The VFXblog has visited ILM London and uncovered a lot of interesting facts about the making of The Last Jedi, here is an extract:
ILM had a special project to make sure the space battles echoed the originals (and even considered doing them practically)
With CGI, the space battles in The Last Jedi could clearly be almost anything. But that wasn’t what director Rian Johnson wanted. Instead, he looked to echo what was familiar – and what was so well-regarded – from the original trilogy. But interestingly the space battles there, made up of computer controlled motion control miniature elements layered together optically, were somewhat limited in which way ships and cameras could move. CG of course gives modern-day filmmakers more freedom, but Johnson and ILM deliberately limited any dramatic camera moves, or let the original films at least inform the shots.
What helped was an effort inside ILM to mimic that original look and feel (the studio even bid out how much the sequences would cost to do practically as miniatures, but this proved cost and time prohibitive).
“Luckily, we had Dennis Muren here,” says ILM animation supervisor Steve Aplin. “And obviously he was driving a lot of the initial effects work on those first films. He was also driving an experiment at ILM where he actually took some of the old footage of Star Wars, and got us to do CG versions of those shots, and then spoke to us all about them, asking, why does this work and why doesn’t this work? And what are the differences, and what can we do with the cameras?”
“It was just a great lesson in how much you can move the camera,” adds Aplin. “And that drove itself into the destruction of the vehicles as well. We took it as a base, and just very much paid attention to, ‘Well, why did that feel real?’ And a lot of it is simplifying. Less is more. You don’t have to do so much.”
Out of that process, Johnson generally moved towards “simpler, more storytelling cameras – he wanted it to be very graphically obvious what was going on in each shot,” states Aplin. “And we could take it to the edge of what we felt was reasonable within that, so long as it told the story. There’s only a few shots where we really pull away from this simpler sort of structure of the cameras and the language that you had in the original films.”
One direct example where that approach was used occurred when Poe is doing some low-level flying across the surface of the Dreadnought and is slaloming between the different turrets to blow them up. ILM referenced shots here from Return of the Jedi of X-wings flying across the Death Star surface. “We did some very basic matchmove tracking to those shots from the film, and then put them into the space of our Dreadnought,” outlines ILM visual effects supervisor Mike Mulholland. “We didn’t use it directly, but it was there showing how the ships would move when the camera moves at certain speed and how it operates in some spots.”
For the rest of the fascinating and in-depth look at ILMs work, visit the VFXBlog for the rundown.
