VFX Artists React to Bad & Great INDIANA JONES CGi

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The Temple of Doom bridge shot has so much more to it, and it got covered by one of the best VFX documentaries 'How To Film The Impossible'. When the crew are casually saying that the falling bodies are being rotoscoped, you have to remember this was done on film, that meant blowing up the frames, drawing lines around the objects onto transparent acetate, and then painting over the outlines to make the mask, rephotographing these onto 35mm film and then finally compositing the whole lot on an optical printer. When hanging off the cliff there's a lot of optical elements that needed to be combined, and stuntmen falling off watch matched by puppeteers so they could transition from the real people to the models as they fell from one side of the frame to the other. It's a fantastic documentary because it shows just how much work was needed before digital compositing became commonplace.

I love how Clint regularly shows up to mess with the boys even after all this time because they have so much fun together

Physics captain here: The ”2 shockwaves” of the nuke are not a mistake. The first one is electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light and infrared light etc) hitting the buildings and literally burning the surface, instantly vaporizing it. It travels at the speed of light. edit, thanks nathankoren for your awesome comment Then you get the shockwave that travels through the ground as the speed of sound is much faster in denser materials like the ground. edit ends Only after that does the actual traditional air shockwave hit, much later (relative term here, explosions are pretty fast). I recommend watching footage of the actual first nuke test Trinity here on youtube, where you can see that "light burning" happening. It’s amazing how destructive nukes are. Second point: an explosion can cause objects to fly away faster than the speed of sound = faster than the shockwave. Otherwise bullets would be bound to the speed of sound, which they exceed often by several magnitudes. A bullet is literally an explosion launched object. The explosion itself, the expansion of the exploding gasses, can be much faster than the speed of sound. Only after it’s lost it’s initial momentum, you just start pushing air, which pushes more air, which pushes more air, and that is limited to the speed of sound. So the launch speed of the fridge is dependent on how close to the nuke it was. Still the whole “Indy is in a led-lined fridge so he survives” is a bunch of physics herecy of course.

Fun thing for the Crystal Skull fridge - I was a fx artist on Cryptic Studios' "Champions Online" and was working on the desert map around the time that movie came out. I had to create a nuclear explosion event for the game, and I worked with the level designers to make a rare event that would drop a fridge on a random player and then have a fedora float down.

Dr. Jones found the only refrigerator in the whole town, otherwise the sky would be full of them. “Our refrigerators will blot out the sun!”

the melting faces made me squeeze my eyes shut as a kid but now I can't look away...it's such a cool effect

Really got to laugh so hard with Ren's anticlimatic "biggest hit all of all time" moment. That was a priceless laugh, thank you Ren! hahaha

@23:34 what I find amazing is when we see Mads Mikkelsen's character later, he just looks like he aged normally - not that his skull was completely smashed in by a metal spout. I was waiting for him to show up as Bond-type villain with a reconstructed face.

The de-aging on Mads Mikkelsen was so good they didn’t even notice it!!

22:08 To me, the reason why Harrison Ford still feels CGI is because he still looks a little too smooth at times. There are some scenes where he looks like he has one of those beauty filters on at 20% opacity. Also, the transition between expressions is too smooth. Even for his age, he should be switching expressions a touch faster, where as what they do here feels like a slowed down interpolation. This is still a breakthrough in deageing, but not 100% out of the uncanny valley :)

I think the bloom in Crystal Skull is just them trying to match the blown out lighting Janusz Kamiński and Spielberg were doing in every movie they did together in the 2000s. The jungle stuff in Crystal Skull is crazy, because when you watch the behind-the-scenes stuff you can see they actually went out and filmed stuff on location for the jungle, and it actually looks good, and then they added all this digital underbrush and overgrowth all over the place and it just makes the whole thing look fake to the point it doesn’t even make sense they filmed in real places because the whole thing just looks like a cartoon and like they were on a stage for everything.

8:50 NO WAY!!! In the over 30 years I've seen Temple of Doom multiple times, this is my first time ever seeing that shot with the hand IN the chest. The UK release we had on VHS at home didn't have it nor have I seen it on TV over the years. My guess is the censorship board had the shot removed for release over here.

Around 20:40 when they show Shia swinging I finally got why the scene looked off to me. The sun was on the left, the whole scene was lit from the left yet Shias back (that was facing left) was hidden in shadow and his face (facing away from the biggest light source, the sun) was brightly lit...

regarding 18:50 , I think the "double shockwave" is fully intentional. A nuke explosion would have the heat wave arrive way before the shockwave (at the speed of light, compared to the speed of sound), and locally it has this billowing effect on the smoke and dust. Real test footage from nuke explosions shows this same phenomenon, something that appears like a lighter wave before the actual shockwave hits

The opening of the Ark (thanks flexydex8754) scene is just incredible, a juxtaposition of spellbinding wonder and visceral hellishness. God this was terrifying as a young boy growing up... When you have writing and screenplay this effective it almost doesn't matter about how convincing the VFX are, your belief is suspended to an extent that you totally buy into what you're seeing and feeling. Let's not forget the musical score too. Damn... what a film Raiders is. Maybe the GOAT for me.

On the monkeys in Crystal Skull, one of the challenges was that they were using E-on Vue for forest rendering. At the time, it could do things well beyond any other package for atmosphere, terrain and plant simulation but it was also buggy as heck and integrated poorly. ILM had experience with Vue in Dead Man's Chest (the entire cannibal island was created in Vue) but there it was purely used for background mattes. For the first 5 versions, Vue was just a pretty good step up from stuff like Terragen but version 6 was an absolute game changer. Out of the box, you could do volumetric clouds that looked better than anything outside of a studio's proprietary workflow, spectral atmospheres (automatically doing things like Rayleigh scattering) and put down millions of terrain items (plants, rocks) on a fractal landscape with individual variations. This could even be done on a home PC of the time, though the render times were punishing. Vue 7 polished this and improved the workflow but it was one of those products that did what it did well but was really limiting once you stepped out and tried to do more.

"So you know hot ones? Yeah it's like that but nothing like it whatsoever"

Even as a kid it was obvious that sped up photography was an ingredient in creating the melting face sequence. And because it was so obvious I didn't care about the glasses basically disappearing, because I knew WHY they disappeared. Still, the melting face itself works so well that it actually sells the shot and I'm really glad they kept it in the movie.

Not so fun fact: The Temple of Doom is banned in India, because it was very stereotypical, presenting them in the wrong way and Goddess Kali being an evil goddess. They didn't even let them shoot the movie in India, it was shot in Sri Lanka with Sri Lankan people acting in it. The villain played by Amrish Puri only worked in the movie because it was a Spielberg movie.