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00:00 Let's welcome, he's a Primetime Emmy VFX nominee
00:03 for the show, Foundations VFX Supervisor, Chris McLean.
00:08 (audience applauding)
00:11 So, there's, you know, the sci-fi shots of spaceships
00:19 and galaxy in this show can make the entire canon
00:24 of Star Trek and Star Wars blush.
00:27 It is just really, just mind-blowing.
00:31 And there's a saying in the VFX world,
00:34 you could have it fast, you could have it cheap,
00:39 and you can make it good,
00:40 but what we're seeing here is excellent.
00:43 When building this out, are you guys like going back
00:48 to the Asimov books, or are you looking at like Hubble,
00:52 like deep space Hubble telescope stuff to, you know--
00:56 - When we started on season one, we looked at,
01:00 we started with real space.
01:01 It was all NASA, we wanted it to be more realistic.
01:05 Then we started looking at, you know, Asimov covers
01:09 and things like that, and tried to bring a little bit
01:10 more color into the world, and you know,
01:12 and then also riffed on some of the sci-fi greats
01:16 like Doug Trumbull and Slitscan and things like that,
01:18 where we could, you know, like the FTL jump in season one
01:22 was all based off of kind of old school technology,
01:26 like burning wire wool, Trumbull Slitscan.
01:30 We did some fire effects and kind of combined everything
01:33 into a CG world that, you know, Dine did a really great job
01:38 on kind of bringing to life, so.
01:40 - I mean, this plays on a big screen.
01:42 This is really amazing.
01:44 - Thank you.
01:45 - What of, in regards to the diggers at the end there,
01:50 talk about designing that.
01:56 - Well, Rory Shane and I, we have a very good relationship.
02:01 We're kind of like the real Bob and Doug in space guys,
02:06 'cause we're, you know, both Canucks.
02:09 We started out, you know, we both started out scouting
02:16 in Iceland, and we started just designing the show
02:19 on planes, you know, passing each other iPads
02:21 back and forth, kind of drawing over top
02:23 of each other's stuff.
02:24 And that was one where, you know, usually you don't want
02:29 to do CG spiders in film, and we kind of said,
02:35 fuck it, we'll do a CG spider.
02:37 And we tried to make it cool.
02:39 It ended up kind of being like a CG crab.
02:41 But then we took that design, we gave it to Framestore,
02:44 they did a bunch of motion studies for us,
02:46 and we just tried to really make sure
02:48 that we nailed the scale, and it turned out really well.
02:52 So, I think so anyways.
02:54 - And then how long for the entire show,
02:59 you know, for one season as far as the FX?
03:04 - I mean, we were almost two years on season one
03:08 because of COVID, but I've been on the show
03:11 for four and a half years now.
03:13 So, you can tell I have PTSD.
03:16 (audience laughing)
03:18 But no, it's been a long run.
03:20 It's about, you know, season two's taken
03:24 just about as long now, especially with the break
03:26 that we're having right now.
03:28 - And I gotta imagine it's not.
03:30 I mean, there's a lot of season two that has to drop.
03:33 You're still working on it?
03:35 - Oh no, we're done.
03:37 We're done.
03:37 I kind of slipped out there and said season two
03:39 instead of something else.
03:40 But no, yeah, season two is very much done in the bag,
03:44 and I'm excited for everybody to see it.
03:47 - And then tell us more about working
03:49 with the other departments, because similar to Silo,
03:54 there's so much that's live,
03:57 and there's a majority that is green screen.
04:00 - Well, I know Jack's here in the crowd somewhere.
04:02 He's my VFX producer, but we kind of live
04:05 in Candy Mountain on Foundation because visual effects
04:07 has such an important role on the show.
04:09 We are in everybody else's business for better or worse,
04:14 but we all work together to make the best product possible
04:18 and the best show possible and just try to make sure
04:20 that everybody doesn't pay attention to what we're doing.
04:25 Even though they're like, "Oh, that's a cool shot,"
04:27 they don't think, "Oh, it's a visual effects shot,"
04:29 or anything like that, so yeah.
04:31 - For you guys, how can you tell when it's off?
04:34 Is it just, because for us sometimes it looks perfect.
04:38 For you guys, you just know if something's off.
04:43 - It's very subjective, depending on the supervisor
04:46 and depending on whatever.
04:47 But for us, it's just making sure that it looks
04:50 like something that could be photographed
04:53 or look like it has been photographed.
04:55 We pay a lot of attention to the cameras that we use,
04:58 the lenses that we use, the focal width of the lenses
05:03 and the T-stops and all of that stuff.
05:05 Everything that a cinematographer thinks about,
05:07 we think about on the show to make sure
05:08 that we're getting that right,
05:10 make sure we're not putting spherical bokeh
05:12 into an anamorphic shot, that sort of stuff.
05:15 - Tell us more about the technology you are using for this.
05:18 - Well, we have every kind of shot conceivable
05:21 in visual effects on this show,
05:22 so we use all the technology.
05:26 (audience laughing)
05:27 - But I mean, did you build anything,
05:29 any new programs or anything like that?
05:32 - Not really, no.
05:33 I mean, one thing that we do not use a lot of
05:37 is blue and green screen on the show.
05:39 And that's kind of, that's just an aesthetic choice
05:43 because we would rather get the natural color
05:45 than try to, you know, dispel stuff.
05:48 People turn gray when you dispel them,
05:50 when they get green spill on them, so.
05:52 But no, in terms of technology,
05:55 we use some volume capture on season one.
05:59 We built a scanning rig on season one
06:01 that we are using on season two,
06:05 or used on season two.
06:07 We are, I don't think, I mean,
06:12 the vendors are using their kind of standard processes,
06:15 but we didn't really, there wasn't anything
06:18 innovative in terms of technology.
06:22 We did look at a lot of old technology
06:24 to kind of give it that analog feel,
06:27 and tried to bring it back to reality a little bit,
06:29 'cause you can end up making impossible looking shots
06:33 if you're not trying to ground things
06:35 and things that already exist.
06:37 - For someone that wants to go into the VFX field,
06:40 what kind of advice can you offer them?
06:42 To start off.
06:44 - Learn about film first.
06:47 Decide if you want to do it.
06:49 And then pick one small piece,
06:54 or find out what you might be good at,
06:56 and go for that one small thing,
06:59 and then expand your horizons after that.
07:02 Like if you want to be a modeler, or a texture artist,
07:04 or a lighter, or a compositor,
07:06 focus on that craft first,
07:08 spend your 10,000 hours doing that,
07:09 and if you want to become a supervisor after that,
07:11 you got to spend another 10,000 hours doing something else.
07:13 But just spend as much time as you can
07:16 focused on that one thing,
07:17 and everything else will just kind of organically
07:20 come together.
07:21 I mean, I started as a junior asset modeler
07:24 way back in the day.
07:26 - Now, how is the industry changing?
07:32 Where do you think we'll be five years from now?
07:37 - I think we will...
07:39 I hate to bring up AI, but...
07:43 I think that's gonna become a big tool set for us.
07:48 And one thing that I always tell everybody about AI
07:52 is that you're always gonna need artists
07:55 to tell the AI what to do.
07:57 You're never gonna be able to just tell a computer,
08:01 or a neural net to write a script,
08:03 or animate a person, or do anything like that.
08:08 You have to have somebody who's balancing
08:11 and checking that information that comes out the other end,
08:13 i.e. a human participant in the operation.
08:17 (audience applauding)
08:20 AI is a tool.
08:23 It's not meant to replace us.
08:25 - Chris McLean, VFX Supervisor Foundation.
08:30 (audience applauding)
08:33 (audience applauding)