As if the pandemic weren’t enough to worry about, how about Army assault robots running amok?
Three 2019 YouTube videos show a military robot subjected to abusive distractions by its creators while performing its programmed tasks until it finally turns its weapon on them and bolts from a gunnery range.
Alarmed viewers went to the fact-checking, myth-busting site Snopes.com with the question, “Does a video show an armed robot turning on humans?”
The answer is that the videos are in fact the convincingly realistic prank creations of Corridor Digital that merely parody actual, non-rebellious robot footage from robotics developer Boston Dynamics.
Corridor Digital is a Streamy Award-winning Los Angeles production studio whose clients include Harley-Davidson, “The Walking Dead,” Grubhub, Samsung, Microsoft, Disney, AT&T, Google and NASCAR.
The robot videos appear on Corridor’s main YouTube channel along with other humorous demonstrations of their special-effects artistry.
They’ve turned the original Gene Wilder “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” into an R-rated horror movie, “fixed” classic examples of bad computer-generated imagery (CGI) from other studios and mounted a live-action version of the “Grand Theft Auto” game, among numerous other products of their technical proficiency and sense of humor.
If you are curious about the skills and crafts behind movie stunts or special visual effects or the state of the art in CGI, then you should check out Corridor Digital’s second YouTube channel, “Corridor Crew.”
There, professional special-effects creators (most often, Corridor founders Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski, visual-effects artists Wren Weichman and Clint Jones and producer Jake Watson) analyze the best and worst special-effects scenes from popular films.
The Crew also discuss how SFX artists combine real actions with CGI and exactly where they can swap out a live stuntman for a CGI figure or vice versa.
They clearly enjoy letting you know when actors are performing their own stunts, when stuntmen are wearing face masks that recall those of the old “Mission Impossible” TV series making them look like the stars they are doubling, and when a computer simply pastes the star’s face over the stuntman’s.
And you can request an analysis of a particular stunt or effect in their comments sections.
The Corridor Crew have often invited professional stuntmen and at least one stuntwoman to join them on their viewing couch to analyze and explain their own and others’ stunts.
The Crew know a lot about crafting stunts in a computer, but they’re not quite as knowledgeable about how physical stunts may be pulled off.
So you’ll sometimes hear astonished reactions such as “Oh my God! How is he not dead?!” when they’re viewing extreme stunts — especially those pulled off in Asian action films where low budgets correlate with greater risks.
In addition, they regularly include advice for would-be special-effects artists — including how much it costs, say, to buy a CGI spider to deploy in your film, where to get free lightsaber effects online, and how to use household objects to achieve stunning effects.
They reveal how some impressive waterfalls in one of the “Star Wars” films, for example, are not CGI but rather the product of pouring out ordinary table salt in front of the camera.
Getting off the couch brings other lessons/challenges, often of the don’t-try-this-at-home sort: setting Jones on fire in a fireproof stunt suit, exploiting Weichman’s arachnophobia or satisfying Pueringer’s toxophilite (archery expert) curiosity — whether, like when Odysseus returns home to Ithaca, one can shoot an arrow through 12 axe heads, or whether, like William Tell, one can shoot an apple off someone’s head.
The Crew’s enthusiastic SFX discussions range broadly over computers, physics, ballistics and color theory, but they generally keep within parameters that the general viewer can comprehend.
The only drawback to the
“Corridor Crew” videos is that you’ll suddenly realize you’ve watched several in a row and it’s a few hours later.
Check my Twitter feed (@RichardLeskosky) for live links to Corridor Digital’s YouTube channels (including the very convincing-robot revolt episodes) or Google “Corridor Crew.”
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May 24, 2020 at 09:00PM
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Richard J. Leskosky | YouTube channels feature professionals discussing how they create special effects - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette
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