A major change in tone between the pre-Imperial Coruscant of the Prequel Trilogy and the harsh, monolithic gray of the Empire’s reign is highlighted in the debut season of Star Wars: Andor, and the LA Times take a look at the VFX of the shows first season, focusing on their efforts to craft as much ‘reality’ to the cityscape as possible.
In the “Star Wars” prequel films, the galactic capital Coruscant felt fantastical (and notably green-screeny in the early days of virtual environments). In “Andor,” it feels like a material place where people live and work, and with buildings that have weight and substance.
Pritchard says, “We wanted to be completely immersed in the city. We didn’t want these kind of big aerial shots, kind of, ‘Meanwhile on Coruscant,’ you know, big helicopter shots. Most things were shot at ground level as if the camera operator has the camera on their shoulder and they’re right there. We wanted to move away a bit from the prequels, which were kind of high science fiction, you know, 1950s, kind of ‘Metropolis’ style. We went more towards the Art Deco stone materials you might see in New York. Our buildings were in a variety of stone materials but not using metals to embellish them. And then using glass as a nice reflective surface.
“We had this idea to do a reflection shot for a while, just tracking [a luxury flying car] across the reflection and seeing it distort and wobble and then panning off that to a plaza. That took a long time to feel natural. Even before we started rendering, it took a long time to get the camera and the animation right, to make it feel correct and not too forced as an idea. But yeah, really happy with that shot.”
- Hardcover Book
- Mann, George (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 416 Pages - 11/14/2023 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
