hey everybody adam savage here in my cave answering questions from tested patrons
uh if you'd like to know how to become a tested patron there is a link in the
comments below today's question comes from patron michael t and he says
i'm here with my painted up black series helmet i do believe that when i finally
finish my mandalorian baskar armor costume that this is going to be the helmet i wear
um yeah it's a lot more comfortable than the anova's right now and i mean i'm gonna put some
padding in here and everything but i dig this helmet uh okay so today's question comes from
michael t being a fan of the mandalorian he says and talking to your friends at ilm oh he's not a
fan he's talking about me being a fan okay being a fan of mandalorian talking with your friends at
ilm george lucas's effects studio industrial light magic uh what are your thoughts on the
volume what are the ilm guys thoughts is it a game changer for making tv or movies or just another
evolution of technology that ilm has been on the forefront for a lot of years well it can be both
um the volume that michael refers to is the environment in which they shoot the mandalorian
which for the uninitiated is actually mind-blowing and michael this this here and herein lies my
answer it is an absolutely groundbreaking piece of technology allowed by the radically increased
speed of computers and gpus and the many parts and components they use to process data on the fly
um it is an absolute game changer so uh what the volume is is a uh an environment in which to shoot
movies that is unlike any other environment before so uh if you've ever watched any behind
the scenes movie making you have seen actors with a background of green behind them that is
a green screen the reason they use the green is because when they shoot them they can then take
the character that they've filmed against the green and plop them into any environment they
want this is an old technology well-known green screen blue screen we can even use other colors
but these have been the ways since time immemorial that we have taken an actor and put them in space
or in a jungle or in some other environment and it can be done on video on film it's been
done on television in the movies you can do it live there's all like it is a known technology
so that idea of taking a character where they're correct and real on the film's
camera but everything behind them is not is a a sort of classic construction of special effects
and it goes back to even the silent era when you had backdrops
there's even uh there's even double exposures done way back in the day where they took
a character exposed one background with a black spot where the character was and then
re-exposed with the character in there yeah but what the volume does so every way that
i've just described that is a multi-step process you film an actor against a background then you go
and use post-processing technology it used to be analog now it's digital
to replace their background what the volume does is it puts the background in
the camera live so the volume picture um i think the best way to picture it is a hemispherical dome
that is the shooting stage except that the inside of so picture that i you and i in this video are
surrounded by a huge hemispherical dome with i don't know 20 foot ceilings and maybe it's 60 feet
in diameter i haven't been to the actual volume so i don't know its size
now picture that the inside of this dome is all an an led screen right like like you've seen on
the billboards that wrap around times square that this is a compound curved led screen okay
and you can project anything you want on it you can project a background right okay so that right
in there of itself is amazing so the camera sees the actor and a background on them which
means that when you look at the mandalorian in the frame the reflections in his helmet
reflect the world he's in this has never been possible before really you the there are digital
artists who have digitally taken the green in reflection and replaced it with the world this
does it absolutely live with real lighting effects all right let's bring it back in here um but the
volume goes one step further than that because if you simply projected the world the background
i don't know the intern the interior of the moss aspect cantina let's say um and it was static it
would look great for individual shots but when the camera moves you would be able to see that the the
world that is projected on there isn't necessarily moving dynamically with the actors because it is a
it is a single screen so what the volume does is it originally used if i please forgive me if i
get this wrong but what i understand is that in the first season of the mandalorian it used the
unreal engine and then for subsequent seasons they've been modifying that with some custom
software i'm not exactly sure of the details but um we all know unreal engine as an incredible uh
a game engine for generating virtual environments on the fly for gaming uh it did that for the
volume where it generated the virtual environment to the camera which means that when the camera is
panning around an actor in the volume and there's like multiple levels of detail behind them let's
say there's trees and then there's houses and then way in the distance there's mountains
instead of all those things being just a flat projected image they move dynamically in relation
to each other so that when the camera moves around the actor the background moves too and
it may even be disconcerting for people who aren't looking through the camera on set because the
whole environment is changing just to accommodate what the camera's eye sees
i again i want to tell you i have not been to the volume this is all
from my reading and from like the obsessing i've done about how beautiful this is and
john knoll one of the designers is a good friend of mine and we've chatted about it but
there's it's entirely possible that i'm getting huge chunks of this wrong so please forgive me for
uh facts that i'm not nailing here and i hope that was somewhat clear about the volume because it is
absolutely an incredible game changer my friend fon davis has a wonderful film studio done in
la callenco and we were just filming down there and fawn is experimenting we didn't film with his
volume but he's experimenting with a mini volume and getting some fantastic results with it um
like i said you know ilm is always customizing and and refining their pieces but i think they
started out with the first experiments with a bunch of off-the-shelf products and
people can too the idea that computing power has increased enough where one could put a
bunch of led screens behind one and get some really dynamic filming shots in your house for
a few thousand dollars that's that's astounding um i would love to play around in a volume and
people are building them all over the place right now uh i have not yet gotten to play
in one and see all the different things that it can do but rest assured i want to someday soon um
because it doesn't just okay here are some of the advantages to the volume
every time you take a film piece and you post process it you're you're deteriorating
its quality somewhat you are making some compromises um and putting things in camera
is always better it is i don't think there's an effects human out there who would disagree with
me if you can get it in camera it's just going to look better than if you have to animate it or mat
it or composite it later and i'll give you some examples there are two great movies to look at
for this uh to compare against each other one is batman the original 1989 batman with
michael keaton and the other is uh brazil brazil came out in 1985. batman came out in 1989 um
i can't remember who the production designer on brazil is which is ridiculous because i've seen it
hundreds of times but anton first the incredible designer anton first was the designer of batman
and he's amazing and i do believe that in the batman sense he was inspired by brazil i've never
met him or spoken to him but um batman's sets are frequently uh miniatures that are matted against
the world and uh uh brazil's minute brazil also uses a ton of miniatures
but where batman does a lot of composite shots because it's a big blockbuster film and that was
pretty standard for an effects heavy film in those days uh uh uh in any day really brazil did almost
all of its effects in camera uh which was the low budget way for terry gilliam and his team to do it
but when you look at so so in brazil there's a famous scene of sam lowry the lead flying in a
suit of armor with wings mechanical wings and he is flying through this cloud landscape and
oh you know what i'll compare this to uh to to to empire empire strikes back okay so in brazil
there's there are several scenes of sam lowry the protagonists in a suit of armor mechanical wings
flying through clouds now picture the scene of uh luke arriving in bespin in empire strikes back you
see his ship flying through the clouds there are some shots that are absolutely magnificent and
there are some shots where you really can see that the ship is like matted into these clouds
in brazil there is no uncanny valley of sam's character flying through the clouds
because what they did was instead of animating a model and then compositing it
into the set they actually built like a 12 or 14 inch long figure of sam lowry mechanical with the
costume that he's wearing and mechanical wings and a motor in it that flapped the wings really fast
and they had lead in the arms so the motor had to work against the wings like this and
then they filmed it at high speed so when they slowed it down the puppet looked to be working
against the wings and it was in the set that they were filming it in there was no compositing
i submit that the sam lowry flying through the clouds scenes in brazil are way better looking
than the the the effects shots through the clouds of bespin uh that there are some of those that are
just a tad clunky because of the the limitations of compositing so getting it in camera is
absolutely critical and there are shots from the mandalorian where you're looking at desert
reflections in the helmet and they are indoors just absolutely blows my mind it's the kind of
thing that you might not notice the average person might not be like no the reflections of the world
are in his helmet but like as an old effects dude oh my god like the first time i saw it i was like
how are they doing this um i am really grateful to disney for releasing the gallery and showing
how the volume works and the different innovations and ways in which they're using it
um i would love to get to the volume someday and do a deep dive and boy do i want to play with one
yeah someday a boy can dream um thank you so much uh michael t i appreciate your question again
tested patrons uh your questions are fantastic if you'd like to find out how to become one
there's a link in the comments below thank you guys so much and i will see you next time