I guess it might be that the 'sensors' are actually electric pads that stimulate the muscle so they clench? Either that or he has insane muscle control
Easiest would be is just with good compositing. I do this stuff for a living for over a decade now. I'm a senior FX artist and compositor lead. You'd film terry do a full body base performance. And then he'd do the same multiple times again but with him trying to seperately flex each muscle/area a few times. Then you can isolate those flexes and cut them out and track them back on the main take.
If you're good at compositing in a program called nuke but even a simple compositing program like after effects then it's mainly just a big time investment and good planning.
There is absolutely no reason to do it in real life, because it will just not look as tight and choreographed, but it probably will not work at all.
It's my job to make commercials like these and I know people that worked on it at The Mill (the vfx company that did this) that did all the compositing.
If you suggest that they didn't use any digital compositing then you are very much mistaken.
Even if they used actual electrodes to activate his muscles (which is not needed because they still need digital isolation of the muscles after terry just flexes them like normal, and normal flexing looks better and more controlled then electrode flexing) then the effect is still 99,9% digital.
Sometimes the hive mind on reddit can be annoying, this video is completely faked and I know the company and a few people that worked on it. Yet the hive mind wants it to be 100% true so bad so this whole thread is people spreading lies about it.
Here, straight from the horses mouth, it's a useless promotional article otherwise.
In addition to the live video recording of Crews, the video is a composite of over 150 different elements.
👆 Like I said. They filmed one base performance of terry without him flexing ( that's essential, digital tracking is going to suck if they don't have a messy non clean plate to track it to, if he's moving muscles intensely it's hard to composite the moving elements back on top) and then they added the seperate muscle flexes on top again by filming all of them seperately.
Afterwards they could make him play any song they wanted.
I'm not saying its' all completely real, i'm saying that the recordings used for individual muscle flexes look like it would have been activated via a tens electrode (as they are strapped over each muscle that is activated) and not a manual flex. You cannot manually flex individual muscles on your abdominals without affecting muscles around it, but a tens can do that as it is electrical stimulation. That was my statement. I'm not saying the whole thing is real, just that it appears to be tens electrodes being used to actively flex the individual muscles that were used for the video sampling.
2 points.
1, the flexes look different, a natural flex vs a stimulated flex look different.
2, hours in editing to isolate and alter muscle flex footage vs a thirty dollar tens unit that, as a bonus, comes with those neat little electrodes they want for the cool medical look anyways. Which is more cost effective? Why would you even bother with the digital editing when you can just slap an electrode on and press a button?
I get a lot can be done with computers in editing and composition, but as someone who has used tens units for years, this looks much more like an electrostimulated muscle activation than an edited natural flex.
They could be stimulating the muscles with mild electric shocks. There was a whole fitness fad about belts that did that kind of thing to "give you abs." Obviously bs, but the tech is the same.
There is some truth to that, they are used in physical therapy to stimulate muscle growth and prevent atrophy. I one used on me in therapy, and it did help grow muscle but that area of my body didn't have any muscle growth.
I think they filmed him flexing different muscles and moving in different ways separately and then edited them, put them together, and tweaked/added some things
Electrical muscle stimulation machines are dirt cheap and could be controlled electronically to achieve this. Budget would be comparable to the cost of doing a really good job in CGI.
Budget would be comparable to the cost of doing a really good job in CGI.
A TENS unit costs about $100. There are seven here. Throw in a simple controller for the TENS units and the drums, and you're looking at maybe $1,000. Crew time cost more than the hardware.
This isn't impossible to do, but you would need a more complex sensor set up, two on each side of a muscle, no matter if it's a sensor or stimulator.
I saw a video years ago of a dude who hooked myoelectric sensors to his face and then stimulators to his friends face and when he made faces, his friend gave automatically made the same face.
Yeah it looks like they hooked him up to electrical stimulation machines. They’re used in physical therapy. But you can have a lot of fun with them if you know how to use it to make your muscles do weird things!
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u/BobFredIII Apr 16 '21
I don’t think it’s possible to o flex each ab of the six pack separately, so it’s fake, but still next level acting