Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
30 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (TOP & BOTTOM LEFT) PHOTOFEST; (RIGHT) EVERETT Clockwise from above: Cameron with actor Sam Worthington in a motion capture suit during the making of Avatar; the director, right, with DP Al Giddings shooting The Abyss in a 7.5 million- gallon tank; confer- ring with Sigourney Weaver on the set of Aliens. backlight's a backlight. And where it gets interesting is you're going to backlight a person, you put a 10K Xenon behind them and they block it. Every tiny little hair on the side of their neck is going to light up and become an outline. But if your CG model doesn't have those hairs—they're not going to behave the same way. That lighting gag is not going to work. F: What's helpful now is that game engines that are built for gaming and drive VR are getting to the point where there's enough code in there to emulate all of these analog aesthetics that you would see when you were really moving a light around. So to some ex- tent, we had it on Lion King—that was Unity on The Mandalorian, the stage set you visited me on—we ended up using an Epic game engine with these new Nvidia video cards for gaming. There's enough processing power to get all of these lighting effects so that you're actually seeing [it] in camera. You wouldn't have to explain to a DP, you could actually have him see it, so when I move the light, it reacts like they do in the real world. C: But you still have to light the CG environment that you're going to project on your LED display… F: Well, so this is the next step, which is like, "Can we do it actually in camera and not have to comp it with green?" Because when we first built the walls, I thought I was just going to solve problems that we had on Jungle Book, which is it takes so long to… C: To move the blue screen. F: You've got to move the green screen or blue screen every time you move the camera. And then you've got to relight the blue screen and then you've got to hide the lights. And then you've got to hide the lights that are lighting the blue screen. C: Yeah. What's smart about what you were doing with the big LED array is you were doing like a garbage matte around the char- acter. That's where your green was. And I can't remember how you were generating that, but it was almost like a big soft shadow of the character. And that's only where the green was. F: Yeah, so you've got a halo. So you'd have no green… C: …and it moves with the character. F: It moves with the camera. And then you're able to create a skydome. And if you have the environment ahead of time, you get all the interactive light that was so convincing with what Alfonso (Cuarón) did with Gravity with those little video panels. By having a whole video environment, often we never even had to hang a light. It was like shooting outside. But in the beginning, we weren't really going to get in-camera shots that required no rendering at all. And no comping. I think up to 70 percent of the shots [on The Mandalorian] we were able to get in camera because we were dealing with hard surfaces. It was sci-fi, it wasn't a jungle, which would have been much harder. And we shot ana- morphic, which has got more falloff. C: Right. But you also had separation of the characters from the background. They weren't interacting. They weren't running through the bush on a full shot. F: But if you remember from Jungle Book when you visited, using the virtual system, we would plan what the shots were and