The second part of my two-part conversation with Industrial Light & Magics TJ Falls and Mohen Leo lands on ILM.com as we discuss editorial and VFX collaboration, the Yavinian doodar, background plates, and here Mohen Leo discusses the lessons learned from Gareth Edwards while working on Rogue One.
“I have to give credit for having learned this approach to Gareth Edwards,” he explains. “When we built the city of Jedha, we had blocks of neighborhoods based on layouts from parts of Morocco. Then, Gareth asked us to do something which seemed really strange at the time. He said, ‘I want you to drop 300 random cameras into the CG model of the city, anywhere you like, and show me the pictures.’ We wrote a script that dropped a camera at every intersection and then rendered a view in every direction. We sent those to Gareth, and he picked from those, the idea being that rather than artificially building a view to the camera, you would scout the artificial city just as you would scout a real location and go, ‘I found this really cool angle here.’ That way, you ended up with compositions that felt much more interesting than if you simply asked someone to put some buildings in the background.”
“What I really appreciate about Gareth is that he has this really disciplined approach to thinking about whether you could have done a visual effects shot in the real world, and would it have felt the same way?” Leo continues. “I took that forward into our approach to Andor. Quite often, if we did a layout of visual effects and everything fit neatly into frame, Gareth would say, ‘That feels artificial. Make it so that something uncomfortably sticks out of frame, and as the shot progresses, I have to pan and tilt from one thing to the other, because both of them won’t fit in the frame at the same time.’ That makes it feel real and organic. I always appreciate how much I learned from Gareth about shot design.”
