THE MANDALORIAN
INSPIRING CG ARTISTS 3D WORLD sits down for a conversation with Richard Bluff, visual effects supervisor and Hal Hickel, animation supervisor, both at ILM in San Francisco, to unpack the creative adventure of telling the story of a galactic bounty hunter.
Werner Herzog, world-renowned filmmaker and occasional actor, takes a key role in the new Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian. Speaking in 2019 about the series, Herzog made the key point that it deploys what he described as mythic images, and his description speaks to the visually compelling quality of the series and the rich tradition of Star Wars. It’s a pop-culture phenomenon that has captivated the imagination in two ways: the story unfolding on screen, and also the story of the creative impulses, choices and challenges to put those stories in motion.
Richard Bluff begins our conversation by identifying the project’s landmark approach to environment creation: “I think the biggest challenge was wrapping our head around how we wanted to utilise real-time game technology in collaboration with the LEDs, effectively prototyping out what that technology would look like, and then of course executing a production-ready tool for the first day of shooting. That was by far and away one of the greatest ever challenges that I’ve faced in the visual effects industry.”
Fascinatingly, ILM has a connection to game engine use that dates back to their work on Steven Spielberg’s dazzling science-fiction fairy tale, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, where it was used for virtual production approaches during filming of the Rouge City sequence.
Bluff sketches out the longstanding relationship between ILM and its use of LED: “There had been an awful lot of work done prior to The Mandalorian utilising LED screens at ILM and Lucasfilm: they’d been used on Rogue One for example, and the game engine technology, particularly Unreal Engine for season one, had been used extensively for X Lab, our .
