To bring Jon Favreau’s Star Wars-themed The Mandalorian to Disney+, the VFX team combined a new virtual production pipeline with classic techniques used in the original Star Wars trilogy. That included the decision to forgo the CG character route and bring the adorable character called The Child — best known to fans as “Baby Yoda” — to the screen with the help of puppeteers.
Season one was shot at Manhattan Beach Studios, across three stages and the backlot. A large wraparound LED screen onstage displayed completed set extensions to enable the filmmakers to shoot scenes in camera. This virtual production system, which shared similarities with the one developed to make Favreau’s The Lion King, uses a real-time gaming engine (in this case, Epic’s Unreal Engine) to display the environments on the screen. “Wherever the camera moved, the background on the LED screen moved accordingly,” explains VFX supervisor Richard Bluff, of lead VFX house Industrial Light & Magic, adding that this was possible through the use of the real-time game engine combined with proprietary software developed at ILM.
The VFX house effectively created the environments that would typically be added in postproduction, but did so during preproduction, with input from department heads in cinematography and production design so that they could be ready for shooting. “A lot of the environments were built and modeled from scratch by artists on the computer,” Bluff explains. “Other times we went out and photographed a sky or landscape that appears as a backdrop behind CG geometry, or it was scanned data.”
He adds that before production started, “you would often have Jon Favreau, [director/executive producer] Dave Filoni, the DPs, VFX and production designer with the headsets scouting virtual locations. We could decide in the environment where we believed the physical stage would exist. Once those choices were made, the additional work was done to help visualize the lighting. Once that was achieved, it was turned over to ILM to take it to a photoreal, finished level [for filming].”
Read the article in full here, and (re)watch The Mandalorian exclusively on Disney+.
