Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/997235
www.postmagazine.com 15 POST JUNE 2018 SUMMER MOVIES L3 costume for the character and that included what you see around her hips, chest plate and the outside of her legs and arms, as well as the top of her head. Then we actually used all of that from the original photography, and we removed Phoebe from inside of it and put back in with CG all the inner surfaces, connectors and wires, so it required a very tight integration between the live action photography and the digital additions. Once we had the technique all worked out, the character was just incredibly believable because it really was Phoebe in a suit on-set interacting with the actors. Because she is so great, and so great at impov, you get this amazing performance and her ability to puppet and be this character. It was so fantastic we were able to leverage all of that. Then in visual effects, the work was very detail-oriented to make sure everything matched perfectly and to bring the character to life." Bredow says that the team leveraged a "wide variety of tools" for Solo, including rendering primarily in Renderman, compositing with Nuke ("an industry standard"), most of the animation in Maya and "then some of the more articulate char- acter builds were completed in ILM's proprietary system that just won an Academy Award this year (a Sci-Tech Oscar for its BlockParty procedur- al rigging system that has enabled ILM to build richly-detailed and unique creatures while greatly improving artist productivity). It helps us create realistic and digitally-animated characters, so characters like Rio [Durant — voiced by actor/di- rector Jon Favreau] really leveraged that system with the muscles and the face." Bredow points out that all the visual effects decisions stem from the creative, storytelling per- spective and are simply a result of what the story demands. "A great example of that," he explains, "is in the train heist sequence, which takes place on the planet of Vandor, which has these snowy mountains and steep valleys. There were multiple ways to approach that, but the way that we chose, that kind of suited the storytelling of this film, was to actually go out to a real location. We flew in the Italian Dolmites for a six-day shoot where we collected a bunch of different background pho- tography, the plates that we actually used to put together that sequence from, and which was all based on the previs that we created. Then we took those plates and also about 40,000 photos, more than a hundred square miles, of these mountains, and we used that to photo model all of those mountains as well. So, we took all those photos at the right time of day, that not only gave us the shape of the mountains for our photo mod- eling but also the texture, the actual lighting that we wanted to capture. Then we enhanced that in a couple of places, with computer-generated mountains, too, but we were really using the plate photography and the photo-modeled mountains as the primary sources from which to draw. And Qi-ra and Solo Phoebe Waller-Bridge portrays L3. Laser projectors helped create Millennium Falcon exterior shots.