Name: Behind The Visual Effects of SILO!
Uploaded: 2025-02-13T11:52:26.000Z
Duration: 16 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Daniel, this set is so large, and yet your team still has to fill in so much of this world.

You were saying off-camera that repeating patterns present unique challenges for effects.

Even on this set, we had, when you look at it initially, you kind of go, oh, it's just a big set.

But then you realize it's almost a mathematical problem.

We have the bridge repeats every 120 frames and degrees.

Then you go and you look at the pipes, and the pipes repeat only every 180 degrees because you wanted to, it needs to play, it's part of what the story is.

Then you start realizing that when you're seeing repeating patterns, you look down the silo, it becomes very quickly, it just reads like a very long pipe with a spoke kind of  And you need to break it.

You need to try and realize what I can do to still retain that kind of scope of a city and look like the way you look at Fifth Avenue and kind of go, I can recognize a city.

What kind of triggers that in the horizon all the way up to close to where you're looking from.

And it's just about the movement of the crowd, how to break the textures of the concrete, the light, making it feel like it's not, you know, we couldn't have neon lights everywhere and just put distance signs, so we had to play with our own lighting and just break all those patterns with textures.

For example, our farms, as you go further back, we let them kind of bloom and kind of pollute the atmosphere of the silo and just kind of slightly feel like, you know, a distant grow light is kind of a bit stronger and different colors and bringing magentas and cyans into the horizon, but not have them in the warm, closed environment of the silo.

I've been watching, walking through the sets here and they're so immersive, so all enveloping and yet you were showing me the show reel and you're still having to provide many times 100% of what's in the frame.

Yes, we were obviously limited with how many variations of this world we can build.

And when you start looking into it, we needed to create different, people need to constantly feel like they're moving up and down this place and feel different, like you want to be able to almost allow the audience to localize themselves in the space.

So, a lot of times when we moved on the floor, we had to start bringing in our blue screen.

As you can see, we have a lot of it, but just to retain the scope so we can have someone continuously walk from a floor and land on another floor without repeating the same set, without feeling that, oh, it's just one set repeating itself.

We wanted to constantly make sure that you feel like, oh, it's a new location or I'm familiar with that from the previous episode.

I'm now, I know exactly where I am, which is kind of an interesting play with how you make people that don't know the silo slowly get familiar with it and almost feel like by the end of the season, they could read, they can very quickly go, oh, that's upstairs.

And you must end up with the same thing, like the silo must actually exist in your head.

We became the map keepers on the silo because, you know, we look at the blue and go, oh, if he looks this way, it's the wrong bridge.

The eye line from this bridge, when he looks 10 floors up, actually lands on the wrong bridge.

So how do we turn him around to make sure he's looking at the right person and he's looking back?

Because we had a lot of those contacts of continuity between our set and what's happening above us or below.

Now, I think a lot of people think of special effects as kind of just a toolbox full of tools.

But I know that every shoot brings its own unique, specific challenges.

What has been some of the biggest challenges in bringing the silo to the screen?

The main, I would say there's been quite a few that kind of required their own solutions.

One of the things about this silo is that there's no straight lines, which doesn't seem to strike you originally.

But when you start dealing with crowd movements, it becomes a major thing you need to solve because suddenly you go, oh, someone walks down a stairs, a set of stairs.

Spiral staircase introduces a completely different body language of what it is walking downstairs.

Oh, especially if they're on the inside or the outside.  So we mapped it kind of like we had rules for the silo.

But when we break the rules, someone's running up, he doesn't care about the rules of keep right or keep left.

So the stride of the stairs became a major thing we had to solve how to capture.

And we had to build our own set of stairs just for the motion captures to be able to have the correct physicality of if it takes two steps down each one of the steps or the very narrow inner kind of stairs.

And it creates a completely different angle for the shoulder, the way your eye line looks when you kind of you're careful not to stumble down.

And we had to build a whole texture of that.

Then you have how do people step off the bridge or go on that small platform between the two different flights of stairs.

All those movements had to be captured so that we are not limited by our crowd and that we can continue continually see people walking on the outer rotunda.

So every curve suddenly changed the physicality of how we can capture our movement.

Because the stairs are getting wider, of course.

So, you know, I'm walking zone one, zone two, zone three.

So on this season, we kind of we were taking it to the next level and we actually built our stairs in multiple ways so that we can go onto the bridge, off the bridge.

And we had a proper flight of stairs because we went to the bigger motion capture set.

Last season, because of limitations of how you can create the volume of motion capture, we created flight of stairs that are the different strides.

So we just had the very narrow inner stride, the middle one and the other one and had our stunt team kind of run up and down, walk.

You realize that very quickly, some things feel forced and don't quite work.

And so we had to rebuild our motion capture approach for the silo.

And it's how people go around each other, even when you walk in a curved line.

And that's what the main thing for the silo was to not have what I call the classic stadium crowd, which is we have waving, we have cheering and flags.

You wanted to not have the train station effect of people just walking back and forth.

If you look in the back of our silo and in some of the episodes, you can see a bunch of kids playing hide and seek because we wanted to feel like a city.

You have rush hour, early morning, high noon.

Every time they had a different approach.

Someone is telling them now we're singing.

So all those things layered up on our crowd build.

It became a major challenge for both seasons.

And in season two, you've got some underwater stuff.

I'm curious what challenges are presented by effects underwater.

The idea of closing the door and turning on a garden hose got rejected.

So we had to build a way of approaching the silo in a way that it's flooded.

And everything you think about, a curved world suddenly becomes quite different.

You're accommodating for the angle of refraction in water.

Which is one of the things when someone says, oh, we do underwater, that doesn't take care of it.

And then you start thinking about it and you start testing and you go, oh, that is something we need to take into account for our camera tracking, for interaction of Juliet and how she deals with it.

So all those refractive elements are things that we need to deal with.

We need to figure out, give it a look that is dirty, but find ways of...

So we need to play with what tells the story of a flashlight rolling on windows.

So we cleaned in our model, we created clean spots on windows so that you can catch your own reflection.

Just to make it a bit scarier and a bit more like a set.

So I'm curious, given that you guys had to shut down for the strike, if during the time the strike was happening, did that give you time and perspective to think about what you were going to do when you came back to it?

Yes, it's a problem when you sit at home and you think about what I would have done.

Who do you talk to about it?  You sit at home and go, that's a really good idea.

I should remember that and put it in your small notes.

So we were lucky enough to have finished shooting part of season two.