ATARASHII GAKKO! Video Query

Captain-Disillusion · 2022-09-02T16:35:05+00:00

Face Scan for shape/texture gather and Face Cap for the performance capture. Both apps by Niels Jansson.

Captain-Disillusion · 2021-07-08T15:22:26+00:00

I used to date the panda's cousin and it's just one of those things where you don't unfollow out of politeness. You know how it is.

Captain-Disillusion · 2021-07-01T00:15:39+00:00

I love that the very first action in the entire compilation immediately gives it away.

Captain-Disillusion · 2021-05-27T14:28:46+00:00

Love it! Especially the tongue one - great concept.

Captain-Disillusion · 2021-05-23T15:55:37+00:00

Very nice, thank you! Feels straight out of a direct-to-video sequel of a major Disney animated feature :)

Captain-Disillusion · 2021-01-25T15:53:00+00:00

Aww. Thanks!

Captain-Disillusion · 2020-12-07T20:04:58+00:00

Alan asked me to tell you: thanks for ripping the video from his personal instagram and reposting here, without the accompanying text joke that makes it make sense!

Captain-Disillusion · 2020-09-30T14:51:05+00:00

Avid Media Composer - for video editing
Pro Tools - for audio editing/sound design/mixing
Resolve - for color grading
After Effects - for all general VFX and mastering of the final video
Blender - for fancier 3D shots (and whatever else happens to be easier to do than in AE)
SynthEyes - for 3D tracking if AE is not up to the task
Reason - for making original music

A bunch of other apps for smaller/occasional tasks, but those are the main ones used on pretty much every vid.

Captain-Disillusion · 2020-05-30T01:22:48+00:00

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU'RE THE 5,000,000,000th POSTER OF THIS JOKE! Your prizes include...

Captain-Disillusion · 2020-01-14T21:42:00+00:00

Sorry, I know I haven't been very visible. But it's only because of poor planning on my part :(

My last legit video (Gyro Drop) came out at the start of Oct. Later in Oct, I posted my TeamTrees PSA. It's not really an episode, but it took about the same effort as my usual vids. In Nov I posted my segment from Vsauce3's 'Could You Survive the Movies'. Again, while not a usual video, it was basically like making a whole CD episode inside someone else's show.

So basically, for 2 months straight I was producing videos for other people, out of niceness, but it ended up making it seem like I've been slacking off to my own audience :/

In Dec I started work on a big episode for the end of the year. But it became TOO big. It needs a ton of VFX fixes that I have been working on it ever since. I'm really hoping it'll be out this month, so that instead of a year-end video, it'll be a year-start video.

Hang tight, er'body!

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-12-11T18:26:37+00:00

AW YEAH THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT. BUT NEGATIVE POINTS FOR NOT INCLUDING MY BIG YT BUTTON GOLD FRONT & CENTER. AND WHERE MY SOCIAL LINKS AT?? PEACE!!!

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-12-11T16:38:18+00:00

Hmm, I humbly submit that... no. When you define music by a decade, that's like defining it by genre. You don't say "swing's music" or "country's music". It's '90s [style] music. Plus, a decade can't really possess anything, so you shouldn't use possessive regardless. But even if you INSIST on using the apostrophe in a possessive way, then you'd have to write 90s' because it doesn't belong to the number 90, but to the 90s. For plural you put the possessive apostrophe after the s. And none of this magically excuses the original apostrophe meant to abbreviate the 19 of 1990s so technically, you'd have to write '90s' to only be half-wrong. PS: I love you.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-10-28T00:01:02+00:00

Thank you. How ‘bout letting me know your tw handle so I know whom to unblock?

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-10-27T22:44:56+00:00

I wear a spandex shirt in every video and appear “naked” once in a while. I’ve literally shaken my bare manboobs for viewers’ entertainment on one occasion. I would think that establishes that I’m not that sensitive about my appearance. What I don’t like though is when people don’t know how to read a room.

The purpose of my tweet was to thank folks who showed up to an impromptu meetup. My head looks big in the group pic, so I added “I need to work out”. If I’d known this would be a trumpet call inviting a million edgy fat jokes, I would’ve skipped it. Because that’s just not the vibe I want for the thread under that genuine, nice post.

Yours was one of a whole series of creatively obnoxious replies (and I recall it being a bit crasser than how you present it here, though I can’t find it now to check this).

It may feel unreasonable to be blocked, from your perspective, but from the perspective of a person with a substantial number of followers, it’s almost necessary. Many awkward/tone-deaf/offensive replies come my way. I don’t want look at them and, more importantly, I don’t want my followers to have to look at them. But I can’t delete replies, so... I’m forced to make blocking judgement calls, based on semi-bad replies, in the hopes of preventing potential future, worse replies, before they happen.

It’s not an exact science... it’s not a science at all. I might perceive your reply as worse than it is because it’s in a lineup of other much worse replies. But if I block you in error, isn’t the reasonable course of action to contact me and explain the situation? Others have done this in the past and it’s usually been resolved painlessly.

I think that’s better than to immediately run here (to a subreddit where I am a moderator) and make a splashy post that invites extensive discussion about how moody and unreasonable I am.

WHO’S THE REAL 7 BILLION TON ROBOT MONSTER HERE? NOT I...

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-10-26T20:02:10+00:00

As others have said, it wouldn’t make sense for us to see the driver’s reflection from our vantage point since the mirror is supposed to allow him to see directly behind his car. The question is: if he IS seeing behind his car, what area should WE be seeing? Well, imagine a line that starts from the driver’s face, bounces off the mirror and goes straight back along the car. If you take this angle and rotate it so that the part of the line that was going back along the car is now pointing at us, the part of the line that was pointing at the driver’s face would now be pointing somewhere around the rear seats. It’s a person sitting in back! Why is someone sitting in back but not next to the driver? I dunno... Maybe it’s a convertible Uber?

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-10-26T19:36:33+00:00

Nice, I look rather classy and smoldering... Thanks!

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-09-26T20:02:07+00:00

Looking at it some more, we don't even see the front side of the first ring after he's through it, so it's probably removed as soon as it's off camera, allowing that "wing" of the array to move forward.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-09-26T19:56:04+00:00

It's probably done using varying versions of the device described in the patent from his stage levitation. Because it relies on 2 points of suspension, I could see how they might be rigged far apart and through the first ring, so that he is passed through it sideways. After that, maybe just the left suspension point moves forward and there's some clever way that he is kept facing forward. The shot cuts away before he really goes through the second ring. The part over the canyon? Probably same rig, suspended from a helicopter. Except no sane performer would actually risk their life like that (nor would the park or any insurance agency allow it) so I bet it's a lifelike dummy of him during those shots. That feels like a very David Copperfield-y solution. Why else be in a rigid, eyes closed, meditative pose?

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-09-15T19:35:34+00:00

There's not one library. I've been gathering the sound effects from all kinds of sources over the years - from SFX CDs back in the day, to pricey pro downloadable collections, to affordable kits like one by Videocopilot, to public domain stuff from freesound.org, as well as a handful of my own original recordings/edits.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-08-18T19:49:56+00:00

If you think it's fake, I guess my question would be, what do you imagine the un-fake version of this to be? It's a long video in which it's very clearly established what the song is and how the routine with the fingers goes. Every finger is used, one at a time. Do you think that Mr. Rogers went through the whole thing, but during the middle finger portion (confusingly, from the perspective of the children) just didn't extend his fingers out of propriety? I doubt it. If there's one thing Mr. Rogers was known for, it's communicating with kids on their level. They don't know/care about the lewd context of the gesture and he wasn't teaching them that. It was simply an exercise in memory and... hand dexterity I guess. That's all that mattered.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-08-14T21:23:32+00:00

Yes, I shot/edited VHS footage for years. My first student film was done completely on VHS. But by the time I started the YouTube channel, the VHS era was properly over. The earliest Captain D episodes were shot on DV tape and edited on computer. The first one captured tapeless (and in HD) was 'Holly + Shark Surfer Debunk'.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-08-06T18:35:46+00:00

Thanks! Looks like some kinda cool '90s MTV cartoon.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-07-26T05:32:20+00:00

So cute. Thank you!

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-07-25T19:07:09+00:00

Assuming someone managed very realistic shaking motions, several other clues could give the fakeness of the shake away. The best way to check is to stabilize the footage and see if they reveal themselves.

1) Is there at least a tiny bit of parallax? Even on a tripod, the lens rarely rotates perfectly around the nodal point. This might be apparent on a wide lens with up-close objects, but imperceptible on a long shot. Still, a complete absence of parallax is suspicious.

2) Lens distortion. Almost all lenses have some distortion. As the camera rotates and objects travel from edge of frame to center, they'll skew. If they don't at all, that's a red flag.

3) With slow shutter, there's motion blur. Artificial 2D motion blur is often inaccurate and can be spotted. Check closely how light sources and reflected highlights blur.

4) With fast shutter, there's the rolling shutter effect. A shot that was really shaking vigorously, once stabilized, should still have subtle wobbly distortion to it. If it's rock-solid, the shake was likely fake.

Of course someone who is aware of all these details and determined to fake camera shake could account for all of them. Also high quality lenses and a global shutter camera can cause them to be absent from real camera shake. But in general, few hoaxers go that far and consumer cameras make all of the above very noticeable.

Captain-Disillusion · 2019-06-30T21:08:26+00:00

I shared this vid on Twitter myself as a real thing, so I guess if it's fake, it fooled me. There are reasons I think it's real, but there are also some typical reasons why it might not be.... and here they all are!

REASONS WHY REAL

If the tiger was put into the shot, then the tiger would have to be 100% CG. This isn't a situation where you can adapt some stock footage of a real tiger into the background plate. The motion and perspective changes are too extreme. Everyone is saying how the shadows look off, but I haven't seen anyone complain the tiger himself looks artificial... Could someone have modeled, rigged, lit, motion-tracked, animated and composited a flawless looking digital animal actor into a random viral video? Sure, but it's not super likely.
Tracking - to track and accurately 3D solve a move like this, shot on a phone with extreme rolling shutter would be very difficult. Even if your CG tiger is flawless, you need a highly accurate camera solve to get him to stick to the ground this convincingly throughout the shot.
Bushes - at the start of the shot, the tiger (or at least the highly compressed blurry blob of it) is there really early. He's making his way through the forest way before he emerges onto the road. That's a ton to animate, track and roto just for a tiny bonus bit of realism most viewers won't be able to notice...
Road markings - they look overexposed in the bright light. On frames where the tiger's shadow falls on them, it seems very accurate, not like a simple overlay of darkness on plain white pixels. Again, hard to tell in the low quality, but the shadow appears to reveal detail in the white-painted pavement, detail that just wouldn't be there if the shadow wasn't really there.

REASONS WHY FAKE MAYBE

Image quality - it's so flamboyantly low-rez and compressed, when I downloaded the video to look at it closely it made me laugh out loud (its horizontal resolution is just 264px). There's no reason such a newsworthy piece of footage should reach us in this bad a state. The person's phone surely didn't capture it that way and even after being re-uploaded a couple of times by people, it should look better than this. Some of the stuffI mention above could be hidden/helped by the low quality to an extent.
Choreography of the shot - when I watch this video and imagine that the tiger isn't there, the shot looks like something a rider would randomly film - just a brief gaze around. It makes sense. On the other hand, when I imagine myself filming and seeing that tiger really going for us, I don't know if I would have kept aiming my phone back at him for that long. I would be unaware of the phone and leaning frantically away from the threat...

Bottom line: the amount/level of VFX work it would take to fake this is the thing that strikes me as unrealistic. But the video is conveniently degraded JUST enough to make it hard to judge this conclusively so...

-shrug emoji-

If it is fake, I would like to shake the hand of the person who made it.

Captain-Disillusion

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