Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - How MrBeast’s Squid Game was Made with SoKrispyMedia

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Marques and Andrew sit down with Sam and Micah of SoKrispyMedia to discuss the visual effects from the viral 'Squid Game' video with MrBeast. Sam, Micah, and their team had ten days to create the visual effects that took some of the scenes to the next level, and we're willing to bet you didn't even notice. If you're interested in how the effects were made or just want to know what the future of YouTube could look like, this one is a must-listen. Enjoy! Links: MrBeast Squid Game: https://bit.ly/3ppP28C Behind the Scenes with SoKrispyMedia: https://bit.ly/3xSkj83 Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://twitter.com/sokrispymedia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. You guys might have seen probably the biggest video on YouTube of the past year. I mean, easily of the past year, but probably of the past few, which was MrBeast's recreation of the Squid Game Show

on his own channel using a ton of the game mechanics. The video got 120 million views in four days. It's all anyone on the platform was talking about. And it was incredibly well done and really interesting coming from his channel. So we got a chance to speak with some of the creators that worked with him on that video, on the behind the scenes and on the VFX

that went into making that such a unique and incredible video. So before you listen to this conversation, I highly recommend watching MrBeast's video, if you haven't already somehow, and then also watching the below-linked video going over the behind-the-scenes of how it was made, how they kept everybody in the moment

with a ton of combination of practical effects and VFX. I still haven't seen Squid Games, but now that I've seen all of what went into this production, I have a ton more respect, and I probably kind of do want to see squid games now but i recommend that and then we go into the chat and just in case you still haven't seen squid game and you don't want anything spoiled there are a couple talks about some games and stuff in this so maybe save it for later if you haven't spoiler alert let's get into it welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And we've got another special episode today. We've got guests in the Waveform

Podcast studio. We've got Sam and Micah from So Crispy Media. It's just So Crispy Media. Okay. We have a lot in common and I don't know if people know this, and I think a lot of people who have seen a lot of videos on YouTube might have seen some of your videos but might not remember, oh, these are all from the same channel, because that's what happened to me. I watched some of your older videos,

and I realized, I've seen these before, but I didn't realize they're all from the same people. So I went back on your channel, and I see that you've been making videos for 11 years on YouTube. Do you have an origin story, how you describe how you got started, why YouTube, and why the name So Crispy Media? Yeah, so we definitely started around, I feel like we're in kind of the OG YouTube kind of era.

I think that's right. Yeah, Freddie W era. Yeah, so Freddie Wong, the Cordor Digital guys, a lot of guys that we're friends with now. We loved watching their content when we were kind of getting into making digital content. And that's kind of how we started. And I got into visual effects and editing films, short films and whatnot. And our YouTube channel kind of has always existed as more of creating big videos that are kind of one-offs. So it's sometimes harder to pinpoint exactly us as an audience, more of just, oh, I've seen those before. So we actually hear that a lot, which is kind of one-offs. So it's sometimes harder to pinpoint exactly us

as an audience, more of just, oh, I've seen those before. So we actually hear that a lot, which is kind of funny. But yeah, we started it back when I was around high school and just continued it and have been working on it ever since. And it's not until recent that we've gotten into a lot of the visual effects

services, a lot of the higher tier videos that we've really been growing the audience, which has been fun. Yeah. Sam, you're 25, right? Yeah. Yeah. So to give some context, I mean, this is probably over 10 years of 10, 11 years. So you back that up.

It was like 14 years old, probably. That's awesome. It's been a long time. And then I met Mike a couple of years ago. We started working together and he became a producer on the channel back when we started with Chalk Warfare 4.0. So we had this series that we had in high school that was Chalk Warfare. We made three of them and then took kind of a break for quite a while. I think it was like a six-year break, right?

Yeah. Yeah, so we had about a six-year break and made the 4.0 video that ended up doing really well and kind of revamped our channel where we started doing a lot more visual effects content. Yeah. So I think people watching today might know you guys from the behind-the-scenes video of how the MrBeast Squid Game project came to exist.

One of my favorite videos ever. Not only the actual MrBeast video, but the behind-the-scenes because I'm a sucker for watching behind-the-scenes videos. And I sort of would describe your videos and your style as like VFX projects, where they take a long time to make. VFX stuff is really heavy and notoriously we make a lot of videos in a short amount of time in tech YouTube,

but VFX stuff takes a while, very time consuming and very elaborate, at least to me, because I'm not familiar with the software. I want to like, do you find that that's like a big challenge in maintaining a YouTube presence and like how many things you get to do on YouTube? Talk about like what it's like being a VFX creator. Yeah, it's a really hard medium to be in because when you're making content, you can make make it fast and you can't make it cheap. So it's hard to create the stuff online. And then with the push for watch time, that's a big one too.

So when you want to make it longer, we end up spending a lot more time on a project. So we started that really with the Chalk Warfare 4 stuff. It was our first time ever really making a video over 10 minutes, and it really helped with the YouTube algorithm, which was exciting for us because we've always just been wanting to make content that we want to watch and we want people to see. That's always been our mindset and our mission statement. From that, really one of our longest films that we had made was Chalk Warfare 4,

and we followed along with the trajectory of making stuff like that. It is definitely a really tricky thing, like doing VFX in particular on YouTube. Because YouTube does reward watch time. It's content that you can make on a weekly basis is very well rewarded as well, that consistency. And things of VFX, like the cost per frame can be really, really expensive.

And not only the dollar cost per frame, but just the labor cost per frame. Because in our world, not all frames are created equal, right? So like there's these- That's a good metric. 24 frames for a second can be a weeks long process. So it does, in a way it's ironic because we love YouTube

and we like, you know, believe in the platform. We like love posting on YouTube, but in a lot of ways, like we would be more incentivized to do short form, you know, like something where we just have a 15 second window we have to deal with. Cause then we could realistically turn over a lot more ways, we would be more incentivized to do short form, like something where we just have a 15-second window we have to deal with because then we could realistically turn over a lot more content with the amount of labor that's required.

Yeah, but with length, you get the ability to tell a story. And that ultimately is what we want to then do with a lot of our longer-form content. So if we're making a video, it can be hard, and it can be a big process where we go through these cycles of, it may take a year long to create a larger form film, but we're able to really dive into it and make it something that we're proud of.

And that's kind of been the trajectory of what we've been working towards. One of the formats that we found to be really cool and work really well both for us and for YouTube is this idea of we do these big, massive tentpole films that have all these VFX and they're huge spectacles and they're kind of like a moment for our channel. And then we also release a behind the scenes of that because we find that telling the story of how we made something and how we overcame the obstacles of,

how did you do this massive shoot on a YouTube-sized team, sized project? It ends up creating a lot of cool stories in and of itself because there's always problems to solve and there's always unique solutions. And there's also a lot of innovative tech involved to be able to find ways to do things that, you know, normally costs a hundred X where we've found ways to do them for a lot cheaper. So it's, it's a lot of, there's a lot of like story in and of itself about even just telling how we made a video. So we find that that format of doing a video with a how we made it works really well for us. It is really interesting to hear

and have all the buzz about this behind the scenes because I come from a background of thinking that no one really cares about how we made it. To be completely honest, when we used to never do behind the scenes, we would do it on a second channel. And it wasn't until recently when we realized we needed to push out some more

or at least try to push out some more content that we decided to start uploading on our main channel as well for behind the scenes, we would do it on a second channel. And it wasn't until recently when we realized we needed to push out some more, or at least try to push out some more content, that we decided to start uploading on our main channel as well for behind the scenes. And normally something like the behind the scenes of the Squid Game project wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for that mindset. Because I was always under the impression that people just wanted to watch the content. Because the further you kind of dive into the technicals, you start to think it's not as cool when you're doing it.

Yeah. And I'm unaware of the fact that people might actually be interested in this yeah you might underplay you might be underplaying how much people are like fascinated by it on something they're unfamiliar with i think our audience would be like i was kind of describing your channel as like our channel audience really likes tech and gadgets and they really like film and production and you guys are bringing that about as close together as possible i mean we we do a lot of uh a lot of practical effects in here like almost all the stuff we do is practical we have a motion graphics person but

that's mostly titles and stuff like that you guys are bringing that just right on top of each other with like motion tracking and all that and it's it's fascinating to watch i think our audience would super super enjoy that and i was dying to see behind the stuff, the behind the scenes stuff of all of your things. Sam, you might have a better way to explain this. I'll take a second. But there's kind of this mantra that we found that we love to be able to kind of,

I didn't explain it, find the marriage of technology and innovative technology and how can you apply that to storytelling. A lot of it boils down to this idea that we can take tech that's being used by massive Hollywood studios and find ways to democratize it to be able to allow content creators to utilize it. A great example is motion capture.

Five, four years ago, that was very inaccessible to now. For content creators, now we've been able to access motion control suits that are cheaper and we can use them and now we can been able to access motion control suits that are cheaper and we can use them. And now we can find ways to like integrate those into our content. So we love to be able to find those, like whether it's innovative tech

or these little moments where, you know, new software is coming out, whatever to be able to then say, oh, hey, actually let's try to take this and let's tell a story with it. And that's kind of like the thought process of how it eventually evolves in these short films.

Like we have a lot of really fun short film ideas for the sake of like, oh, that'd be a hilarious short film. But more often than not, there's even tech behind it that we can think oh now that this is possible let's make a film about this i feel like that's the robots for us like that too it's like we have the robot now we think of an intro shot that we want to do of it or just we're begging for a video that we can use the the robot arm in yeah he brings up an interesting point because it is kind of about a marriage of tech where we have

for a while we don't make a lot of content. But when we do, we try to make it something new and refreshing with what we've recently learned. A good instance of this is around 2015, 2016 we really got into VR. And then we did

a cool VR series with google daydream where we made like three pieces of content so we have like 25 minutes of content where it's literally in stereoscopic vr and like that might not sound that you might not know what that would mean but for video wise like for video sake making a youtube piece of content in 360 degree with stereo that's the equivalent of making like six videos per one video because you're literally doing a left eye and a right eye and it's and then it had uh stereo or it had a spatial audio so when you turned yeah as well it felt very immersive i think this is the year i also did my only 360 video yeah when it was like

a huge deal and i did a studio tour in 360 and i had sort of like navigate around like having this camera in the middle and walking around it and touring things. It was fascinating. And I remember that. It was like back when the Odyssey was a thing, right? Was that what it was? I think that's what we used, yeah. Super cool stuff. But we loved like getting involved with that and then figuring out a way to make our content with that.

So when you watch those videos, it's like those were a production nightmare. And I think if anyone who was like making a YouTube channel where we're like, yeah, we need to get content out regularly, we would have never done that. Yeah. Yeah. I also want to, I, I figure you guys might not know my love for the word crispy. I've described words like to describe like really sharp footage. Like when we're trying to get a shot and there's like the exact, like, it's really weird trying

to describe footage, but like it has the's like the exact like it's really weird trying to describe footage but like it has the breadth and the depth to it and the texture and you just capture it just right and some of my friends john and austin and i have described it as like a really crisp shot and we love being able to get crispy videos and to the point where we've had uh i think is hashtag team crispy okay we all feel like we're part of the same group where we're like, oh yeah, we know what a crispy shot is and we know how to get one. We feel like you guys are honorary Team Crispy

because you've had the name way longer than we've even been talking about this. I just wanted to toss that out there. I love that. This might be the greatest compliment we've ever received. The crispy shots. It's definitely a great way to describe visual effects too. When it's something that you really like, it's okay, that's perfect. You crispy shots. Exactly. Aptly named. It's definitely a great way to describe visual effects too. Like when it's something

that you really like, it's okay, that's perfect. You know what it is when you see it. Yeah. Hashtag team crispy. Merch, you're willing to come out here soon?

It's never too late. Never too late. Okay, so the Mr. Beast Squid Games project I think was the, maybe the perfect combination of like how you would get maximum interest

in a behind the scenes because most Mr. Beast videos and I've talked to Jimmy about this it's like people want to know how it was done and kind of the most amazing part of the video is that it was real it actually happened he really did say that word a million times to a camera he really did run a marathon in the biggest shoes like that's actually what happened and that's the amazing part of the video. And this latest one was like, all right, we all know what squid games is. We've seen it. There's these crazy challenges and he's going to put real people through these challenges to find an overall winner at the end. And watching that video to me, I'm in the mode that I sort of go in when I go to watch Mr. Beast video, which is,

all right, this is going to be real. Let's see how I pulled it off. And so slowly my mind starts to realize more and more, oh, there's a little bit of VFX happening in this video. This is really interesting. I'm curious. There are multiple people here who said, no, it's good. That's what it is. He's already built it.

I mean, that should be a compliment to y'all. Hayato was like, no, this is real. I was like, I think it's close to real, but there's some help involved. It's interesting because it's such a hidden, it's interesting because in a way, the better we do our jobs, the less people realize we're doing the job.

That's always the joke. It's like, if we do our job well, you're not supposed to know we did our job. Which is awesome and hurts at the same time. So it's like a great thing and a bad thing. It's like, oh, it's awesome you didn't notice those VFX, but also at the same time it's like, hey, we did do a lot of work to make that shot.

It's kind of like a really well-done video game. You can tell when something runs really smoothly, it's just great and immersive, and when someone steps weird over a curb, it's like, what were they thinking? This is terrible and just broke immersion. Exactly. And going back to the practicality of MrBeast, i think it's the perfect marriage when he added these visual effects

because everything that you saw was still done practically it was all still done and like we can tell you that stuff the stuff he does is real like yeah it was done practically and it was it's like incredible and we are really just bringing in our style and being able to allow them to do stuff that is impossible yeah you know it's like an enhanced yes version yes yeah i i'm trying to imagine like you guys like put yourselves in our shoes for a second when we're there and we know like for vfx it's really important to shoot things a certain way and do things a certain way and you know think like the footage you get is like you know that's that's our canvas that we paint on you know and if that canvas is perfectly white and clean and ready to go, and it's like, you know, we can do whatever we want, that's fantastic.

If the canvas gets muddied, that's a problem. So it's a little bit terrifying going into a production where they're literally, and this is completely true, there is no take two. Like you go in and when the cameras roll and the game's played, you get what you get. So there's a little bit of that like, oh crap kind of feeling of like, when you're getting this all set up, where we're like, oh man, like, you know, let's, we have one chance to knock this out

and do it right. And so we're really fortunate, like the footage came out fantastic. Like, you know, the final end product we're super proud of. So, but it was definitely a little bit, it was pretty scary getting up to that point. There was a moment, I think,

before the first game in your video where he comes up to you and is like, everything going to go well? Oh yeah. At least from your side okay good let's do it run man you're already you're ready for this and there's like a pause for a second i was like they're nervous that's gotta be terrifying to like go through all of this man it yeah i mean it's it's interesting because you know we do so much preparation to like you know get everything right but there's variables you can't control you know i mean like it's just because, you know, we do so much preparation to, like, you know, get everything right. But there's variables you can't control. You know what I mean?

Like, it's just like when you're out there and you're filming, like, you know, the game is going to go on. You know, so it's a little bit of kind of like, for us, it's uncharted territory because we've always had the privilege of being able to, like, control the set. You know, take two, take three, say, oh, that didn't work. Let's change things up. But for this one, it's like, you know. Yeah, even in terms of visual effects. If you're filming a scene and you need to put a blue screen behind somebody, you know, if you're filming a one camera show, you should put the blue screen up behind that actor for that shot, move on to the next shot, move all your supplies,

move your crew, everything. This is a holistic scene. Like we're, we're catering to a game show that's happening and we're just enhancing it. All right. We're going to take a quick break here to talk sponsors. And we'll come right back with our conversation with Sam and Micah from So Crispy Media. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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I thought it was really interesting, or blue screen. I thought it was really interesting in your video how you said you basically almost didn't use blue screens because they used a black backdrop to make, so the audience felt more like they were in and real and everything. When it comes to,

we do super basic green screen effects here, stuff almost always stationary. But now it's coming into motion and you don't have tracking points on all that and everything and not a real blue screen, no second takes, it's just black. How much harder is that now to add visual effects to it and to go into that post-production process of,

is it a big difference or? Yeah, so basically if you're committing to blue screen, you're committing to doing work on every shot that gets taken. But when we're looking at the reference of what we're trying to match, which is from the show Squid Game, they ended up replacing it with a lot of just black abyss backdrops.

Yeah. And then also there were some like a steel texture on some and our jobs and look at that and say, okay, how can we get the best like bang for our buck? Right. Like if we're, if we're trying to do visual effects on this, is it better to do all visual effects for every single shot or enhance it on some of the shots that can really be like massaged and we can touch those ones up yeah so we made the decision early on to say it'll better cater this entire product if we just go ahead and do black screen and we we had done this actually with a commercial i was on with my buddy um pat hall he shot a

patrick mahomes commercial. And we didn't have a lot of time to shoot with him because he's a huge athlete and he's got a lot to do. So we shot with Black Curtains with Duvetyn and it just created such a great effect and we enhanced the story with visual effects. So we took that same idea to this as well, which was it's going to provide a very realistic experience because everyone's there playing this game and all the shots should have tracker points because

they're shooting wider typically. So all the shots should have tracker points. We should be able to get everything pulled out of that. Some shots will then be final. And then when we want to have a shot that kind of looks down, we'll do the work there. And we did this process called Luma keying, which is a kind of advanced process of being able to take you convert the image to a

grayscale map and you clamp the uh the the shadows and the highlights to be able to then say if it's black right put make a matte out of it so you're basically making a luma matte so if it's black you can put something behind it if it's white that'll be the matte okay yeah that's awesome yeah one other thing to add to that too and i think it's like worth emphasizing is the immersion for the contestants we thought was like super important and super huge because um you know these are not actors these are not like these are just literally contestants they're random people playing this game and so i don't even know like i wouldn't even expect that they knew that this was going to be the effects at the end of the day. I think the contestants playing on the set thought this was the set. And so the concern of doing even really heavy blue screen stuff, in my mind, is that it takes the contestant out of the game.

And then they start thinking about, oh, the filming. And it's like, what's going to be in the blue screen? What's going to be replaced? And on the contrary, having the black screen there, I think it helped the contestants be able to play the game and focus on the game. And just be able to actually do their the contestants be able to play the game and focus on the game and just be able to actually do their job, which is to play the game. They're not thinking about

all the other things going on around them. So I think that helped with a lot of the immersion too. Yeah, definitely. And from the behind the scenes, you can see we did use blue for some sections

where it's decided, hey, blue screen is the obvious choice here. We know what we're replacing this with and it's not a dark abyss. So it's really just kind of that level of when you're working on something that has this many shots and wanting to cater to the product uh that's what we did when that was ultimately a really good decision too because the other thing is when you're shooting with blue screen even i saw this on the show like uh you can spend a very long time on every single shot

but you're still going to get that kind of fringing around the hair and you're really gonna have to touch it up yeah yeah but it looked really good because it was shot on like a black screen so it's just a perfect lighting fall off and then like all of the all of the light that was then hitting it it was just being absorbed by that so it literally was just lighting the stage and everything looked really cool and cinematic just right off the bat it was really well done i want to zoom out to the to the beginning of the process like we we see mr beast is going to be i will i want everyone first of all to watch both videos watch the squid games video watch the behind the scenes video right so in the video you mentioned like okay mr beast says he's going to do the squid games project how do you how does the

process of you guys working with him on all right this is going to be a really big video with some VFX. How do you guys start on putting this together? Yeah, so one of the new things that we've started doing is pre-visualization. And I talk about this a little bit in the behind the scenes, but it kind of all starts with the building blocks of what are we going after? And luckily there's a show to reference.

The show kind of did a lot of the set, like shows the sets that need to be used. That's our reference, right? Yeah, there's the visual aid. And then we kind of then go in and start building up those sets as well. And then working with, you know, we're working with their team

because they're building everything practically and they build as much as they possibly can, which is very impressive. From that then we started using Unreal Engine, which is basically a game engine. It's used to make games like Fortnite. We've been using it for years, ever since the VR stuff. We kind of got into it around 2016,

back when we wanted to wear Oculus Rifts and walk around in our 3D environments. So we've been using that tool, which has been increasingly just an incredible tool and under our tool belts. And it's now getting to the point where we can create something in Unreal Engine, literally have it for final product. So I, I normally, if you're saying previs, you're saying, Hey, I'm just going to make this. And then we're going to completely scrap it. We're just using it to look at how the composition of the images are

and the flow of the sequence of events but and then you scrap that and then you end up making it again we're actually using that unreal engine we're using all of our stuff in unreal engine to make the previs and then we're also using it for the final so it's running real time and that's the only way we're able to pull off all these shots in that amount of time. I feel like that's doubly important too when you only have one take. You have to do all of that pre-visualization both conceptually and literally just to make sure you have everything set

so that when the contestants are there and they're going through it, you already know what you're doing and you get everything on the first try. There's two processes to it. It's called pre-vis and there's tech-vis. Both equally cool. Pre-vis would be's tech-vis. So both equally cool. Pre-vis would be, you know, what do I want this to look like? We kind of already have that visual reference,

but for us it was helpful because we had to make the sets. So we made two versions of the sets. We made the glass bridge and the tug of war all in Unreal Engine. Very cool looking scenes that literally you're on like a game engine. You can like walk around them with a virtual camera. We could put on a VR headset and walk around it yeah i thought that was awesome and then from that there's also a thing called tech viz which is if you were working on a show and you said okay i want to you know know how many extras need to be in this or like how fast

do i need to go to get from point a to point b in this one take that I'm trying to do. How fast do I need to be going? That's tech fizz. So everything's mapped out, the focal length down to literally everything, frame rate, focal length, everything. So we're literally able to go in there on the scene with virtual cameras, and then we can say, okay, what camera are we shooting with? Is it a full-frame DSLR?

We can throw it on a full-frame DSLR, put it on a 10mm and then see what it's going to look like in this map. So then you're able to provide those stills and you're able to use that as visual imagery to know what the final product's going to look like. To go to the extent of how useful this can be, and particularly for this

project too, there's examples in our BTS where Sam gets in a motion capture suit to pretend to be a contestant on the glass bridge, where he's jumping across a glass bridge that we're just faking and setting up in our little office space. And then we're basically taking him, putting him inside the environment of the glass bridge

in Unreal, which is to scale. And it's the exact design. It's going to look like the final set itself. And then we can actually then show and place cameras and demonstrate, hey, here's what we're going for and here's where we're going to position these things. That helps on the production side, but it helps in a way even more on the post-production side because we're already able to

prepare and prep and say, okay, these are the shots we need to do VFX on. Here's what we're kind of preparing and we know the work we're going to have in front of us. And we can plan all that up front, which is amazing. And it goes even beyond that too, like to touch on even some of the other, like the red light, green light, like we can actually place the contestants

in the 3D world to scale to know, okay, here's how the blocking is going to be. And there's like, there's so many applications that this just applies to across everything. The tech is involved with, you know, what size room do we need to be in to have 456 people? Like that's a lot of people. The show didn't even have 456 people.

They used background set extension, like individuals to be able to do that, or body doubles. But yeah, it's very powerful technology to be able to do that. And being able to place those cameras anywhere, get different views. And then on top of that, it's also helping service our deadlines as well. So we know that we have a short deadline once they shoot. So I'm able to work with the team to say, hey, this is very helpful for us.

Like for instance, with Glassbridge, there was a shot that we kept cutting back to and I was able to show in my previs that it was going to be shot on a, anywhere from a 200 to a 400 millimeter lens. So basically I was able to show them visually if you do a cowboy shot, which is basically from knee up

we can cut out the glass bridge and we don't have to do visual effects on that sequence so we can cut back to that and it can be helpful for us if we're in a pinch we're using this previs to also help us be able to showcase the work and show how we need it done so that

everyone can be on the same page just because it was a little bit of a different workflow. Visual effects in this project was a little bit different because they're doing so much stuff practically. There's a real bridge there. There are people falling in the bridge and it's a real game.

So we're just servicing that by setting up a previs to be able to show how we can execute our visual effects. It's cool because if you're in the Hollywood space or in the Hollywood VFX and all that world, this Previz stuff is stuff they do it all the time. It's a really, really cool application now bringing this into a YouTube space because as this tech becomes more accessible and it becomes democratized more and more, there's so many applications for it, even just beyond Squid Game of

Previz-ing other shoots, Previz-ing things in the future. It really like this, there's so many applications for it, you know, even just beyond Squid Game of like pre-visiting other shoots, pre-visiting things in the future. It's like there's, it really excites us because I think it opens up this new

tool that creators can use that can just continue to like bring them value. And the big point too being that it's final at that point.

Like the visual effects look as good as they're going to look because it's in a game engine, you know. It's not a grayscale model.

We're literally looking at lit models that, like the glass bridge looked like the glass bridge in our game engine set you know? It's not a grayscale model. We're literally looking at lit models that, like the glass bridge looked like the glass bridge in our game engine set in Unreal 5. Super cool tech that we're using to do that. I have a question about the creative process.

So when I watch a Mr. Beast video, I guess we all know at this point there's a team behind everything going on, but it is a pretty personal element of like, all right, there's Jimmy, there's a couple of friends, there's a contestant and we're like watching what's going on. When we're coming in and making this like huge project where now it's creatively a little bit different,

there's going to be some VFX in some of the shots. We're going to have this prop that's going to look a little different in the final video versus the real practical prop. How much of this do you get input on? How much of is like you and jimmy talking back and forth about it how much of it is just like the trust factor of like i'm gonna hand you this footage and we'll see what happens out of it what is the level of like input that all parties have there yeah at the end of the day we were really enhancing you know the creative that they were putting on screen.

And that's their product and that's what they're known for and it's awesome stuff. And then basically what we were doing is literally making them feel like they're up 200 feet high. We were able to use Previz to help instruct on different ideas. use Previz to help instruct on different ideas. Like if there were different variations of what, what they wanted to do for safety or, or, or different creative ideas. But at the end of the day, like we were also servicing that to be able to show what different things would look like, what, what foam would look like in the middle or underneath the glass bridge and at what heights and whatnot.

So there's that creative element that we were able to also visually help with. So it's cool that we can, we can service and help with a lot of the ideation process because we can like you know we can show what something might look like in your head and be like oh hey what does it look like to do this and this so we actually can do a little bit of problem solving um just by having you know having everyone have eyes on the previous and being able to say oh hey this is what this looks like or hey this is how this could function um you know whether it's camera related things or whether it's just part of the set build you know yeah and it was a it was a great process working with them as well because they were very open to embracing visual effects which was very cool

because again there are they you're so used to doing everything practically everything and and they yeah so definitely like if it could be done practically in this it was and that's what's really neat and unlike this type of work we usually do, where if we get a commercial and they say, hey, we're going to fix this in post. We want you to do all this work because we're going to fix it in post. We normally will get a short end of the stick on that. But it's really cool working with a team

that's really interested in doing things practically. Because it allows us to really focus on the stuff that's going to heighten the experience. And at the end of the day, that's what we always want to do with visual effects. Yeah. Everyone's objective for this video is we want to make the best freaking video possible.

We were all on board from that from day one of we believe in this project. We want this thing to be awesome and just blow everyone's minds. So it's cool when everyone can have that same goal to work towards, where we're being able to go hand in hand and say, Hey, what, what does each, what does everyone need to make this thing the best thing possible? And just having that mindset, I think from the beginning really helped this thing, you know, evolve into this fantastic project, you know, versus a, you know, other pipelines, like what Sam was referencing where sometimes it's like, Oh, we're going to shoot a video. Oh, it didn't turn out. Now let's have

VFX go fix it. Like that's where, that's where this,, we're going to shoot a video. Oh, it didn't turn out. Now let's have VFX go fix it. That's where this would not have been able to be possible if it was that way. Just because for this to be, it needs to be kind of like everyone's on the same page from the beginning. Yeah, sometimes with a lack of communication, a film can get completely remade in the computer afterwards. So this was a much more collaborative overall process. Like,

I feel like that's what a lot of people were raving about on Twitter, which is like, oh, this, this new media landscape, a hundred million views in four days, like just on a YouTube video. It's crazy, which is like, obviously amazing. But I think the, the process itself is the most interesting part to me, which is, I don't know, we've been making videos for 10 years and still to this day, when I get on a set for like a commercial or like a small project where there's like 40 people behind the scenes and there's this ladder of communication and there's all this disjointed all this stuff in the way it's like much harder to make much harder to have everyone on the same page by making the best possible video yeah put it that way and there's a lot of film sets where you have one person that like holds a nail another person

holds a hammer basically yeah yeah exactly the the cool thing of this too is like you know since we obviously have such familiarity with the youtube space it was really easy to just kind of like get it you know it's like we're not a big vfx house who only does hollywood things where we have these you know preset expectations of how you know how like things are going to happen and that are that are way arcane our way just kind of more in that world so for us to be able to come in with a huge grasp of like YouTube and being able to say, oh yeah, we are YouTubers. We make YouTube content. Like we kind of can see the vision, you know, that we think other YouTubers have a bit easier

than maybe someone from outside that space would try to enter. So having that was also like something that we felt just fit really well for a project like this because, you know, we can kind of just walk through and say, okay, hey, like we get the idea here. We get how this is going to go and like let's just knock it out how much footage did you end up with do you have any idea how much footage was like because i know there's a ton of cameras rolling at once was it in the ballpark of i'm just going to say our projects typically one to no i'll say 800 gigs to two terabytes that's like the range

of an MKBHD video I'm guessing it's on a different scale with a VFX yeah I can tell you we set up networking for all of our visual facts and

I think at the end of the day I had to delete a lot of stuff we have a 100 terabyte server I had to delete a lot of stuff from our projects to be able to make sure

everything was housed properly and I think at the end of the day we walked away with maybe 20 terabytes of just work, and that includes all our visual effects. Not that bad. Yes, and obviously, you know, we're working to try to minimize.

That's the other thing, is like we're all in cahoots from day one. It's like, okay, how are we going to shoot this? What are we going to, you know, all of these technical things that all lead to space on our server and also just bottleneck us too because we know that we're on a deadline so how much processing do we have to do

uh should 4k video be a thing for our final output uh you know do we need the color uh depth right to be able to pull these luma keys really well right and and valuing what is worth it and basically we were able to get away with a lot and, and, and get what we needed footage wise, and then still walk away with just working off of our, you know, our OWC server.

That was all good. We all were kind of piped into that and then working with all of our artists around the clock. Then after that, it was actually a really funny story about service space because we like when we decided, yeah, like let's bring in our server,

let's set it up. We just need that for the space and the speed and the time. We had kind of, in our minds, set a idea of how big the project was going to be. So we're like, oh, yeah, this is plenty of space. And so we go and we set it up and we're ready to go. Then after we shoot and we come back and we start seeing the storage starting to shrink and shrink

and shrink, we're saying, oh, shoot. OK, yeah, we don't have enough space. So actually, this is kind of funny, but mid-project, it was literally, I don't know, day four, maybe something, while we were still ingesting footage and we were already moving and every day we're losing space, we had to actually delete one of our artists, Brendan. He had his student film from college on the server as his like, as his like, that was the

like master folder for his student film. So we actually like, that was kind of the least common denominator of something we had to delete. So I remember Sam went over to Brendan and was basically like, Hey man, do you still care about that project? College was years ago. We're going to take that thing off the server. I was like, I'll get you a hard drive or something, but it's so we're deleting it. So no kidding, it's like while we were running out of space, we were also like, the server was processing deleting that, so we kind of had the perfect amount of rollover

as Brendan's student film was being deleted, we were able to save that space as we were transcribing. Yeah, there was a lot of archival that was going on too, to make sure that we were uploading all of our stuff that we had been working on. Shout out to the student project getting deleted right on time. It's incredible.

There's a time and place for it. Everyone has one. Everyone needs to get deleted. For a little context, it was 10 days to do everything from start to finish when you got there? Yeah, so that includes visual effects. So once we started working on footage,

it was a 10-day sprint, basically. With pre-visualization, we were there for maybe two weeks. We were able to work and just focus on shooting and whatnot. The shoot happened and then sprint to edit. To kind of set it up, I guess, in another way, essentially, as soon as the camera stopped, we have 10 days and the video is on YouTube. So it's kind of like, you know, we obviously,

we spent some time preparing and being there and kind of, you know, getting everything in place. But there's literally like, it's kind of the clock ticks as soon as they wrap up the final, you know, the final scene and the footage starts to come to the server where it's like, you guys have 10 days, like, let's get this thing done. And basically just like, that was our window of time. And it's interesting because we where it's like, you guys have 10 days. Let's get this thing done. And basically, that was our window of time. And it's interesting because we don't even, again,

to kind of frame this in a crazy way because this whole project was just awesome and insane. We don't even have an understanding of how much work we're doing until we start to get the edit in. Because in a normal VFX pipeline, we are given basically a final edit. And it's like, hey, you have 60 shots. You have 80 shots. You have 150 shots to do.

And then we're like, OK, let's look at the footage. Let's absorb it. Let's kind of figure out. For this one, just because of how the pace of how fast things move, we kind of go in blind. We have no idea how much we're going to be doing until we see it being filmed you know and we see we see it put together in the edit um so it's one of those things where like we you know we kind of just have to like figure out once we've received footage it's like i was like

on a daily basis we'd get more shots coming in and be like all right let's start getting these organized let's start i'm getting this system in place and assigning if you're working on a film you know you have a script. And normally people look at a script and they say, one page is one minute of content. I have that formula for my own videos. Yeah, so with this, because it's real life entertainment, it's like in real life entertainment, you don't know what's going to happen.

True. Glass Bridge could be the craziest part of it and it becomes the whole video. Or it could fly and it could be a small segment. And again, that's not our wheelhouse. We're here to do visual effects. So at the end of the day, we're trying to estimate, you know, okay, from our standpoint,

what do we need to prepare for? And we're thinking, okay, maybe 200 shots. And we kind of did a ticker to see what the average cut was and how we needed to prepare for our visual effects. And we assumed 200 shots. We ended up doing around double that. Which was the fun fact was what it's more shots than the entire matrix movie.

Yeah. So it was mostly VFX. Yeah. For every, I think matrix had what, 340 VFX shots? It might have been 350. Yeah, 350 VFX shots. So we just crossed that threshold. So we were like, oh, all right.

It's more than the matrix. The matrix in 10 days. Okay, great. Pretty much. We had no clue we were going to be doing that many. But again, we were able to build out pipelines to be able to account for that. So those worlds that we built in Unreal Engine running real time, it's like, okay, we just have to do this process this many more times. So it's just being able to scale up then and being able to work with our team to be able to account for all of those new ones.

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So I guess my final question in like the VFX YouTube world is like, all right, so we just established you had 400 something shots in VFX in a YouTube video in 10 days. Where we, the matrix took longer. I think it's safe to say, right? So when you think about making more and more VFX inside YouTube videos, which is now what's going through my head after seeing this, and this pre-visualization process and how much it helps with cutting down the time it takes to actually integrate the VFX into the video, do you think it's likely or possible we'll see more stuff

like this in the future on YouTube, meaning more videos with VFX built in because of appropriate and helpful Previz. Yeah, I mean, I think Previz has always been around, but I think because it's being integrated with a final product and you're able to say, okay, I'm now able to walk around this, I've made this, and now it can be my final video as well. I think it's definitely going to be an end all medium because if you watch our behind the scenes, you can see that we literally made a video game out of that. Like I, I honestly, I'm, I'm convinced that you're going to be able to say, Hey, here's

this awesome short film, right? I also took the assets and I made the short film concept into a video game and the video game is also for sale or downloadable. Yeah. So you can, and basically you have this, like you can build a world of IP right out of a film and then you can have different entertainment all from that one singular software.

That's interesting. That was running everything. Cause it is running real time. Like imagine a movie, like, like imagine a movie that you're watching, but then you're able to change the color of the hero's car. Right? If it were running locally on your computer.

Wow. Yeah. Or advertisements changing depending on the viewer's age. Or even unimagining. Like they're holding a beer or a Coca-Cola. Or like you go to the Matrix or something like that. You're like here's the matrix it's an incredible movie now here's like a vr game that you can play in the

same scene as one of the scenes from the matrix yeah incredible that's gonna i think like this idea of like i guess entertainment kind of merging is something i think you know in the next decade if not sooner we're gonna see that with film and YouTube and TV in video games. And there's going to like, I don't know, I think this is maybe getting into some metaverse conversations. 100%. But it's this idea of like, you know, you now have,

like you're building a playground to make a movie, which is the same playground you play in to play video games, which is the same playground you could play in if you want to do a podcast. There's a world where we could be sitting in a Squid Game set right now on this podcast. And it's not a world that is far away from the world we're in right now.

And the thing is, it's not becoming that much more difficult to do when you've already built that world. And so it's really interesting. I think we'll see a lot of content creators, like especially post Squid Game, start to wrap their heads around the potential of this technology. And the technology itself is becoming more accessible and more easier. I think kind of the hero in that story is not necessarily our talent and our skill, although that's a part of it. There's a big part of it,

which is the tech has evolved in so many ways. And that's kind of the cool thing about it is we're able to now utilize this new tech to make these things possible. I don't think we'd have been able to do this in 10 days without the ability to do real-time graphics, without the ability to create this thing that we can see it in real time,

we can iterate in real time, we can put the thing that we can see it in real time we can iterate in real time we can put the frame and composite in the shot in real time um you know even five years ago if we were doing offline rendering like this would have been so much slower so i think we're really at a precipice of this kind of new tech that is now getting in the hands of content creators and i think in the next few years we'll see some really cool stuff come from it for a lot of our films i still use like CPU rendering and it will take five ten minutes sometimes like 30 minutes a frame right and it's just ridiculous to sit there and let that go because I'll spend I could spend a week on a shot you know or even longer if I want it to be like a

certain if it's like a hero shot for the film but we knew going into this project that that was not something that could be done and we had to use real-time technology but the thing is as real-time technology as video games are always racing to become more realistic there will be a point where like the quality level will match film and then you're just going to be able to have films run in game engines yeah and that's kind of what we're experiencing now we kind of just jumped the gun a little bit and said okay we're going to use unreal engine to do this we're going to use it for our end all solution it's going to be from the beginning we're going to build it in here and then we're going to finish it in here and then create the uh the content yeah so it's yeah it's super cool to see where that

leads to and that was kind of why we threw in that little glass bridge game in there because the possibilities are really cool I'm just starting to see where it's all going to go I kind of wish this would have been a fun experiment, I wish when we were doing the project we would have kept a stopwatch of when something is

what amount of time is something rendering that an artist is not able to work and we minimize that as much as possible with a lot of the real time because anyone who's really familiar with the effects in a traditional pipeline will know like you can work for a couple hours but when you need to render the preview or you need to render the final thing you need to step back and wait for a couple hours to see like that would have been a nightmare to deal with yeah you can know that you can see from our behind the scenes that the unreal engine part was the fastest part about the process because the guy running it literally had time to make a video game.

He was working those 10 days but also had time to do that. I had spent time prepping the scenes and I built the scenes. I'm also a compositor, so I wanted to use myself as the ability to also work on some of the shots. We brought in our buddy Taos, who I went to college with, and he does some great stuff in Unreal Engine. So he was running Unreal the entire time, and then we worked together to do all that. So it's really cool that he was literally able to do that

with that real-time tech while we were in the middle of a very pressed-for-time project. It kind of shows that real-time rendering is really just the future of rendering of any kind. Yeah, I think the project as a success story showed how well the tech has worked and how far it's come. And I feel like now we're in post-Squid Game YouTube.

That's how I look at it. That's exciting. Yeah, I think there's going to be, I'm so excited to see what creators can take from this and what they can like i think next year is gonna be awesome for content creators i'm really excited to see um what comes from that so i'm inspired i think it's time we do a bts of them now yeah we should circle it up yeah you need to start doing more vfx in our videos too there you gotta be sweet one more thing every guest that we have on waveform we like to give them a little test and I don't know

Adam do you have the appropriate mechanical equipment so I don't know if you're a fast typist or if you pride yourself on your typing speed I kid you not I don't know if this is like a fluke or something but I've taken so many typing tests

where I get like the 99th percentile, and I brag about how fast I can type. This one will be a little interesting. Have you watched Top Gear at all? No. They have something called the star in the reasonably priced car, where every guest they have on,

they basically put them in a pretty standard car that's the same for all of them, and they have to do a lap around the track and they have a leaderboard of all their guests. So we have a website where it's how fast you can type the alphabet. Yep. So all of our guests now do three tries on this. And now we have a leaderboard for all of our guests on,

um, on the show. Yeah. I shouldn't have said, I shouldn't have said I'm a fast type. But it is weird because words per minute is way different than the alphabet. How often are you typing the alphabets? So yeah, whichever keyboard.

I didn't say anything, but I purposely picked this one. I know, I know. I was going to say, I don't want... I tried to do you dirty right there. I know, man. You're making me talk all the talk, and now I'm going to be embarrassed at the slowest. So we give each person three tries. So I do the alphabet. I'm, man. You're making me talk all the talk and now I'm going to be embarrassed at the slowest. So we give each person

three tries. So I do the alphabet. I'm not actually typing words. No, just the straight alphabet. I'm nervous. I didn't know there was going to be a test because when the pressure hits

something helps. So we're going to give you three tries each, whatever keyboard of your choice and we'll see what kind of times you put up. Oh, man. Let's see it.

All right. You ruined the ASMR on that one, guys. Where is Z? I never use that one. Boom. No Z. There's no copy and paste in Unreal Engine. First try. It's always first try towards the 14 not bad

you want to give another how does that compare to yeah what you see here I'll reveal that at the end I love not telling anybody how how good their scores so oddly nerve-racking cuz we I mean we were nervous doing it and it was just in front of each other and so it like, why do I take pride in the fact that I can type a little bit fast? All right. See, you foreshadowed it by saying that you were going to be good at it. Yeah, I know. It's a lot of pressure.

All right. That one sounded faster 11 yeah three i mean three seconds shaved off cutting three seconds off is pretty major imagine cutting i feel like that should be a lot i feel like that should be a lot faster though it is it is really not something you do we have um we have it on discord and people our audience likes to try it and there's some like all over the place at the time. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah.

One more try. I kind of want to see where he's at. Do you want to pass it over and then you'll take your third try? Yeah, I like it. Do you like that keyboard better? Well, I'm committed at this point, so I'll let you practice. Yeah, exactly. All right.

And this is a fantastic excuse if it's really bad because I don't have a mechanical one chunk it over your head we've got plenty of those

right in the center it's gonna go one of two ways here with him this is a lightning port keyboard I always thought lightning port was

just iPhone no just Apple just Apple yeah they weirdly have they're starting to change some things but keep some

lightning whoever knows with AirPods iPad so I think for everything I have Apple I think it's just my iPhone and my AirPods is the have they're starting to change some things but keep some lightning whoever knows with airpods yeah ipad so i think for everything i have apple i think it's just my iphone and my airpods is the probably yeah all right so i just type in it yeah when you hit a it'll go yep all right you're way faster than I was. Dude.

What is it? It sounded pretty fast. 7.49. Hey, that's a pretty good. Now I feel like, see, now I feel worse. Do you want to swap keywords? We can do, when Colin and Samir were here, they decided to do a team effort. All right, let's do that.

If you want to go team, just best team score. I think I can get under seven. I feel like you could. Yeah. Okay. Shoot. It is one of those things. Too accurate. The last few letters.

It's super frustrating when you mess up, man. Yeah. All right. You want to go one more time, Sam, and then I'll wind this out? I'll just get it. One more. Go for it. Go for it. I get three tries, right? Yeah. wind this out? I'll just get it. Go for it.

I get three tries, right? I'm going to try it on your keyboard next. It's the button push. I have to go further. It's all the travel time. Is this optical? It's mechanical. If it was an optical sensor, it would be very fast. I think I did it on, no, I did mechanical.

Yes, six point, what was your scores? Six, two? Six, two, six, two, five. That's, that puts you right in the middle. One of our fastest guests. Six is pretty good. Six out of like 12, I think. Yeah. Dead middle dead middle middle all right

was I the slowest no no response third try our slowest I go is 9.4 you wanna go you're right there are you kidding a chiclet so that does not make me feel good okay maybe did not help me Colin and Samir went together. No shade on Samir, but he was pretty slow. I need to know who the fastest is after this. We'll reveal it in one second. It's wild. I have to at least get that. Hey, under 10. That sounded great.

There we go. Sub 10? Yeah. Single digits feels good. It does feel good. Single digits is good. All right. So you give everyone three tries.

We give everyone three tries. There's no one there who's like, time number 10. I got this one. Almost, I think every single person, you would also, you beat, you're not last. 9.2?

Not last. Not last. Not last. Right now, our fastest is our quinn from snazzy labs he's a tech youtuber he has 4.4 3 4 4 3 oh man marquez is at marquez is in second because apparently he's just good at everything and none of us can beat him at it um 4.539 nice adam's got third i have fourth we're both 5.2 ish um doug demuro 5.9 you might know him colin samir is 6.677 so just you beat them yeah yeah he gets a brag to them now yeah haven't met you guys yet but i'm a slightly faster type

that's how you can don't break the ice i guess the my friend who created this app this has been his like his talent thing he shows off at like school for the last 10 years he can do 1.3 which is why it's just muscle memory at that point yeah um but yeah it's crazy some of our some people on discord have gotten under two and it's really wild but it's obviously more than three tries the craziest part it logs you can take a screenshot when you're done I've seen people send me screenshots of like two three seconds from a phone no i don't know how they do it it's wild i wonder absurd i don't ever intend to get that good at this but congrats on your place on the leaderboard if you guys now it you guys ever last if you guys ever decide you want to do a big youtube typing tournament, let me know.

I'm there. Sounds good. I got you. I got you. All right. This has been great. I appreciate you lifting a little bit of the veil behind the curtain and showing some of the BTS. Again, if you haven't seen the videos, which at this point you probably have, but just in case you haven't, you should watch them. They're linked below.

Shout out to you guys for making the behind the scenes and uh making the project so incredible and uh thanks for joining us on waveform thank you so much for having us yeah thanks for having us this is awesome waveform is produced by adam molina we are partnered with vox media and our intro outro music was created by vane silk Take care.