USED UNIVERSES, EXPERIENCE AND WHY LOOKING BACKWARDS HELPS US LOOK FORWARDS.

Current buzzwords in production and VFX are Led Screens, Unreal Engine and Disney Stagecraft™. Made famous by ILM’s The Mandalorian, these technologies allow productions to, in large part, do away with green screen/ CGI composite shots. Instead, the worlds and sets are created within a game [Unreal™] engine and projected live on set onto a 360 degree LED wall. The system allows actors to feel more part of the environment, allows nearly instantaneous changes of location, controls the perspective and parallax of the background and most interestingly eliminates green spill from green screen, instead creating realistic lighting on both talent sets and vehicles.

 In the original Star Wars trilogy George Lucas wanted to create a ‘used universe’. Robots spaceships and props were old and beaten up- originating from different cultures and eras. It’s no surprise that much of the hardware in the original Star Wars films was inspired by aircraft grave yards and constructed from scavenged Revell and Airfix kits.

But back to the future. 

In common with nearly all films of the last 2 decades the Mandalorian’s starring Spaceship  ‘The Razor Crest’ [ granddaddy to the X-wing Fighter] was initially designed as a purely digital 3d model. But there was a problem, it’s shiny, used metallic skin just did not look right. Next to the new LED stagecraft shots, the computer generated reflections did not look anywhere nears as good as the rest of the footage shot on the Stagecraft™ set [otherwise known as ‘The Volume’]. Something wasn’t right.  Something didn’t fit

The solution? make a model and try and learn what wasn’t looking right from that. 

In the end they went a lot further, building  a 21st century motion control rig for reference and shooting the model in motion. The resulting footage replaced and dictated the look of many of the planned CGI effects shots in the finished series.

The moral of the story? 

ILM unlike other industries have retained many of their ‘Legacy’ employees, many of whom created the Original Star Wars universe and who, with a bit of old school thinking, skills and analogue engineering radically improved the digital Star Wars universe of the future.

Enjoy the story here.

Join us as we journey behind the scenes of the Emmy™ Award-winning visual effects behind the first season of The Mandalorian. We'll pull back the curtain on ...