beloFX visual effects supervisor Russell Bowen talks with Befores and Afters about the skill and craft in creating lightsaber blades, something that would seem to be very simple but in reality is far more of a skill than one might think. Here he talks about his work on The Acolyte, an effects-heavy show that required the work of a number of FX houses under the supervision of ILM production visual effects supervisor Julian Foddy.
Lightsabers are interesting, on paper they should be the simplest visual effects to do. It’s a glorified glow node, but actually, it’s not, because there’s an artistry to it and a history or legacy to lightsabers and how they look. Also, if you look at the franchise, lightsabers change. There isn’t one consistent look to a lightsaber.
There’s a similarity across the Star Wars universe for sure, but we obviously know there’s the character it is attached to, and that influences the look of it. Whether that’s color, intensity or even the frequency of the beam itself.
Overall, our approach was to look at all of them across the board, every lightsaber style, and find similarities: what works and what doesn’t, especially those that favoured the look of the show and our main character Indara. We went back and forth with Julian a lot on this particular topic. Julian had his preferences on his favorite lightsabers as well as the showrunners. Some of that was already present in the onset material, the light rods used to cast light for example.
