Four years ago, Hal Hickel tackled a question on Quora regarding the digital recreation of Grand Moff Tarkin for Rogue One, and now ILM’s Todd Vaziri – with permission from Hickel – reports Hal’s reply, whcih gives great insight into how the effect was done in 2016’s billion dollar blockbuster. Vaziri gives some details on the Quora question.
Back in 2020, Hal Hickel answered a Quora question with great detail about how we created Grand Moff Tarkin for “Rogue One” (2016), and in the interest of film history preservation, I got Hal’s permission to reprint it here. (I was a lead on the digital human team at ILM for Tarkin, and worked closely with Hal on the film.)
Hal summarizes our process succinctly, and corrects many misconceptions and untruths about how we made Tarkin, so I feel like this is an important document. To be frank, I hesitate to talk publicly too much about our Tarkin and Leia work for “Rogue One” because for some folks it generates a lot of… emotion.
Over to Hal.
“Guy Henry was cast because he’s a terrific actor, and had the bearing and vocal quality we were looking for. It was helpful that he also had a certain physical resemblance (high cheekbones, etc), though that was not essential, given that the plan was to completely replace his head with our CG Tarkin. That said, when remapping the facial expressions of one person onto another (Henry to Cushing), the more similar they are, the easier it’s going to be.
The intention was never for Guy to do either a vocal, or physical “impression” of Peter Cushing, but rather to give us a performance that “felt” like Tarkin, both physically and vocally. So we never asked for, or expected a spot on vocal match, or for Guy to smirk, etc, like Cushing.
We didn’t do any modulation or any other audio tricks with Henry’s voice. We didn’t compare waveforms with Cushing audio, talk to his old manager, or any of that other stuff mentioned elsewhere in this thread. We just used Guy Henry’s voice. I’m sure Guy watched the Tarkin scenes from ANH endlessly, and did his best to find a tone and delivery that felt right.
Guy didn’t wear any prosthetics or makeup as part of the process, with the exception of the dots that help us track his facial movement. Someone in this thread talked about “makeup, cosmetics, physical altering”. No. Again, we just put dots on Guy’s face to track it’s movement, that’s all.”
It would be fascinating to see how Tarkin would be recreated in 2024 after the advances of The Mandalorian and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and how much more it would resemble Peter Cushing. Maybe that’s a question for another day.
- Hardcover Book
- Mann, George (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 512 Pages - 09/24/2024 (Publication Date) - Random House/Star Wars (Publisher)
