Having that experience, did it make you think about how you may have captured any shots differently? Since Rogue One, you’ve gotten to visit ILM’s StageCraft volume in person. An Imperial I-class Star Destroyer emerges from the shadow of the Death Star’s Mk I Superlaser. Within a few hours, we had the shots that went into the trailer, and that never would have been possible without the real-time technology that ILM was using. I remember asking them, “can you do real-time shadows on this?” Once I learned that that was possible, it became so fun to reveal and conceal the ships in shadow, and find that moment where the dish slides into place. The idea was to have a ship that you know the scale of, like a TIE fighter, and then reveal the Star Destroyer, which feels huge, and then you reveal the Death Star which feels impossibly massive. When you want something to feel big, you need to set something up to feel really big, and then show a new thing that’s even bigger than that. It’s a trick that they used to great effect in The Empires Strikes Back. A typical thing you do in matte paintings, is when something needs to look really big, you paint a little human in there. The important thing when devising a shot like that, is that the idea of scale is only relevant to something bigger in the shot. I remember that John got the iPad, and set up a model of the Death Star and some Star Destroyers. If I remember correctly, we needed a shot of the Death Star for the trailer, but they needed it in only a few days. That was a great example of John Knoll and ILM pushing for this new technology. Like that shot of the Star Destroyer emerging from the shadow of the Death Star.Įxactly. The Death Star’s Mk I Superlaser is set into place. It felt like the process of getting those virtual shots was how we were getting the live action shots, which was, “light a space and find the shot,” versus, “tell us the shot, and we’ll invent all the pieces to create it.” It always feels more real with the first approach. For each one we’d smooth it out by filming from another spaceship, and for another we’d keep some of that handheld-look. It would be very jittery, and handheld, and not perfect. Then I’d go home on my MacBook and select my favorite takes, and then try to cut something together. They would then just loop these twenty or thirty-second chunks of animation, and I would get to hang out in these spots and just film it again and again, generating hours of footage. When you moved the iPad, it could tell where it was in 3D space. They then figured out a set up where they had an Apple iPad, with a game controller attached to it. It was pre-viz animation of each section of the battle sequence.
John Knoll and Alan Tudyk, in his mocap costume, on the set of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There’s lots of ways to achieve that, but when you’re in space with spaceships, the only real way to do it-unless you’re doing what George did, which was taking footage of WWII aerial combat that would represent the final shot-is what John Knoll and Industrial Light & Magic were pushing for. The trick with VFX is having that opportunity, and going, “this was the plan, but now that the ingredients are here in front of us, doing this would actually be better.” So figuring out a seamless way to do that without it being painful for the artists is important.
The light hits objects in this space a certain way, and going in, you knew you’d do a close up of someone’s face, but if you were to have them look down a little bit, and maybe move to the right, suddenly you have this beautiful composition that you wouldn’t have found with storyboarding. Whereis, in the real world, what you tend to do is you have a space, because it already exists. I find that storyboarding shots is really useful, but at a certain point it becomes somewhat limiting, because you’re having to invent every single detail about that shot. The downside to that is that they can ask for things or approach scenarios in such a way that is really back-to-front, and doesn’t produce the best result. My entryway into filmmaking was through visual effects, so I understand it a bit, but a lot of VFX is kind of dark arts, which causes clients to come to visual effects companies and see VFX as magic, because no one understands what they do. John Knoll was very crucial for this, because he and the team at ILM devised a virtual environment where we could go in and look for shots. Tell me about the freedom you found in the virtual production-aspects of Rogue One? Gareth discussed the cutting-edge virtual production used for the film, and the ways in which George Lucas inspired him as a filmmaker. Join Gareth Edwards and the Publicity Group at Industrial Light & Magic as we look back at his time directing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Gareth Edwards on the set of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.