Twenty-five years ago, a 35-year-old Rob Coleman was deep in the code of creating the incredible advances for The Phantom Menace, and the current head of ILM’s Sydney headquarters looks back at the challenges that had to be navigated to bring Episode I to the screen. Here, he delves into the creation of the Boss Nass scenes on Naboo and the balanced of tones that had to be juggled.
“You have two characters who don’t exist in the world as the prime focus of that shot,” explains Rob Coleman, who served as animation director on The Phantom Menace and today is ILM’s creative director of the Sydney studio. “We had these little mini-triumphs as an animation crew, and were earning more and more trust with [director] George [Lucas] and the editors that we could sustain this and handle it. In the early days, they would really only cut to us if the characters were talking, and over time, especially into Attack of the Clones [2002], we earned those non-verbal shots.
“In live-action, we see it all the time,” Coleman continues, “an editor cuts to a non-verbal character so that the audience sees the reaction and actually learns more about the scene from the reaction than from what they’re hearing offscreen in dialogue. It was really important to me to get to that point. Along that journey, there were many shots with sustained physicality of the characters, what we call body-mechanics shots. They’re acting, in character, sharing the screen with real people. Subconsciously, the audience can say, ‘Well, I know that person’s real but that other one is fake.’ Once we got to a point where they weren’t thinking that anymore, then we were in the place we needed to be.”
