in the hard work.
For anyone wondering.. the garbage behind them was all from Wrens desk.. for years he's been sneaking into the office after hours and eating up all the food like some deranged gremlin.. sam put CCTV up in the office space to identify what or who has been eating all the food.. once Wren was outed Sam confronted him about it.. Wren broke down crying insisting he's got a problem, he opened up his desk drawers and a mountain of trash spilled out.. Sam just slowly nodded in shock and awe and instructed him to clean it up..
Seems legit
Addiction is a terrible thing. I hope Wren gets his goblin tendencies under control. 😌🙏
Either you wrote this like a fanfic but it's real, or this shit's made up. How big is his desk that he'd have *that* much garbage in it? Not to mention Sam "nodding in shock and awe."
Im in my late 30s and I love the old effects from Highlander and the old effects from Harryhausen and the old Ghostbusters are the best!
I love how collectively the clay graphics arms and shoulders got more of a WOW than the hand -through-face-CG
The more natural obstacles there is - the more amazing is the result. Even modern stopmotion amazes me, as a digital (wannabe) animator - I just can't fathom how they are able to animate EVERYTHING AT ONCE, straight forward, without adjustments or passes!
@@DarthBiomech Stop-motion has always been my favorite style
The Clay Guided Interactions (CGI) are amazing in that last clip
Yes! Finally! A Ray Harryhausen appreciation episode!
This is definitely my favorite react video! Love how you guys are so comedic and sociable even though we aren't there! Love it so much you guys! Thanks for the reactions and your passion for genuine creativity making magic happen!
1:08
_Your Majesty_ ... sheeeeeeeeet
I thought that was the line for a second.
I‘m having a bad time with love right now. I just opened my phone and hoped to see a notification from her. But instead i saw the notification for this video and i thought to myself: At least i have that. Thank you guys for making me happy every week. And thank you more for getting that job done even now ❤
Return to Oz has to be praised more. It's genius stuff from the effects to the performances!
I know it's easy to crap on the new CG stuff but man... the old stuff is absolutely mindblowing. And it STILL HOLDS UP
Lyle Conway, creator of Tik Tok said in an interview, "Michael was about five five and Tik Tok's about four four. So Michael had to bend with his head between his legs, bolted in, and he did the actual walking around in the thing--BACKWARDS. Sometimes, in the morning, he wouldn't be able to fit, so it was just a matter of forcing him in. Then everything loosened up, and his body settled into it. When you took the suit off of him, this rush of hot air hit you and there were pools of sweat at the bottom of the thing."
Back in the 80s, I produced a lot of plasticine stop frame initially on 8mm film where it was difficult to gauge any light changes and you had no playback until weeks later. Video made things easier as you had playback....but it also had massive issues....using an HB Umatic recorder (this was before 1" so quite high end!) It would pre roll back 30secs, drop the frame, post roll forward 30secs
So every frame took at least 60secs just to record. It was rarely frame accurate and would drop black frames into the video....and....after 500 frames the tape would start to stretch and warp so stop playing! On those nights when renders are taking too long or AE keeps crashing. I smile and think how great the tools were now using really are.
It's nice having this every Saturday to be able to actually hear someone talk about film and effects in the way that I've enjoyed it since I was a kid
At least with the DP&W big fight, they take care of at least a good number of the people with guns fairly quickly.
Also, they are either super powered or supernaturally trained and can dodge/tank bullets/lasers while fighting.
You should react to "Walking with Dinosaurs" the BBC documentary series from 1999. I remember being amazed by the "realistic" Dinosaurs as a child and I think you would find a lot to talk about.
I've worked as a VFX artist on multiple stop motion films. I wouldn't say anything went horribly wrong, but certainly there have been challenges, ranging from things that were just mistakes, to things that were hard to plan for.
Most of the mistakes were stuff like this:
Animators forgot something in the shot, like leaving a screwdriver in the shot or something else that needed to be painted out.
Animator stood in front of a light, or put down a cellphone with lights on or wore a different color shirt from one day to the next that affected the bounce light, which had to be fixed in comp.
Most stuff you do on a stop motion isn't really mistakes though, its the stuff you have to deal with on all productions like
Set-shifts:
These happen when something changes the set over time. either were parts of the set slowly become softer and bend (like flowers) when they are under heat from lights for a day.
Or moisture changes from one day to the other makes the whole wooden table the set is standing one shift and contort (often in the middle of a shot since most animators will only do 3-5 seconds per day).
deflickering the shots because of natural power grid differences during the day, which makes all the lights flicker all the time.
The stuff that came more out of the blue was when we animated stuff that was flying on two's and realizing it looked way to choppy, so we had to manually reanimated all the in-between frames of the character flying to ease out the animation (this is quite tricky cause you have to actually understand how its supposed to move, you can't just go 50% on all frames, cause animation curves should ease in and out etc..)
Roto of anything is suddenly not as easy cause normal interpolation doesn't work on two's, but at the same time, suddenly an animator will do something on ones or three's because that makes it flow better so you can't just reduce the framerate an roto on 12 fps either.
I guess the biggest curveball was on a film called "In the Forest of Hucky Bucky" where there's a Old bear whose son has been kidnapped by some farmers who are gonna sell him to the circus, and he was supposed to have a sad face, but the two heads we had for him (it was animated with a rig instead of the printed head swap like skellington) which was happy and sad, was more in the lines of happy and sociopath.
So we had to manually warp his face in comp to make him look sad about his son instead of a serial killer :P
The special effects in that Ray Harryhausen movie are better than the CGI in "the flash" (the movie not the TV show)
Well it’s probably better than the show as well…
2:54 Jordans shirt comes to "life" I guess. Nice touch!
They have proven soooo many times that old movies are just impecabe.
It's the same reason I am fascinated by old analogue machinery, it's amazing to see (and figure out, if you're clever enough) how it works with the limitations they had. The same can be done for modern things as well but there's a real charm to older practical stuff.
Timestamps messed up, says you've got a 5 min ad in the middle lol, rough!
im an animation student at uni and we had to do a stop motion project in first yr and i genuinely have ptsd from that shit. basically i had 1 day to film the entire thing and my tutor who knew how to 3D print everything was away until the last week and i was filming on the friday. thursday night i got finally had everything printed and needed to not only glue it all together but paint it all and create the wires for the joints as well as use miliputt to stick the wires to the printed model parts for the characters. basically nothing went right most stuff didnt stick together and i got there friday morning with a shit show and my tutor accidentally broke the leg piece for the main character when drilling the whole to make it bigger for the wire so i ended up only using the top half of the character and angling the camera up. not only that but dragon frame (the stop motion software) wasnt working and my tutor couldnt help me till after lunch(2pm) and the stop motion room was being closed at 5pm. oh and the arm joints were so scuffed they would slowly fall down if they were raised so it was literally a race against time to take the pic for each frame before the arms would drop again and i only had 3hrs to shoot the whole thing and learn how to use after effects to edit out the thing i used to keep one of the characters (a flying pig) in the air over the main character. in the end i got it all shot in like an hr and edited by the end of the day but the amount of stress i felt almost gave me a panic attack multiple times that day and i refuse to ever touch that shit again. 3D digital animation all the way
You guys should react to Superman VS Hulk by Mike Habjan!
I think they have reacted to it already
Old shots like these are awesome because they are practical and i feel confident that i might pull it off myself - since it already clicks way before explanation
LOL pause @1:54
*Vine Boom*
I remember reading an interview with Ray Harryhausen several decades ago where he talked about doing the hydra scene for (I think it was) Jason and the Argonauts. He'd been working on it about 4 to 6 hours, animating a creature with 7 heads and necks(!) when the phone rang. He answered the call, went back to work and could not remember where he was in the move sequence. So he had to scrap it and start all over again. When I was a kid/teenager, Ray Harryhausen was my hero. At 16 or 17 I had a Super-8 movie camera and was doing stop motion animation, inspired by him. As a note, Ray didn't do Claymation (tm). His puppets had metal armatures for skeletons and foam rubber "skins" over them. No clay involved.
Been subscribed to you for ages, love it!
I've always loved Ray Harryhausen's work, I grew up watching a couple movies he worked on, and even a couple recently and I'am always blown away by his Claymation
The performer inside the Return to Oz character Tik-Tok was (all due respect to @NotThatOneThisOne) was BOTH Michael Sundin AND Tim Rose, who also played EVERY ITERATION of Admiral Ackbar in Star Wars, but also Howard the Duck!
14:23 Small Jackman 😂
"Clay Graphics" should be considered a new VFX term for old-school stop-motion animation
"If you do something right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
HIDARI (Pilot Film) - The Stop-Motion Samurai Film is a awesome stop motion film with a bunch of behind the scenes videos
20 seconds late. Sorry boys
HAhahaha. Dang it
0:30 Corridor Crew officially warship Chaos God Nurgle now
13:48 Deadpool makes a joke about how Wolverine was still stuck in his CGI form, that’s the point of that part, I thought you guys would catch that it was on purpose tho lol
When he says "I blew it, the only thing they'll remember is that godawful dismount" he's talking about the fact he just fell out of the bus after a sick fight scene. Why do so many people assume he's talking about the cgi lmao. He's clearly making a joke about himself screwing up, he literally says I
Why would they do that the Model looked Perfect the Motion was Just a Bit off
@@betterbaulball it's all cope. They couldn't POSSIBLY imagine something being bad in a Deadpool movie 😲🤯 lol
Bro coping so hard
I love how some of this old stuff, the “trick” so often boils down to, just be a stone cold monster at whatever the thing is. That claymation stuff is insane.
If you guys like stop motion, I'm once again recommended "The Wizard of Speed and Time". The filmmaker basically did all the effects in the movie himself, which is impressive because it's a movie ABOUT special effects (and also about trying to get a movie made). Charming stuff.
Also! Speaking of guys in robot suits: for something to really blow your mind, look up how they did the robots in Silent Running.
And re: Sam saying "you still need a guy inside" for robots, I'd look at Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. Incredible work for basically an RC rig.
21:23 The clay arm takeover was the ultimate animated practical limb replacement flex! Try and find another movie where this exact thing happens to compare this too, I dare you.
The claymation breakdown was fantastic (dunno why the spear transition gave me such joy), more please.
Perfect! I actually watched this for the first time this week! I was more impressed than I thought I'd be.
Liking the continued love for Harryhausen. And yeah, the Casandra Nova hand-in-face sequence was astounding!!! You do truly forget that that sequence is CGI, and on top of being good, incredibly faithful to the comic (check out the X-Men comic, E is for Extinction). And the inventiveness of 80's SFX is just so innovative and weird, Return to Oz was a masterpiece.
I'm surprised they didn't point out the cgi mistake in deadpool where wolverine and deadpool jump out of the back of the bus and when deadpool stands up and puts his sword away the sword clips through wolverines left arm.
In the late 80's at high school we were doing a stop motion film project. We did several hours of work, moving the items, taking frames, then realised the old Super-8 camera appeared to work correctly even though it had no film in it.
Ray Harryhausen was a LEGEND. There's no person in the VFX industry that doesn't have the outmost respect for that man. Incredible artist and technician.
My guess for the layered stoneface: They created clips from a default state into all kinds of emotional states or mouthposures for speaking and then just "scrubbed" back and forth from the default state into the various transitions. It´s a hell lot of work but once you have all the frames photographed, you can play around and see what looks best. It´s not linearly created, it is reusing a lot of frames when basically doing pingpong loops on some sections like vinylscratching back and forth the footage and then transition back to a state which allows for transitioning into different expression.
With that stop-motion clay wall face, the only way I can think of to be able to animate that would be to first do a 2D animation to act as a blueprint, and then recreate each frame using clay. It's a lot of tedious work, but the end result is honestly brilliant.
And Ray Harryhausen, well, he's just an absolute genius. Absolutely no denying that. A true master of the craft.