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In the fourth episode, the Mandalorian is looking to lay low and travels to the remote farming planet of Sorgan and visits the common house, which is a thatched, basket-weave structure. The actual common house was a miniature built by the art department and then photographed to be included in the virtual world. The miniature was lit with a single, hard light source that emulated natural daylight breaking through the thatched walls. “You could clearly see that one side of the common house was in hard light and the other side was in shadow,” recalls Idoine. “There were hot spots in the model that really looked great so we incorporated LED “movers” with slash gobos and Charlie Bars [long flags] to break up the light in a similar basket-weave pattern. Because of this very open basket-weave construction and the fact that the load had a lot of shafts of light, I added in random slashes of hard light into the practical set and it mixed really well.” When you think about it, unless it’s a practical light in shot, all of our lighting is outside the frame — that’s how we make movies,” Fraser continues. “But when most of your lighting comes from the environment, you have to shape that environment carefully. We sometimes have to add a practical or a window into the design, which provides our key light even though we never see that [element] on camera.” A variation of the LEGO Minifigure baby, Grogu has appeared in 4 sets now, appearing the same each time. It is one of the most adorable minifigures I have ever seen, from the sand green rubbery head to the infant’s torso. While not unique, it is good to see it here. The Build Fortunately, says Fraser, Favreau wanted The Mandalorian to have a visual aesthetic that would match that of the original Star Wars. This meant a more “grounded” camera, with slow pans and tilts, and non-aggressive camera moves — an aesthetic that helped to hide the system latency. “In addition to using some of the original camera language in Star Wars, Jon is deeply inspired by old Westerns and samurai films, so he also wanted to borrow a bit from those, especially Westerns,” Fraser notes. “ The Mandalorian is, in essence, a gunslinger, and he’s very methodical. This gave us a set of parameters that helped define the look of the show. At no point will you see an 8mm fisheye lens in someone’s face. That just doesn’t work within this language.

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We all felt a little like film students at the start of this,” Fraser says. “It’s all new, and we were discovering the limitations and abilities of the system as we went along. We continually pushed the system to break it and see where the edges of the envelope were — but the technology continued to evolve and allow us to push that envelope further. We’d say, ‘Oh, man, I wish we could …’ and someone at the Brain Bar would say, ‘Yeah, I think we can!’ And the next day we’d have that ability. It was pretty amazing.” Favreau had just completed The Jungle Book and was embarking on The Lion Kingfor Disney — both visual-effects heavy films. It was also of paramount importance to me that the result of this technology not just be ‘suitable for TV,’ but match that of major, high-end motion pictures,” Fraser continues. “We had to push the bar to the point where no one would really know we were using new technology; they would just accept it as is. Amazingly, we were able to do just that.” This information was mapped onto 3D virtual sets and then modified or embellished as necessary to adhere to the Star Wars design aesthetic. If there wasn’t a real-world location to photograph, the environments were created entirely by ILM’s “environments” visual-effects team. The elements of the locations were loaded into the Unreal Engine video game platform, which provided a live, real-time, 3D environment that could react to the camera’s position.The virtual LED environments were hugely successful, but traditional greenscreen still played a significant role in the production of The Mandalorian, and it was always on hand — especially for situations where the frustum was too wide for the system to adequately respond. The Volume was also capable of producing virtual greenscreen on the LED wall, which could be any size, and any hue or saturation of green. Among the benefits of virtual green-screen were that it required no time to set up or rig, and its size could be set to precisely outline the subject to be replaced — which greatly minimized and sometimes even eliminated green spill. According to Idoine, the production used 50mm, 65mm, 75mm, 100mm, 135mm, 150mm and 180mm Ultra Vistas that range from T2 to T2.8, and he and Fraser tended to expose at T2.5-T3.5. “Dan Sasaki gave us two prototype Ultra Vistas to test in June 2018,” he says, “and from that we worked out what focal-length range to build. As amazing and advanced as the Unreal Engine’s capabilities were, rendering fully virtual polygons on-the-fly didn’t produce the photo-real result that the filmmakers demanded. In short, 3-D computer-rendered sets and environments were not photo-realistic enough to be utilized as in-camera final images. The best technique was to create the sets virtually, but then incorporate photographs of real-world objects, textures and locations and map those images onto the 3-D virtual objects. This technique is commonly known as tiling or photogrammetry. This is not necessarily a unique or new technique, but the incorporation of photogrammetry elements achieved the goal of creating in-camera finals. There are many benefits to the virtual greenscreen. It is nearly immediate, requiring no rigging, stands, time to set up or additional lighting. It can be any size, meaning the green is really only the perfect size to outline the subject to be replaced. When this happens there is no (or extremely limited) green spill on the actors or reflected in other objects around the set. This all but eliminates the requirement for de-spilling green in post; a timely and tedious process.

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If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could create final in-camera visual effects — or “near” finals, with only technical fixes required, and with complete creative confidence in the composition and look of the shots. On The Mandalorian, this space was dubbed “the Volume.” (Technically, a “volume” is any space defined by motion-capture technology.) Speaking as a card-carrying OG Star Wars nerd — literally: I bought the first set of trading cards at my neighborhood comic shop in Kansas City, and to this day I can’t look at jpegs of those babies without hallucinating an olfactory Proustian bubblegum rush — I truly do understand the grateful tears that some viewers shed during the last ten minutes of “The Rescue,” particularly at the “surprise” revelation of Grogu’s savior. When that hood dropped, waterworks flowed around the world. And the saltwater level rose when episode director Peyton Reed held that anguished close-up of Mando watching his emerald child depart.Scanning is a faster, looser process than photogrammetry and it is done from multiple positions and viewpoints. For scanning, the more parallax introduced, the better the software can resolve the 3-D geometry. Damm created a custom rig where the scanner straps six cameras to their body which all fire simultaneously as the scanner moves about the location. This allows them to gather six times the images in the same amount of time — about 1,800 on average. Each phase of photography — photogrammetry and scanning — needs to be done at various times during the day to capture different looks to the landscape. And so it is complete. Overall I appreciate the look of the craft. The silhouette fits nicely, and the underlying technic elements in the conning tower provide a sturdy handle, improving the overall swooshability of the model. The tiny TIE fighters are gorgeous. One can be placed in the opening at the front, and pushed forwad. Unfortunately, this mechanism is only functional when the cabin lid is open.

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This story was originally published in the Feb. 2020 issue of AC. Some images are additional or alternate. We should’ve known things would wrap up this way the instant that Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) moseyed into The Mandalorian and pulled focus from Mando. Miraculously disgorged from the Sarlacc pit that devoured him in Return of the Jedi (a silly twist canonized in spinoff properties), Fett had come to reclaim the armor sported by one of The Mandalorian’s most charismatic new characters, a Tatooine marshal (Timothy Olyphant) who wore Fett’s gear like a knight riding into battle against a dragon (actually a sandworm/sand-shark monster). But Fett was really onscreen to reclaim The Mandalorian for that sector of the Star Wars fan base that refuses to accept anything that feels like a revision, subversion, or expansion of what they already know they like — particularly when the new iteration asks them to look beyond all the lovely, shiny things onscreen and think about whether their own relationship with the tried-and-true elements of Star Wars is healthy. This concept was initially proposed by Kim Libreri of Epic Games while he was at Lucasfilm and it has become the basis of the technology that “Holy Grail” that makes a live-action Star Wars television series possible.Bags 8&9 go towards building the lid of the bridge. Bag 9’s contents already appeared unwrapped with bag 6, however. Visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff and executive creative director and head of ILM Rob Bredow showed Favreau a number of tests that ILM had conducted including the technology of the LED wall from Rogue One. Fraser suggested with the advancements in LED technology since Rogue One that this project could leverage new panels and push the envelope on real-time, in-camera visual effects. Favreau loved the concept and decided that was the production path to take. “I was very encouraged by my experiences using similar technology on Jungle Book and using virtual cameras on The Lion King. I had also experimented with a partial video wall for the pilot episode of The Orville.” In 2016, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy approached writer-director Jon Favreau about a potential project.