Is it the force, deepfakes or fake babies?
A lot goes into making The Mandalorian look like it takes place in a galaxy far far away.
Every installment in the Star Wars empire features new creatures from far-off planets
that only the most creative minds could dream up. This is true even in the early
episodes of The Mandalorian. Consider the Blurrgs, for instance. These fat, bipedal,
possibly reptilian creatures have been seen running around on Arvala-7. Din Djarin
finds himself on this planet during one of his missions and uses these creatures to get around.
Pixomondo's visual effects supervisor Goran Backman
explained to DigitalTrends some of the challenges they had to
overcome to make the Blurrgs look as realistic as possible. As he put it,
"Since we had a lot of interaction between the actors and the creatures,
we also had to drive the on-set, practical buck — that's what we called the saddle
that the actors would ride, sort of like the seat on a mechanical bull."
The actors' riding motions were captured with mechanical pistons at the base of the practical
Blurrgs. Then after filming, special effects teams created the Blurrgs' remaining body,
stationary, and in-motion poses. And interestingly enough, the Pixomondo team
often referenced rhinos and elephants for some of the Blurrgs' features.
Grogu, more lovingly known as Baby Yoda, is arguably The Mandalorian's true star.
This cute little green fellow spends his time on the show trailing after Din as the two venture
around the Outer Rim. He's often sitting comfortably in his floating egg-shaped pram,
but no matter what he's doing, it takes an entire team to bring him to life.
This tiny alien was created through the combined efforts of animatronics and CGI technology.
According to the docu-series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian,
it took three months to develop and build the Grogu that ended up on screen. Behind the camera,
it took one person each to puppeteer the arms, eyes, body, head, ears, and walking movements.
The use of CGI only came into play to remove the wires and poles used to control Grogu.
Bryce Dallas Howard, who has directed a couple of episodes, was especially in
favor of using animatronic creatures instead of exclusively CGI technology. According to her,
there's a special magic that comes from using a moveable prop instead of solely utilizing CGI.
The actors' reactions to seeing Baby Yoda were authentic, and the physical acting and
movements with Grogu were far more real thanks to being captured in real time.
"You get to have the experience, like,
live of what the audience gets to experience when they're watching a movie."
The minds behind The Mandalorian have been widely praised for their unique ways of bringing
this sci-fi world to life. That's certainly clear in the construction of Din's spaceship,
the Razor Crest. Instead of opting for computer graphics, the visual
effects creators from Industrial Light & Magic worked on miniature models of the spacecraft.
3D printers were used to build the Razor Crest piece by piece.
John Goodson, the physical model maker from ILM, then put the individual pieces together,
added the ship's exterior layers, and took care of the fine paint details.
In order to get the ship to the big screen, a specially designed camera rig filmed the model.
As the ship sat in one spot with a surrounding bluescreen, the rigged camera flew past.
And to give the craft more movement, techs wobbled the model from side to side.
This technique of filming a model was a bit of an homage to the original trilogy,
as practical miniature ships of that era were also built
and shot in front of blue screens and then later added to starry backgrounds.
The use of a Darksaber by the villainous Moff Gideon posed a unique challenge to
The Mandalorian's prop designers. Prop sabers were continuously being redesigned and built
in order to get Gideon's weapon to look as accurate as possible. Unlike standard lightsabers,
the Darksabers' history had only ever been mentioned in The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels,
and it had only appeared as a cartoon instead of in a physical form. Thus,
it was difficult to get this new weapon exactly right. As Hal Hickel,
The Mandalorian's animation supervisor, explained in Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian:
"There was a lot of time put into getting
the energy effect just right that you see along the blade."
The physical prop that was used during filming was lit to give the surrounding area the lighting
effect that would normally come through from using a lighted weapon. The rest of the warbling effects
that are seen during the final battle scene were the result of many hours of digital rendering.
Lesser showrunners might have backed down from using something of the Darksaber's caliber.
But the special effects team of The Mandalorian rose to the challenge
and created an actual physical sword that Star Wars fans have been anticipating for a long time.
When it came time to bring IG-11 to life as a robotic bounty hunter, visual effects animator
Hal Hickel recognized the distinct differences between this droid and K-2SO from Rogue One:
A Star Wars Story. K-2SO was designed to be as close to human as a robot could get.
By using motion capture suits, those smoother motions were easily achieved.
But in the case of IG-11, the special effects team resisted the use of motion capture
and instead used a pre-built statue-like structure that had intentional awkwardness in its movements.
While there were a few parts, like the head, that could be moved remotely from a distance,
the rest of the body had to be manually arranged behind the scenes. This gave IG-11 a
rickety effect and thereby created an older, more rugged look that's perfect for a space Western.
"It was exactly the right awkwardness."
The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau is never one to shy away from a cinematic challenge.
He learned some valuable lessons in behind-the-scenes technology
during his time directing both 2016's The Jungle Book and 2019's The Lion King. Many
of the problems encountered during production of those films came from the use of excessive blue
and green screens and the lack of interactive sets around real-life actors. So the solution
was to invent revolutionary set technology. As Favreau explained on Disney Gallery,
"The Mandalorian is the first production ever to use real-time rendering and video wall in-camera,
set extensions, and effects. [...] Necessity was the mother of invention because we were
trying to figure out how to do the production here in the timeframe,
at the budget level, but still get the whole look that we're used to seeing."
"What did we learn on Lion King and Jungle Book? How do you apply it to The Mandalorian?"
Massive LED screens projected the scene's background to create the effect that actors and
camera crews were filming at outdoor locations. By utilizing positional data from cameras,
the high-tech backgrounds can change as the camera moves. The result creates perspective or parallax,
which can be defined by an object appearing slightly different from two different angles of
view. This gives viewers a more realistic feeling of being outside and allows actors to feel like
they're actually in a far-off world, something traditional green and blue screens can't do.
Practical effects were a critical part of creating The Mandalorian,
including the animatronics of Baby Yoda and the remote-controlled approach of IG-11.
But while these techniques are effective to an extent, if you don't have an actor behind a mask,
that takes away some of the personality of certain characters. A solution for this is the
use of animatronic prosthetics. This combination of humanity and technology is really fundamental
to Star Wars. As director Rick Famuyiwa put it on Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian,
"One part doesn't dominate the other, doesn't feel like the technology is overwhelming."
"It doesn't feel like, 'Well, that's quaint and primitive, so, you know, I'm not buying it.'"
Consider the character Kuiil, an Ugnaught voiced by Nick Nolte and played by Misty Rosas. According
to the creators who developed these prosthetics, Rosas' acting ability gave Kuiil the mobility that
allowed the character a softer and more relatable persona while the animatronic mask created a
face that viewers hadn't seen since The Empire Strikes Back. Similar combinations of animatronic
prosthetics and actors were seen again with the Frog Lady in Season 2. Viewers were able to see
a unique blend of humanity and alien emotion that wouldn't have otherwise been achievable.
When Jon Favreau broke the news of Luke Skywalker's appearance in
The Mandalorian's Season 2 finale, the atmosphere on set changed drastically.
Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian discussed the de-aging process
that was used to get Mark Hamill’s present day face back to its circa
1983 look. The actor admitted that he felt surprised by the proposal to play Luke again
but ultimately came to the conclusion that he couldn't say no to the opportunity.
The process that best suited the needs of The Mandalorian was to replace Hamill's real face
with an AI -generated image of his younger face using a deepfake program. In order to create this
younger visage, art director Landis Fields took 4K footage from all three original Star Wars films,
interviews of Hamill from the same time period, and still photographs from the set to compile
what Favreau calls the "library of faces." With thousands of images of Luke from the era of
the original trilogy, the deepfake program's AI could then rebuild expressions and match facial
characteristics and specific movements that line up with Hamill's lines in The Mandalorian.
That “library of faces” was then added onto an actor – and there you have it,
a 1983-era Mark Hamill!
A major goal of The Mandalorian showrunners has been to give audiences more than a simple
illusion of reality. When it comes to filming varying geographies of foreign planets,
creators of the series have taken it upon themselves to film as though they're actually in
unfamiliar conditions. For example, when it came time to create the planet of Trask in Season 2,
director Bryce Dallas Howard explained,
"You can't just say, 'Oh, the vision effects are going to make it look real.' You want
to shoot it in a manner in which you would actually have to shoot it if it was real."
"And then the audience believes that it's real."
Of course, digital special effects, CGI, and other combined computerized renderings
are the cherries that top the cake. But in order to achieve the look that made up most of the boat
scenes in this episode, a massive set was built to replicate the ship's deck. The challenge,
according to the special effects crew, was making a static boat stage look like a moving ship.
Of course, with the use of those fancy LED landscape screens and the ability to alter
parallax views, as well as specialized camera movements and CGI additions,
the boat set ultimately never had to actually move.
True lightsaber visuals have always been a visual effects feature exclusive to the
Star Wars franchise. And the weapon's inclusion in The Mandalorian is particularly special. In
the same way that Moff Gideon's Darksaber made its first physical appearance on the series,
Ahsoka Tano's twin white blades made their live-action debut as well.
Being able to capture actual light from props was a relatively new way to film lightsabers when The
Mandalorian was filmed. To get the right effect of lightsabers during filming, a visual technique
known as interactive lighting was utilized. This process involved LED lights built into the base of
prop sabers, which allowed the camera to capture how sabers would project real light and shadows
on and around the actors without obscuring the camera's field of vision with light distortion.
From there, cinematographers were easily able to frame the camera on specific focal points based
on where the interactive lighting from the prop lightsabers were highlighting character features.
Without the light source in the props, early film lightsabers didn't cast light or shadows.
This was noticeable by the lack of lightsaber glow reflected on actors' faces. Sabers from the
original Star Wars trilogy got their glow effect from reflective tape on the props.
Colors and other effects were added to individual frames in post-production
using a technique known as rotoscoping. When you compare that to The Mandalorian, you realize just
how far the worlds of special effects and Star Wars have come in the decades since.