VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 106

Heyo I worked on Rorschach! Some of my shots are in this video. The team at Intelligent Creatures in Toronto did an amazing job on Watchmen. Hands down my favorite film I've worked on.

Dante's peak miniature shot is absurdly well done

Thanks for your kind words about Rorschach in Watchmen, I was the CG Supervisor for Inteligent Creature Inc in Toronto, we were responsible for all the Rorshach mask shots in the final movie. One correction I'd like to make is that you showed tests carried our in pre-production by Frantic Films (you can see their name in the top right) but we won the contract over them. We didn't just have 5 shapes we moved between, we animated all shots bespoke from scratch using a 2D animation setup I created in Maya.

I remember in the BTS footage for Dantes Peak they mentioned that something like 6 cameras failed during the flood scene, and they were only able to do one take. But they were prepared for this exact failure, so they had multiple redundant cameras and were able to get the footage they needed. Blew my mind as a kid.

Watching these videos every Saturday is like the adult equivalent of watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Miniature artists react is definitely a category I'd love to see more of on this channel.

Hi, I’m Pat Mcclung. I was the visual effects supervisor on Dante’s Peak. There is so much to talk about in this film that I won’t go into great detail. This was the third show I had ever supervised, I was working at Digital Domain running the model shop and ask Jim Cameron if I could bump up to VFX Sup. He said yes. I did Sargent Bioko first, then Chain Reaction followed by Dante’s Peak. We were on an extremely short schedule to beat out Volcano. The reason it looks great is simple the crew that I had. They were the best. All the SFX including the water were supervised by Richard Stutsman, miniatures by Alan Faucher. There is so much to this film I would need a couple of hours to explain it all. It was quite a ride, 2 weeks later I started on Armageddon.

I love how collected Sam is when he says he has food poisoning. I would've just puked all over the set.

I worked on the first Harry Potter film in the model unit (miniatures) and I can tell you first hand, working on the miniatures was an absolute blast! We made various different scale sections of the school for close ups/fly by shots, as well as the full Hogwarts. We also made a bunch a forced perspective streets etc, and it was incredible to work on a fantasy style film that required plenty of models with such high detail. Even on the school windows, every single window pane was made of plastic transparency film and scored across with a pen, so any reflected light scattered in different directions to give the illusion of individual tiny panes of glass with lead piping. That one i know far too well as i did nearly all of them 😆 (We also stole some pre-made model trees that were left from Sleepy Hollow... Shhhh) 😆

The VFX in Watchmen still blow my mind. That movie is so unflinching that one bad shot would completely break the world

Whether you like Watchmen or not, one thing for sure is that it’s aged super well at least on a visual and technical level. As for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it’s actually not aged badly either in terms of VFX

I'm blown away by how you can still find astonishing VFX scenes to talk about after all these episodes!

All things considered, League of Extraordinary Gentleman still holds up after 20 years.

yes more miniatures please! I love when miniatures are used in movies...wish we had more minis and less CGI honestly.

My step dad actually worked on Dante's Peak and Watchmen. Working on Watchmen was really cool, but a physical nightmare because it was built in the middle of the desert in the summer.

I don’t love the Watchmen movie but the way they portrayed Rorschach was literally perfect. Such a brilliant move to make the mask flow and change organically rather than have a few different ones for each scene. This is why movie and TV adaptations for comic characters can be awesome, it can allow new little details that aren’t possible on a comic page.

Lord of the Rings and King Kong probably have some of the most extensive miniature work ever done. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight also had some miniature work for the Tumbler sequences that totally fooled me. That shot of the Tumbler going underneath the garbage truck and ramming it up into the ceiling of the tunnel was miniature.

I highly recommend the Director's Cut of Watchmen for genre enthusiasts. Many people who dislike Watchmen have only seen the theatrical version.

The bad fortune of Dante's Peak is that it premiered almost next to Titanic here in Mexico City, I went to see it because the rooms to see Titanic were impressive and without knowing almost anything about it, except what appeared on the poster and I was more than grateful for my fate. I've seen it about 20 times and it never bores me

The Abyss has some of the best miniature work in any movie. Apollo 13 the launch sequence is amazing. The spider in The Wild Wild West. The list goes on. The world of miniatures in film is a deep dive that deserves a few episodes. There are so many out there that you would never know were miniatures.