In the Fall issue of the Camera Operator magazine, the Society of Camera Operators bring us a detailed look into the making of Obi-Wan Kenobi, with a focus on ILM’s work, the Volume and the advance of digital technology that is allowing stories like Obi-Wan Kenobi to not only be told, but to also cast us back to earlier times – the Clone Wars – in a convincing manner.
CO: Talking about that balance, obviously a lot of the series was shot on the Volume using the virtual environments, but you still have some practical sets and even some location shooting. The third episode largely takes place on this sort of Joshua Tree–looking mining world with mountains and desert plains. Am I correct in assuming that that was a location shoot?
Herr: Yeah, that was on location at Mystery Mesa near Santa Clarita. So, that was all real. Obviously, there are a lot of extensions; they added mountains, they added all the mining infrastructure, the factories, smoking smokestacks in the distance. We did bring in the Joshua trees. Those are real, those were stuck in the ground. I think the challenge with that is the hard sunlight. That’s one of the things that they’re still trying to figure out; how to get hard light into the Volume. If you have hard light hitting the ground, that point where that transitions into the LED wall, it’s hard to match that brightness. And then there’s an issue where the light hitting the ground then lights the screen, so you lighten up the screen to match, but when you lighten up the screen, you’re now lighting the ground even brighter. You end up with this feedback loop. That transition was always something they were tweaking and trying to get right. Especially on the wides—the big wides where you kind of see the roundness of that stage. I think they definitely had to go in there and tweak a little bit, but there are plenty of instances when we’re shooting normal lenses, tighter, that you cannot tell where it starts and ends.
CO: That’s so interesting! Speaking to some of these unique situations in the Volume and the lighting challenges that you were mentioning, how different is it shooting on the Volume versus shooting on a traditional set or location shooting? Are you using similar cameras and lenses, or is it all totally different and unique?
Moseley: Well, we’re using really all the same lenses and cameras. When you’re shooting on the Volume, large format cameras tend to look best. You try to keep the depth of field down so things look better. We also try to get lenses that are more old-school—lenses that aren’t super sharp. Softer lenses help the LED screen to not be too sharp. We shot a lot with anamorphic lenses as well as spherical lenses for certain things. We had a mixture of lenses, but mostly we just try to keep the depth of field down. You have to pay attention when you’re on the Volume a little bit on how you shoot things.
Herr: Also, it’s hard to shoot two cameras. Three cameras? Forget about it. Basically the field of view of your camera as it hits the wall is your background, and that travels with you as you move around. So if someone’s shooting a wide two-shot, and then somebody wants to do a tighter single, you’re now within the wider shot’s “frustum”—in other words, the rendered area of the screen. You can shoot within that if you’re tight enough, and it can kind of work even though the perspective would be from that other camera. But if that camera pans away, you’ll see this blurry line come through your frame where it goes from the rendered frustum back to your field of view that they stack underneath because there’s a hierarchy of cameras within the Volume. They’ll prioritize the wide and then give second priority to B camera, whose frustum would go behind the A camera instead of busting the A camera shot with their background. They can outline them in red and blue just to see where they are, so there are these squares flying around the Volume as you point the camera around that show what your field of view is. So, that was a challenge, but we found ways to work around it, like shooting a wide and then going in real tight within that so you don’t notice the perspective being off. But three cameras in the Volume is definitely a challenge. I’d say the only time we did three cameras was on “dirt shots.” They call it a dirt shot when it’s literally just practical sets, mostly looking down. You can throw those in anywhere. But yeah, multi-cameras are a challenge.
CO: That’s something I hadn’t even considered. The perspective is tied to the camera. And even forgetting any issues of physical logistics or physical space, just the sheer rendering power of it, if you’re shooting multiple camera angles, each camera has to be rendered from its own unique perspective. That’s very interesting.
Herr: They can make the frustum wider than what the camera’s really seeing to accommodate another camera. They can make it half the Volume from that perspective so you can shoot within their frustum. As they’re panning around, it’s not going to kill your shot. The background is always just like a static panorama of that set by default. When you don’t have any cameras in there, it’s just a static 360 image. When you bring a camera in, that’s when the perspective starts to change. So as you pan around, you go from the 360-degree still image to a live perspective. Sometimes set pieces will move around as well, like you’ll pan over to some ship and in reality it’s not where it is in the 360 image. It’s 30 feet to the right because physically in space, you are in a different location. It gets a little confusing sometimes.
Moseley: But they can always fix it in post if they have to, if they really want the shot.
Herr: Well, with the budget we had, they can fix it in post, but I imagine in the future little productions are gonna go in there, and they have to get everything in-camera final. We would strive for in-camera finals as much as possible, but there are times where we’re doing something where they have to paint out cameras, or they have to replace the ceiling, you know, various fixes. But overall, I think it definitely helped the look of the show, especially with reflective things, helmets, or just even in somebody’s eyes. You don’t have a blue screen in their eye, you have the real city lights or the full environment.
