Writing over at ILM, the ever-industrious and insightful Jay Stobie steps back a year to the wonderful Skeleton Crew and chats with Landos Fields, Andy Proctor, Will Muto, Kate Gotfredson and Todd Vaziri about ILM’s real-time rendering pipeline and the advantages this incredible innovation has brought, charting its history from Rogue One to last years brilliant Disney Plus series.
ILM’s ability to successfully demonstrate the viability of that real-time process was met with an immense wave of support, as Fields credits Jon Favreau, John Knoll, head of ILM Janet Lewin, and Lucasfilm’s Rob Bredow, for being strong proponents of continuing on the cutting-edge course. Nevertheless, Fields emphasizes that this approach was intended to be one of many tools on which they could draw, as the choice of which technique to pull from ILM’s ever-growing arsenal of production pipelines would always come down to “the right tool for the job.” While the majority of the StageCraft volume LED in-camera work for Skeleton Crew was done using ILM’s proprietary Helios renderer and engine, this particular sequence was an opportunity to also see where the use of real time could be pushed and leveraged in novel ways.
Perceiving The Mandalorian’s season three finale as a major real-time stepping stone, Proctor recalls that ILM elected to expand its use to an even greater extent, as he posits, “Now, we’re going to take a sequence and cut it in among live action that was shot in the volume and other traditional visual effects that are rendered offline. It has to match the other sequences and be as visually complex as everything else.”With this real-time production workflow firmly in place when ILM’s work on Skeleton Crew commenced, Proctor recalls the ladder-climbing shot from “Zero Friends Again,” saying, “We knew it was an important moment, because it establishes that Neel is scared. Kate Gotfredson was able to set the shot up in real time so we could do a dynamic height or vertigo wedge.”
This arrangement enabled them to consult with John Knoll and ILM visual effects supervisor Eddie Pasquarello in real-time, experimenting with a variety of elements, from pushing the background forward and away to tweaking the lighting. Speaking to the capacity to review several shots in a row in a single cut with per-shot interactivity, Vaziri adds, “We had a mini-editorial cut with works in progress. Being able to show an entire sequence to the visual effects supervisors and saying, ‘Yeah, this is how it’s going to look, but we can interactively move things around and instantly see in the context of the cut,’ that’s a game changer right there.”
