So this is actually Part Two of our Lord of the Rings analysis here-
If you haven't seen the first one,
Click below to go find the first video, and watch it, it's great, we're gonna finish talking about it today!
Dude, the way the chunks get blasted off to the left side-
Why does this look photo-real?
This was a one-take-wonder
Oh, oh what was that?
- playing Lord of the Rings theme on kazoo -
Guys, welcome back to VFX Artists React
Today is a very very special episode. It is near and dear to my heart.
It is The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. We're going to be breaking down all the cool groundbreaking effects.
I have one tattoo... and it is a Lord of the Rings tattoo.
Clint: "What does it say?"
Niko: "Are you serious?"
It's a quote. It says, "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given us"
Saruman: "So, Gandalf, you try to lead them over Caradhras."
One of the biggest things that sets Lord the Rings apart, is the fact that they filmed most of the crazy, big
spectacular stuff for real, using miniatures, but not just regular miniatures. MASSIVE miniatures.
Big minis! Let's take a look at one of the most incredible miniature shots in the entire series here.
It's so alive and like, vibrant and detailed. Dude, oh my god, this- this reminds me of the dwarf sequence from The Hobbit
This is just like way better. We'll talk about that in next week's video, about The Hobbit. Subscribe to see that when it comes out!
But they spent so much time
modelling this whole thing, physically modelling it, *physically* modelling it. The whole model of Isengard is 60 feet wide
It was built in their, like, parking lot of WETA workshop-
The really cool thing is, to film this, because it's a miniature,
They couldn't just throw a big 35 millimeter film camera through the whole thing. It's actually a periscope. "Oh, no way. Really?" "Yeah"
"Okay!" So the camera is up high, and it's a periscope that's, like, swinging through the set.
DVD commentary: "Essentially this is one continuous shot, shot in on five separate pieces"
So basically, what they did, is they stitched together those five takes. Yeah, they'd motion track the whole move
and then added those birds in, in post. Yes. Those are probably CG Birds. So are these people...?
Blue screen elements or computer-generated people? Both. At this stage in time,
It's still...
easier to film somebody on a blue screen and drop them in the shot, then it's just like, model it and have it be
animated, so they still did that for a lot of this movie. That guy in the bottom
there, you can tell his lighting's a little bit different
"Yeah"
That's why you would use CG characters *these* days, is because it's a lot easier to match the lighting and have all the perspectives match
the camera flies through
oh OH! WHOOAA! "What is THAT?!"
The motion blur disappears for our frame! "What happened?" Look, the mo-blur stops on those guys too. "Oh, yeah, you're right"
That's just straight up VFX effects there-
"I REFUSE to believe that there's a VFX error in Lord of the Ri- *Wren cries*
This might have been one of those things that it's like, better to actually get the hero shot finished rather, than tweaking
this that already works 99% of the way. They had a whole list of "could-be-betters"
Yes! You know, we don't get to it, it'll work...it could be better
So I think probably the coolest miniature they built for the entire trilogy is Helm's Deep, because
They built it physically, a few different times, at a few different scales. "Hmm" Anytime you're seeing like, a close-up of people,
that's a full-size set. Any time you've seen a super wide shot of the entire Helm's Deep, that's actually the *smallest* miniature
they made. Anytime you're seeing like, big sweeping shots going right up next to the castle itself, that's probably their quarter scale "bigature" set
And then boooooom!
That was such like a mind-blowing moment in the movie! So it was a miniature explosion to BLOW out those chunks of debris
For real, but they could only do it once
This was a one-take wonder. The shot right after the initial explosion where we see the people like, rotating, flying outwards,
Those are all computer-generated people. Same with that wide shot from the battlefield here
"..is-is that Peter Jackson??
Yeah, that's Peter Jackson! "HOLY! P-Peter Jackson!"
Well Peter Jackson has a cameo in every movie he's done. "That's AMAZING dude!"
Did Lega- "Did the stuntman just did that?" Yes, he actually did that for real
But he was also hooked up to a cable- "Oh ok" on his back, so he would get down to the bottom, and then he had actually
just swing out. Also maybe just painted out the cable.
So, I think the second biggest contribution to the world of visual effects that Lord of the Rings made was Crowd
Simulation software and they developed a piece of software called
Massive. Massive is super cool
in that it let us see giant armies for the first time. And I see it as basically being a very fancy video game engine
So, if you ever played like one of the total war games,
uh when you see the crowds fighting, that's basically doing the exact same thing that Massive is doing.
Except Massive is built as a tool where you can change the behaviors and the hood's been taken off and you can tweak all the
parameters, but it's the same idea of having these different basically NPCs triggering different animations and
characteristics, based upon their situation. The shot where they're all running up and the first line of arrows are fired, the crowd simulation-
They're all in the "Run" animation and they're all moving and then they select the swath in the front and they just give those
"Kill" animations, and so those all just go to a mo-cap fall and the rest of them just stay in the "Run" animation. It's just all
based off of motion capture data, they just rolled HUNDREDS of takes of different motion capture data of dudes fighting, running,
It's cycling through these different mo-cap performances that they've captured for all these guys
They created a whole
Character Generator, kind of like what you'd see at the beginning of an RPG, like where you select your character and
you can like, morph- make the ears THIS big, make the forehead THIS big, and they basically just throw on a random seed for every
character Massive was referencing. So *every* individual orc of the entire army was actually unique.
Let's move on to the Mines of Moria, there's actually a lot of cool stuff going on here
The Balrog also lies deep within. If we dig too deep into these breakdowns, the Balrog might show up
*Wren gasps*
Look at that shot there
that's definitely a miniature with the people placed in. And you can kind of tell because the people don't
*quite* fit but we only really can tell that because of our- "Cuz of our sharpended eyes!" Same thing with this shot
It's like, another super highly detailed miniature shot, with the people added in.
So this is the old version of Gollum right here.
Notice how his eyes are a different color as well. They're grey here,
they're blue in Two Towers and beyond
"Mmm. I love that-"
That like, "-that optical effect on the eyes" that retro reflective type look- "Yeah" of like a cat off in the dark when you're shining
a light at them
Do you want know why they have that? For a cat's eyes, who are light-sensitive,
The back of the eyeball is basically mirrored. So it bounces light back into the rods and cones
So you get double exposure: both from the front and one more from the back.
Boromir: They have a cave troll.
The first like, big thing
from this whole sequence is the Cave Troll moment. Peter Jackson also had this whole backstory for the troll saying that- "Oh, yeah"
He's just like this kid and his mom is waiting somewhere else in the mines.
"I wonder when little boy is gonna come home!"
Yeah, like "No! Little boy's never coming home. He's dead!"
The troll is actually the first bit of visual effects they did for the entire trilogy
They started by basically making a clay model of the troll and then digitizing them in with a laser scanner
There's a program called ZBrush where you can basically sculpt with clay in the computer
But that kind of stuff didn't really exist back then. Rather than sitting there and trying to, like, come out and do it with
polygons little by little on the computer,  you just sculpt it out of clay and scan it in
Did we talk about this scene enough... to unleash...
...The Balrog..?
*Wren gasps*
We dug too deep
"Ooooooo!" "Hot damn!"
Look at that! "Ooo!"
So. Good!
By this point, everybody's seen a thousand CG characters in their lifetime,
but something that is worth pointing out with the Balrog is
The fire in the smoke. These days, fire and smoke, you do an actual fluid simulation.
Gaseous fluid simulation, to simulate actual fire and actual smoke. But the thing is, back then, they couldn't do that.
So what they did with the Balrog, to still make all that fire and smoke look real, is they use the particle system- So basically,
imagine little images moving out, attached to points, and on those images , they would put fire and smoke elements
they'd filmed themselves. The fact that you had *real* elements as
images for those sprites MAKES the fire look real and MAKES the smoke look real and the whole thing just comes together really well.
So what's crazy about this shot is that, all those people you're seeing are NOT real, they're NOT even blue screened.
This is like, the first *BIG time* they actually succeeded in having really good digi doubles.
"Yeah, those are 100% CG people there."
They look... completely photo real.
"They do look completely photo real."
The MOTION is photo real.
Considering the lighting technology at the time is not that great, and the light stimulation is not that great at the time.
"Why does this look photo real?" Honestly? The biggest thing:
the cloth on the hobbits' capes. "Yep."
So the cloth simulation here is a real physics simulation and when you do physics simulations and they're good
They tend to look very realistic, at least in their motion.
And also, there's a pretty strong directional light,
there's a lot of shadow that really gives definition to these characters
So you don't have to really rely on having very advanced light simulation
You can just have one good directional light and render that well
And then couple with the fact that the motion is both motion captured
So THAT'S completely realistic, and in the cloth simulation, it hides the rest of it
and then it's all on a photo real background.
I wanted to get you guys' opinions on this last shot that I wanted to talk about
"Oh wait, I remember this! Look at- he's sliding off the rocks?!" So that's a miniature shot. They film this for real
"Oh, no"
I guess that was a blue screen element of Sam climbing up and then running
and that's an example of why you
use digital doubles for a shot like this, is because the parallax doesn't match up, and it makes it look like his feet are sliding across the ground.
Alright guys, I know we've talked about a lot
I just want to wrap this up with Niko and Wren's, probably favorite explosion in cinema history
"Ooooo!"
Look at that smoke, that CG smoke, they're finally getting their fluid simulations in there.
"Look at that..." That's a fluid simulation. "Yeah"
The sound design...
"Beooowwww!"
That... "I LOVE that!"..blast wave!
God that looks good!
Look at the dirt! Jeez- the way the chunks get BLASTED off to the left side! "I have watched that explosion so many times!" "So good."
They didn't have a 3D model of this tower. They just had the actual
25-foot practical model, and they wanted to really control the way it was destroyed. They're like, 'well what do we do? I don't know!'
I'll see you guys. It's Christmas break. This ONE dude. He's like, NOPE. I don't need a Christmas break. CANCELLED.
So he single-*handedly*
modeled this MASSIVE tower, came back,
'Here's a little present for y'all' and it was this PERFECT model to be destroyed in the most PERFECT way
"Would you give up your Christmas break to do this shot?" For Lord of the Rings? Heck yeah!
Throughout all of Lord of the Rings
There's all of these really smart decisions, where they are maxing out their techniques and their technology
But not pushing it so far where it breaks.
It's kind of the way the whole movie was, because there wasn't anything that anybody wasn't willing to try.
We never just walked away from something because it was a little more difficult, and that's, you know,
Pete and Barry and the whole, the whole group. I mean, it just starts from the top down.
One of our most highly requested videos was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We hope you guys loved it!
Please leave a comment down below of a movie or a scene or a show that has some cool VFX that you guys loved!
And are curious about how they're made. We'll talk about it. Next up,
We are going to compare Lord the Rings to The Hobbit and do a breakdown of all the different technology and whether it was successful or not as successful between the two movies, it's going to be awesome.
So consider subscribing so you do not miss that episode!
