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You can even combine these ideas for the best of both worlds: Send a team to scout locations in Tunisia and capture them in high-definition 3D to be used as a virtual background. Instead of going to Tunisia to get those wide-open desert shots, you can build a sandy set and put a photorealistic desert behind the actors. But what it adds in technological overhead (and there’s a lot) it more than pays back in all kinds of benefits.įor one thing, it nearly eliminates on-location shooting, which is phenomenally expensive and time-consuming. Of course Stagecraft is probably also the most expensive and complex production environments ever used. It must be mentioned that Jon Favreau has been a driving force behind this filmmaking method for years now films like the remake of “The Lion King” were in some ways tech tryouts for “The Mandalorian.” Combined with advances made by James Cameron in virtual filmmaking, and, of course, the indefatigable Andy Serkis’s work in motion capture, this kind of production is only just now becoming realistic due to a confluence of circumstances. The walls weren’t ready the rendering tech wasn’t ready the tracking wasn’t ready - nothing was ready. There are innumerable technological advances that have contributed to this “The Mandalorian” could not have been made as it was five years ago. Interior, exterior, alien worlds or spaceship cockpits, all used this giant volume for one purpose or another. Yet fully half of the scenes in “The Mandalorian” were shot within Stagecraft, and my guess is no one had any idea. After all, if the movement of the background lagged the camera by more than a handful frames it would be noticeable to even the most naive viewer. This must take that movement and render it exactly in the 3D environment, with attendant changes to perspective, lighting, distortion, depth of field and so on - all fast enough so that those changes can be shown on the giant wall nearly instantly. In order for it to work, the camera must send its real-time position and orientation to, essentially, a beast of a gaming PC, because this and other setups like it generally run on the Unreal engine ( Epic does its own breakdown of the process here). If the camera moves to the right, the image alters just as if it were a real scene. The innovation in Stagecraft and other, smaller LED walls (the more general term for these backgrounds) is not only that the image shown is generated live in photorealistic 3D by powerful GPUs, but that 3D scene is directly affected by the movements and settings of the camera. Because when the camera moves, it immediately becomes clear that the background is a flat image. The problem arises when you want to do anything more fancy than that, like move the camera.
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Filmmakers have been doing that with projected backgrounds since the silent era! And that’s fine if you just want to have a fake view out of a studio window or fake a location behind a static shot. See, it’s not enough to just show an image behind the actors. The Stagecraft volume is bigger than any of those - but more importantly, it’s smarter. The background is a set of enormous LED screens such as you might have seen onstage at conferences and concerts. This particular volume, called Stagecraft by ILM, the company that put it together, is not static. What’s more, because of the limitations in rendering CG content, the movements of the camera are often restricted to a dolly track or a few pre-selected shots for which the content (and lighting, as we’ll see) has been prepared. Practical effects were a deliberate choice for “The Child” (AKA Baby Yoda) as well. The advance is not in the idea but the execution: a confluence of technologies that redefines “virtual production” and will empower a new generation of creators.Īs detailed in an extensive report in American Cinematographer Magazine (I’ve been chasing this story for some time, but suspected this venerable trade publication would get the drop on me), the production process of “The Mandalorian” is completely unlike any before, and it’s hard to imagine any major film production not using the technology going forward. What is this magical new technology? It’s an evolution of a technique that’s been in use for nearly a century in one form or another: displaying a live image behind the actors. The cutting edge tech (literally) behind “The Mandalorian” creates a new standard and paradigm for media - and the audience will be none the wiser.
#The great wall movie cost series
But while a successful live-action Star Wars TV series is important in its own right, the way this particular show was made represents a far greater change, perhaps the most important since the green screen. “The Mandalorian” was a pretty good show.