 Something weird happened with your mom. Oh yeah, what? She's never done this before but she wanted me to pay her in spaghetti for sex. Okay. Makes her a prostitute. Banger! Hey, welcome back to our stupid raxes of Corbett. I'm Rick. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter for more juicy content. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to like button. Today we have a video. This is a, it's called India's VFX Revolution and it's Oscar-nominated RRR VFX Breakdown but it's not from the, it's from IGN India. And so this is a user on a thrilling journey. I don't know if this guy worked on RRR or if he's just interview Pete Draper, the VFX lead supervisor for the film. Oh great, lead VFX supervisor, awesome. It's going to break down some of the VFX. Awesome. From India and RRR in general. And yes, we've seen in just our short stint the transformation in visual effects in Indian cinema. It's been off the charts. Yes. It's amazing. Here we go. Draper, I'm here to talk to you about India's visual effects. RRR RRR RRR We need you to know exactly where an animal is actually traveling. RRR Oh nice. RR's inputs in post-production are they're never vague, they're always to the point. He's very, very educated in that. And that's to exposure and that's to experience. Nartu Nartu was filmed over in Ukraine at the President's Palace. He was left with shoots and unfortunately there's no visual effects in that episode of the talk. RRR Shots like this, for example. Some of my favourites and the reason for that was primarily we had to make sure that there was a balance between the water and the fire. At that particular point in time there was very few of us doing it. There was no... It's not like today when you can pretty much learn anything that you want to learn off YouTube and stuff like that. So it wasn't until mid... when we started to get more tutorials, more websites and a lot more collaborative learning. So back then in the 90s there was a lot of play by ear and a lot of kind of experimenting. Look at that floppy disk entry point. Golden age if you like. I can't feel old. It did feel a lot more gorilla than what it does these days. Nowadays one quick search on Google and you can pretty much find anything you want to do. Visual effects has evolved to a degree but the processes that we tend to do and the analysis that we tend to do are pretty much the same as what they were back then. It's just that systems have got better. Computers have got better. We're still getting the same render times now as what we did then. We're just throwing more ingredients at it so to speak. Ah that makes sense. There's many signs of visual effects that the general audience aren't aware of. There's a metric ton of clean up work that tends to happen on this show rig removals to wire removals which are obvious. You see someone flying through the air then obviously they naturally can't fly so therefore there's been wires etc. or rigs that have been painted out. There's digital doubles which are utilized as face replacements but there's also things like for example set extension work which is done which has normally been called on because it's not physically possible to shoot in such and such a location because of either legal issues or logistical issues and astonishingly you no longer need a green screen to get those things out. The first meeting with RR was topography of what we called the British military base, the BNB and that was to do with climax portion. So he kind of gave us the general overview of the story. There's these two freedom fighters, you know the general kind of backstory for each one but primarily what we were trying to get our heads around was the topography of this particular space because it was integral to not only the climax but also key stages or key events within the actual primary story so we knew we needed to know where the actual officer's mess was, where the training grounds were where the ceremonial grounds were, where the main artillery was. I love scent productions and each one had to be geographically placed because this guy needs to be able to see this place from here, this guy needs to see this place from here and so on depending on what particular beats were going to happen within the story. The police station scene itself which was introduction, we shot that at Rumoji Film City in Hyderabad based on a set which was built by Subway Cyril but the actual space itself was supposed to be in Delhi on the outskirts of Delhi and there was specific terrain to that particular area. The train was different to what we got in Hyderabad lots of ups and downs and so on so we concentrated and built the space around that particular area and populated it as much as we could doing camera. So going by the general rule of thumb of try and get as much close to camera as physically possible which will actually help you cut down your visual effects requirements so we're populating up with as much crowd as we can and generally there was on an average around about 300 crowd members, I think it peaked around about the late hundreds kind of things but largely it was around about 300 which we were working with so we were shooting a lot of plates yeah plate shooting, put them here put them there, put them there, don't move the camera and sticking them over here and shooting a plate there and jungling them up and sticking them over there which obviously increases the the shoot time but decreases the amount of time that we have to do effects you don't have to do all these crowd simulation right it looks better too, yeah real people I could see once we actually followed the general rules and building the system up and populating it that way made life a lot easier was actually not directly in front of the police station as it is in the story it was actually off to the side and the reason for that was there was a big mound there we needed to wrap up elements here before we could actually go across and shoot there, we also then had two units one shooting here, one shooting there just for kind of b-roll that kind of stuff so there was a lot of shots where you had for example if you were shooting from the mound looking towards the police station the police station was CG, if you were shooting from the police station looking towards the mound the mound was CG and vice versa so that's the kind of general rule of thumb that we have there is one shot in that entire episode which a lot of people thought was CG but it actually 90% of it was live and that's the very close shot of Ram's eyeball when you're seeing the reflection of the camera Wow, I was dead certain that was CG the only CG in it if you pause it you can actually see the mound has been added in the background and some additional crowd has been added in the reflection of his eyeball that's the level of detail we're dealing with so for Beam's introduction it was primarily shot over in Bulgaria it was actually the location was sourced by a guy called Judy who was one of our fight coordinators primarily because they managed to because of shoot schedules they were trying to shoot outside of Delhi for this particular location so they give that kind of lush green feel which is in complete contrast of Ram's desolate barren and dry I love that shot it's a great shot the locations wise they found this forest over in Bulgaria but still they wanted areas which were furlies which was native to India to be brought over so we'll see what the other director brought in this year partial size trees they brought a native vegetation from India I love that which we also reused in the climax so the entire sequence the regular audience would have noticed shots was blocked animated, timed by a company called Concept which is based over in LA that's Rajah Mooli as the tiger they knew what angle scene he was to shoot they knew the timing how it was going to be and whether or not there was any additional cutaways that they needed to shoot any additional angles because they were I want to see Rajah Mooli's storyboard block it out shoot the thing is that Rajah Mooli? and he was just a moment ago in harness in the soundstage so everything had to be neatly planned and executed well in advance that's a hard CGI shot all that managed to be able to be achieved look at all the leaves that's not just for the camera placements it's for the animation of the tiger it's for the animation of the character also yes this is the scene we saw those other guys break down for the practical and the CGI the bridge scene was actually supervised by the universe man who was the principal supervisor on the entire show this particular episode was a combination of a lot of live action in camera stuff but a lot of miniature and what they call bigatures it's not a miniature just because of elements such as fire and water fire and water you can simulate them that's okay it's very computationally intensive and it's tough to get all the little nuances right you can shoot if you can the problem with those shooting miniatures of fire is that fire doesn't scale same with water the size of the flames is going to be detasted by the air around it the physics and so on there's only so small you can go without it looking like a toy they did pretty large scale miniature works for this particular episode so what was handy was actually on set itself not only did they have the miniature work going on here but if they needed a direct reference the big one was just literally on the other side of the blue screen so just walk around all the paint works like that just so everything gels together so we actually only had one section of live here which is where the two where the bike and the horse meet and the other one is basically over in the far corner over here which is where beam and his cohorts are meeting by the other side the bike itself for the live part was just ridden normally by taracle or some performer but there was a rig that was built for the skid going across and that last shot where the horse pulls up against the railing that was actually the short horse that was done by the same company my favorite scene I've seen was this one well done because that's where you guys got to show off Wooohooo I'm not used to problems to try and overcome coming out of Covid gradually phasing back in to the office and back into studio the actual entire episode itself was challenging to shoot because of the limited amount of people which were allowed on set the amount of extension that we had to do as a studio compared to earlier on with all the animals coming out which was largely live backgrounds and just digital animals were the important we had to recreate all of that in the background itself because we had a limited amount of cameras to play with shots like this for example were some of my favorites absolutely iconic a balance between the water and the fire this guy could not be more powerful than this guy this guy could not be more powerful than this guy so out of the amount of iterations that we went through on some of these ones what we ended up having to do was when we had the two guys side by side rolling together where the fire trail running through where the water trail trying to run through trying to control that water spectacular utterly spectacular this one didn't look like it was flinging out too many sparks so it wouldn't overpower that the volume of sparks even on this was equipped with balanced out the amount of water in the previous shot this one worked really well because we knew for a fact that we got this concept work sent to us from the production department, from the director himself and when he sends these we know every single thing on this to the particle that needs to be replicated there's no ambiguity didn't even need to say it for the animal havoc episode there's a lot of pre-production involved in this so we needed to know exactly where an animal was look at the saliva on the fangs that was encountered previously as jr. Marley the vfx supervisor stated was that when you're filming something in camera the problem is there's nothing there there's no reference as to where the dp needs to frame next and how fast it needs to frame so there's a lot of pre-production to determine exactly how fast an animal would run from point A to point B attack something from point C has to be justified by the movement of the actors without the animals yes but the dp the camera operator had something to refer to as well to frame up there was right how much space do we leave in the frame to fit the animal to make it believable program running to showcase exactly how far and how fast these things were jumping like the scene where a beam jumps underneath the tiger that's trying to claw him as it flies over him that had a strip that had something for the actor to interact of and had something for the dp to interact of as well there's so much the first one was actually shot in 2 else 3 locations so initially we actually all at build up where beam is tending to arms injuries the initial arrow fight the initial reveal of ram and the fire coming out and setting light to everything outside the studio for that was primarily control that we could control the space control the environment we could shoot during the day and we could extend through and design the background of framing how we wanted to such an epic fight scene man the bike stopped coming through and things started blowing up it's a bit more dangerous to do that on the studio floor and so it's a lot more tough to control safer to do it outside so that was shot at night on location again at rfc just on the outskirts but tying all this together there had to be this geography and this goes back to all the way through to the pre-production planning at the beginning the center around the temple should be this sort of foliage then we should have this dry grass space and then we have this more open cultivated area and then that leads on to the armory building so this goes all the way back to the initial discussion that we had a few years prior that this should lead to that, to that, to that Rasmussen's inputs in post-production are they're never vague they're always to the point they're always to the money and the good thing about working with him is that he knows he speaks the same language with regards to terminology for visual effects so he knows about the modeling he knows about the compositing he knows about the effects work he knows about simulation work he's very very educated in that and that's to exposure and that's to experience so for the set design and for the relative obviously same CG extension that we were doing there has to be obviously a synergy there so the type of research and the period pieces for example signage for the building styles and what have you we're doing a lot of reference we're doing a lot of research into how things looked that's production design still existing in north India and also the architecture in the UK at the time as well which also still exists so we're not only just using the references on one side of the actual street we're using on both strides there's kind of main affluent areas until we actually come to like some of the industrial marketplaces so we have that complete contrast of very very affluent architecture that's going on there there are actually some little nuances that we threw in there for example in the live set itself they added in some additional stuff like Bress' wife for example has got her own tailor shop for example she's the costume designer of the show so obviously the tailor shop works I think there was Sendil had a photography shop for example who was the DP and also we've got Sadeep's pest control which is kind of like a throw Sadeep's pest control Sadeep's pest control that's awesome throw these little kind of little easter eggs yeah so it is part of the same world 1990 was that was filmed over in Ukraine at the president's palace unfortunately I wasn't there for the shoot and unfortunately there's no visual effects in the show in that episode at all but I do know there was one or two like little bursts just added for adding a bit of smoke here in there just to kind of extenuate maybe a foot burst and that's it that's all that was done there was no re-timing I know for a fact that they're doing the action they're doing the dance masters basically making sure everybody's you know to the beat at the time and then the director is going through it frame by frame by frame you're out by three frames okay go again so there's lots of meticulous meticulous meticulous repetition of the action but just nailing it absolutely nailing it every single time great video can watch stuff like that for 12 hours so rewarding love movie making yeah that was that was great is RRR the best VFX film that we've ever seen in India without question I'm trying to think without question for me in terms of VFX work I'm just trying to think of all the action not that other films don't have good VFX in them or have moments of great VFX but the totality of the production and one of the things that's come so far with visual effects is that when you're watching something we very well may comment on something and say look at the lighting my goodness look at that shot wow look at that location you won't know unless you talk to the creative team whether or not that really was the lighting team that needs to be credited or VFX was that set design or VFX was that director of photography or was that VFX and one of the hardest things on a film that's so heavily dependent on visual effects especially when you're dealing with something where you're taking something from the real world it's different when you're taking something that's outer space and science fiction but you have to make us believe the scale of a tiger jumping over beam there is no tiger in the shot but he's going to slide and we know on set that this is what it's going to be well the director of photography and everybody's got to incorporate and then in visual effects you not only have to get it but depending upon which way fire light is going there might be a shadow cast by that animal as it's jumping it's just extraordinary what has to go into making us believe what we're seeing it's extraordinary and obviously there's no better director for it than Roger Mouly he's right up there with any of the great masters of visual effects right now like James Cameron or that's one of the reasons why I'm sure it was so rewarding for him to have Cameron tell him how much he enjoyed it because I mean there is no one's any higher in the cinematic world at visual effects creation I mean there's other people obviously Lucas is the revolutionary as was Spielberg and Peter Jackson but Roger Mouly is in that category and his team and really when you break it down like this with somebody who worked on it you really see how much was VFX and I love that he likes to use a lot more practical as well because I always and it's part of in VFX artists know this like one it'll cost you less and two it'll probably look more realistic because sometimes if you go way too VFX heavy everything looks not real and it suspends your disbelief obviously right but if you kind of beautifully incorporate it like RRR did it's just I even though like there's some great action in like Pothon but there were still obviously moments in Pothon where you could clearly see there were VFX I don't remember moments like that in RRR maybe outside of just a couple small what most of RRR and why I think it was received so well from people in the West is because they didn't have to kind of forgive those little VFX stuff like they probably used to if you saw like old action films in Bollywood or different industries because you're like you know the VFX artist the VFX work here in Hollywood is already at such a high level because they spend such a ridiculous amount of money on it in India obviously as we know it does not they spend like a fourth and have been mastering it for so long and so the fact that they didn't have to do that in RRR is one of the reasons I think RRR did so well yeah and another thing that is so infectious and contagious and speaks to the greatness of Rajamooli is if you've never worked on a project like this before what it means to be creative is involved to have a director who knows the language of all disciplines there's a level of respect that's there it not only makes the work easier but the level of respect for the director to know the the terminologies and then to see your director wanting to be in the harness I will show you what I want the tiger to do I will hold the tiger on location that hands on in the dirt nitty gritty fashion that is irreplaceable and contagious and one of the reasons RRR is what it is it's because it came from the soul of this creative that just is in every molecule of this production and if you guys want us to stop doing stuff about RRR they just need to stop releasing stuff why would anyone want you to stop talking about RRR like this was just released they just keep releasing these different things RRR is going to be talked about for decades to come people will be talking about RRR 50 years from now so you better get used to it there will be a lot of people first even if they never saw they will be like oh I heard about the way they thought of slumdog I know slumdog is not an Indian film but the way people thought about oh I've never seen a belly but I've seen slumdog is that an Indian film this one will actually be an Indian film people know about it the biggest difference because I was around and watching and paying attention and rooting for slumdog when it won because at the time it was a very good movie and everybody loved Jai Ho however there is no comparison to the level of adulation and love and open doors now people saw slumdog and liked it and then didn't think about India again that is not happening with RRR this has made people want to know more want to watch more be awaiting for what is next from Rajamuli that didn't happen with slumdog and once again it wasn't an Indian film there is that as well what a great video let us know what other videos we can react to down below