While ILM are the lead effects house on all things Star Wars, liaising with the many other houses to produce the seamless work we enjoy, there’s always time to check out the work done by ILM’s VFX partners. Here, befores & afters catch up with DNEG visual effects supervisor Chris McLaughlin to discuss their work on Skeleton Crew, specifically the mint on At Attin.
b&a: Tell me about the build for the Mint — can you discuss the process of taking concepts and also any VAD work for this and starting the build? What kind of live action plates were filmed? What were some of the main challenges of dealing with scale, selling the vastness and adding in details, including robots and other elements?
Chris McLaughlin: The Mint environment can be broken down into three main areas – the landing platform and lift shaft, the ‘Credit Maker’, and the vault.
For each of these areas, we were provided with concept art and a previs model. Using these references, we began by creating a blocking model, gradually adding more detail to each component.
Since these were fully CG environments, the filming took place against a bluescreen, with only a few key set elements built practically – the landing platform floor, the spaceship ramp, and a full-size security droid puppet. Everything else was entirely CG.
The onset lighting was carefully planned to account for what would replace the bluescreen. We had many lighting cues to work with in CG – for example, a strong, hard, warm light source behind Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) to represent the entrance of the vault, as well as vertical chaser lights to simulate the motion of passing lights as the landing platform descended down the lift shaft.
The landing platform itself was largely pre-designed, as it had been carried over from previous sequences handled by another vendor. Our main task was to slightly increase its resolution and texture the areas closest to the camera in our shots. However, the lift shaft, through which the landing platform descends, needed to be built from scratch.
