 Hi there, I'm Kyle C. Sullivan. Welcome to Blackpants Film School. You're watching more VFX breakdowns. Last time we covered a pretty basic concept in visual effects compositing, it's basically just sticking multiple pieces of footage on top of each other and making them look like they're one. This time we're gonna do something more specialized because I made it up. You may remember from before that I mentioned I don't know how to do CGI. The most I've ever done is some basic 3D modeling and blender and used it for like sets and maybe occasional objects in shots. But most of the time I don't do it because I am not well versed in it enough to complete it within a week. So I've had to come up with a lot of different creative solutions and it usually just falls back into some form of compositing. For an example, let's take a look at our videos about Half-Life 2. For the very first Half-Life video we did we actually spent a lot of time on making physical props and costumes. One of which was this headcrab right here that my brother built. The only thing it didn't do was move. It's very stiff. Originally we were gonna try to have the legs kind of flop around so it could ragdoll, but the tape ended up just being too hard by the end of it. You can see in the first video when I just hold it up by its leg it's just kind of a stiff prop and it worked totally fine for that because it was dead. But in the next video, have a med kit we wanted to have some headcrabs jumping out at the beginning. Again didn't do CGI so I had to kind of work with what we had. And what we had was that headcrab model, a green screen, and the After Effects warp tool. The movement was gonna be simple. We just needed a headcrab to kind of jump out from behind camera and then get shot back in the same direction. So we knew it wouldn't even be on screen for more than two or three seconds. We got the original base shot with no headcrabs in it. Then in the exact same room from the same angle to match the lighting because remember that's very important. I just knelt down in front of a green screen and I held the headcrab up and then I moved it kind of on the angle that I knew it would be moving as it was flying through the air. Fun fact, the thing that I'm using to hold of the headcrab is a hat. They were originally supposed to be worn by our actors in this video, but I didn't realize when I ordered it that the hats were going to be bright, bright green screen green instead of like the forest green that the characters wear in the game. So in post, I was able to cut the headcrab out, kind of animate it flying in and then flying away as it gets shot. Use some stock gunshot footage and debris flying off of the headcrabs when they get hit. Obviously add motion blur. And then the key effect here was the mesh warp tool which gives you this grid over a two-dimensional piece of footage, which you can then use to bend your image in all these crazy ways. I knew what I wanted to do from the start was make its legs kind of move in and out. So when I got the footage I tried to make sure that the legs were sticking out on their own without overlapping the body. Then in the animation I can just set some key frames on the mesh warp to make the legs kind of uncurl as it jumps out. If you look at it frame by frame, it looks not perfect, but because the movement happens so fast you don't really get a chance to register any individual frame not looking great and then it kind of looks like there's an anatomical creature that's actually like moving under its own muscle power and flying through the air for a split second. Later we filmed another Half-Life video, the one about the ladders, but in that video the things we needed were a little bit more extravagant. We yet again needed a headcrab but this time it needed to be standing on the ground and then get shot multiple times. Even if we like just practically shot our model it wouldn't move in the way that a headcrab actually would. It's just because it's just a rock. It's just a headcrab shaped rock and if it's in frame for a really long time that mesh warp trick doesn't work nearly as well. We also needed a soldier to fall from the roof and hit the ground next to the actors and we didn't have a person that was willing to do that. And our location was pretty much perfect except that it didn't have a ladder which was you know the focus of the script. I originally thought about using Blender and I made the ladder in Blender. It looks awful so I had to think about how I was going to try to add these elements in without being able to generate 3D models. And this was the stupid stupid thing I came up with that was so dumb it somehow worked and I've kept using it ever since. I wondered if maybe I could get 3D models of some of the Half-Life characters online somewhere that were already modeled already textured already had a skeleton applied to it and then maybe I could just run a physics simulation of it falling. And then I thought wait a minute I know a place that has completely textured rendered and rigged models of all Valve characters. Gary's Mod. So I went into Gary's Mod. I downloaded a pre-made giant green screen, set up a digital camera, turned off the little beam thing that connects your tool to any of the models in the game and then just kind of waved them around. I didn't have that plan before I recorded the footage. I thought I was just gonna find models online and animate them and it would not have come out on time at all. But because of this I suddenly had footage of the characters that I needed in front of a green screen that I could just plop into After Effects and key out and they're right there. 90% of the work done. The lighting obviously did not match at all. In Gary's Mod everything is very very flat. There is not any directional lighting. It's also very just kind of basic low quality. It's running on the source engine still and it's just in this big open field so it just kind of looks the way it looks even if you manage to cast some lights on it. By comparison our shots were in very harsh sunlight in the middle of a Texas afternoon so there were sharp shadows everywhere. So I did my very best to just match the contrast and the color and then I added in shadows underneath the characters, added in whatever gunshot effects I needed and voila we got a headcrab being shot in the face. As excited as I was for this new effect idea I didn't actually end up using it again until probably about a year and a half later when we made the XCOM video. This time I knew what I was doing going in so I was able to plan for it way better. The entire XCOM video is actually shot during the daylight. This is something called day for night color correction. It's usually frowned upon as a way to get nighttime footage because it's usually really obvious when it's done. Our video is no exception but the reason we did it is because in the game it actually kind of looks like what happens when you do day for night color correction. In real nighttime shots it's dark. There things in the background are black and when you have directional lighting on that's your only source of light. If you take footage that was shot in the day and you try to correct into nighttime footage it still just kind of looks like blue daytime footage at worst but there are some tricks you can do to make it look a little bit better. One is making sure you don't have any harsh shadows on people because obviously there aren't any shadows when there isn't light. What was really easy was matching this Garry's Mod footage with the rest of our footage because the entire thing we were trying to accomplish was making our footage look as flat as possible and we were color correcting it so drastically that you couldn't tell if there was a mismatch at all. You just apply that same really heavy color correction to the Garry's Mod footage and to the original footage and it just looks like it's in the same place. The trick we used again was making sure that we just didn't linger very long on any of the alien shots and when they were there most of the time they're moving really fast. It's actually just the horror movie method because if you don't have enough money to make a convincing creature then you just show little pieces of it and it ends up scarier that way anyway. Adding in some dirty effects like the blood that splatters on the camera when Joey shoots all of them definitely helps sell a lot of those shots as well. The best things about this method are that it's really easy and really cheap. You could very easily do this on your own videos if you want to try and insert like some kind of game character or really just anything that someone may have put in Garry's Mod which is like everything. I probably wouldn't use it for you know like a big budget production but especially for like weekly YouTube videos where we're just putting in as good of effects as we can manage within a few days. It opens up way more things that we can do that we just couldn't do otherwise. Please feel free to use this method in whatever you want and please send them to me. I'm actually really interested to see what people can do with this. I mean it's basically what Corridor does with professional movies but I could do it with amateur YouTube stuff and that'd be pretty cool. So yeah if you have any VFX that you'd like to run by me and just kind of get my take on I'd be happy to look at them. Thank you for watching. That video was from last year actually when the world was being much less subtle about wanting to erase all the humans off of it. You're probably gonna see more things like that that we've dug up from deep within our hard drives because there's not a whole lot of things that we can actually film right now. But in the meantime we do have other things coming out on other platforms that you can go check out. For example we have an entire channel called Door Monster Podcasts where we release currently monthly and soon to be bi-monthly episodes of a D&D fifth edition real-play podcast called KilnSpark. You can also find a monthly podcast where me and Allison share our completely uneducated opinions on how different future technologies are going to turn out and today she released another video on her channel Panic Banana which is us talking about what it's like dealing with your partner's anxieties and how to you know live in a healthy relationship with that. I had a lot of big projects that I was kind of hoping to get back into this year. As you know I've been just kind of struggling figuring out what it is I want to do and then the whole COVID-19 thing happened and so it's just kind of put a lot of stuff in the back burner. So you know it's hard to say exactly when stuff might start happening again. I got the Batman suit all ready to go when the Russians tied up in the garage. I told you we can't do that right now because of the coronavirus. I'll just make a whole bunch of tiktoks then. No no no you can't do you only have my passport. So yeah like nothing's like in the in the pipeline.