Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1011494
60 cgw | e d i t i o n 3 , 2 0 1 8 "Those are real 550 horsepower speeders, where VFX removed the wheels and en- hanced the world around it," he says. As for the L3-37 and Rio characters, there was a bit more involved that proved slightly more of a challenge. "Some of the work that I'm most happy with in the film revolved around the techniques that we chose, and it did require really careful execution to make sure it looked seamless," says Bredow. "One of the characters that I particularly like is L3; she plays kind of Lando's right- hand person, and she's played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is a hilarious actress. She was very into this idea of performing in a physical droid suit. But the design of the droid was such that there was no way to make a fully-practically suit — with L3, you can see all of her innards, and there's no way to hide a person in there. So, we collaborated closely with the costume department to make an amazing L3 cos- tume 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. It required a very tight integration between the live-action photography and the digital additions." Once the crew 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," Bredow continues. "Because she is so great at improv, and her ability to puppet and be this character, you get this amazing performance. Then in visual ef- fects, the work was very detail-oriented, to make sure everything matched perfectly and to bring the character to life." The team leveraged a wide variety of tools for Solo, including rendering primarily in Pixar's RenderMan and compositing with Foundry's Nuke, while most of the animation was done in Autodesk's Maya. Some of the more articulate character builds were completed in ILM's proprietary BlockParty procedural rigging system, enabling the artists to create realistic and digitally-animated characters such as Rio. EYE ON STORYTELLING Bredow points out that all the visual effects decisions stem from the creative storytelling perspective and are simply a result of what the story demands. He points to the train heist sequence, which takes place on the planet of Vandor, with its snowy mountains and steep valleys as an example. While there were multiple ways to approach that, the group choose one that suited the storytelling of this film: to actually go out to a real location. They collected various background photography from the Italian Dolmites. "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. We took all those photos at the right time of day, which not only gave us the shape of the mountains for our photo-modeling, but also the texture, the actual lighting that we wanted to capture. Then we enhanced that in a couple of places with computer-generated moun- tains, too, but we were really using the plate photography and the photo-mod- eled mountains as the primary sources from which to draw," Bredow explains. The whole goal, Bredow says, was to make the sequence feel as grounded and believable as possible, as if it had been shot in the '70s. So when you see helicop- ter shots – even though they were shoot- ing with a gyro-stabilizer chopper that was very modern, and using very high tech and a very high-quality camera – they also shot with vintage lenses and added a camera shake inspired by the camera mounts used in Apocalypse Now. "That was the kind of era that we were going for," he adds. "We, of course, pulled that off using the latest soware, the latest innovations, but were able to get the creative feel we were looking for." In all, Bredow spent around two and a half years working on Solo, at first in Lon- don, prepping for photography and doing photography, and the rest of the time in San Francisco and LA — going back and forth. While he's worked on some big movies in the past, Bredow says, "there's nothing bigger than working as the visual effects supervisor on Star Wars. When the team asked me to come on, there was some