VFX Voice have dived into the magic behind Solo: A Star Wars Story, specifically the Millennium Falcon. The Voice asked VFX Supervisor and SVP, Executive Creative Director and head of ILM, Rob Bredow about the project.
“First, we knew we had a lot of pages of material that were going to be shot in the cockpit,” observes Bredow. “Most recently on Rogue One, we used LEDs wrapped around the cockpit of the ships in that movie to give you better lighting into the cockpit, but in most cases it wasn’t directly photographable, because the LEDs weren’t fine enough pitch to be able to be used directly when you saw them in camera. So we took the basics that went into that original system for Rogue One, and improved the quality by changing to high resolution, in this case, 4K laser projectors, and had an array of projectors, I think it was six, behind the rear projection screen. This was 30-feet tall and wrapped around the cockpit 180 degrees.”
What this meant, ultimately, was that the actors would sit in the cockpit and be able to see a star field directly outside. Or, when they pushed the levers of the Falcon to go into hyperspace, the stars would streak and form the familiar blue tunnel – an effect pre-made by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in 8K by 4K projected onto the screen like a ride film. Many cockpit shots, of course, still required extensive visual effects work that would be completed later.
