Amazing Before & After VFX Breakdown: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
1,291Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an incredible feat in terms of VFX and a labor of love from director Luc Besson, who was a childhood fan of the original comic. For this epic, alien-filled sci-fi a whopping 2,355 effects shots were needed, which in order to be manageable, were split between ILM, Rodeo FX, and Weta Digital depending on each company's strengths.
Like the music in this video?
Get it on Google Play:► https://bit.ly/2F10vbs ◄
Get it on itunes: ► https://apple.co/2ENGfu9 ◄
Listen on Spotify: ► https://spoti.fi/3boTfCl ◄
Buy it on Amazon: ► https://amzn.to/2QVJZfk ◄
Rodeo FX
Rodeo FX was given the task of creating The Alpha Station in addition to the main spaceship "Intruder" and various space battles.
Rodeo spent a lot of time breaking down concept artwork into individual pieces of architecture, which could then be modeled to start building up what would end up being, a huge library of CG buildings, props, and architectural elements.
These elements were then used to form hundreds of different modules which were the building blocks of every spaceship and building. 10 different modules could be assembled into hundreds of different looking combinations.
Industrial Light and Magic
ILM's main task was the extremely complex "Big Market Sequence" which consisted of approximately 600 shots spread between two worlds, Kyrian and Big Market. Each area within the market was treated and created as an individual set. Working once again from concept artwork, ILM built generic elements such as windows, doors, tables, and props as well as specific elements like stores which were then used to "dress" each individual set.
For the crowds, ILM did a motion capture session to obtain some general movement of tourists window shopping and talking to merchants, this was then used to create different animated sequences over 1000 frames long, containing different groups of aliens. When a character got closer to the camera they switched to Hero animation to create a specific action for the shot.
Weta Digital
Weta handled around 1,300 shots and playing to weta's strengths, these were mainly CG Creatures and a large amount of motion capture for The "Pearl world".
The Pearls are a race "In Sync" with their environment and show their emotions through their skin, which meant that on top of the primary and secondary animation of the characters there had to be a tertiary or even quaternary animation of their skin, in order to accomplish this Weta had to develop a complex skin-shading system.
Around 200 CG creatures were created for the film, many of these creatures' looks were locked down during production enabling Weta to concentrate on the "hero" characters. This was only possible because of the huge amount of concept art, Director Luc Besson had amassed.
In homage to Luc and his previous work, "the Fifth element" Weta added a brief shot of Bruce Willis' flying taxi somewhere in the film.
Please give us a like if you enjoyed this video, don't forget the links to the music in this video are in the video description and be sure to let us know, in the comments, which movie VFX you'd like to see behind next!
Read more here: www.famefocus.com
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/focusfame