After chatting with StarWars.com about his time on Rogue One, Gareth Edwards sits down with ILM Publicity to delve into the technical aspects of the film, how the VFX came together – remember, Gareth has a background in VFX himself, which made him the only choice to direct the film – and how Rogue One came to be.
ILM: Tell me about the freedom you found in the virtual production-aspects of Rogue One?
GE: 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. 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. 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. 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. Whereis, in the real world, what you tend to do is you have a space, because it already exists. 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. 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. 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.
ILM: And what was John pushing for?
GE: It was pre-viz animation of each section of the battle sequence. They then figured out a set up where they had an Apple iPad, with a game controller attached to it. When you moved the iPad, it could tell where it was in 3D space. 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. Then I’d go home on my MacBook and select my favorite takes, and then try to cut something together. It would be very jittery, and handheld, and not perfect. 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 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.
- Stackpole, Michael A. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 384 Pages - 09/07/2021 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
