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e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 c g w 1 1 T he challenge for the filmmakers working on Lucasfilm's television series The Mandalorian was in creating the look and feel of the Star Wars universe. The same look and feel as the blockbuster feature film audiences have viewed for 40 years. But on a television series budget and with an eight-chapter schedule. Eight chapters with approximately 3,800 visual effects shots. Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff, the production's overall visual effects supervisor, oversaw that work with help from ILM visual effects supervisor Jason Porter. "It's two and a half movie's worth of work in half a movie's time," Porter says. "Even with two supervisors, we were jammed all day, every day. But, no one wanted to do the TV version of Star Wars. We wanted to do the Star Wars version. We needed that quality and scope." Several vendors, including four of ILM's five global studios (San Francisco, London, Vancouver, and Singapore) contributed to the show. ILM was the lead vendor. Hybride, Pixomondo, Image Engine, Ghost, StereoD, Base, Il Ranchito, MPC, and ILP also worked on the series. Created by Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian, which streams on the Disney+ channel, is set approximately five years aer the fea- ture film The Return of the Jedi. In The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI, 1983), we saw the Galactic Empire fall and a New Republic be- gin to take shape. Thirty years later, though, in The Force Awakens (Episode VII, 2015), the First Order will have gained/regained enough strength to threaten the New Republic. Meanwhile, during those 30 years be- tween, especially in the Outer Rim along the edges of the universe, chaos reigned. It is in this time and place that an armored bounty hunter bound by a Mandalorian creed earned his living as a hired gun. This Mandalorian is a man with no name early in the series. He's called "Mando" – even when we learn his name in the eighth chapter. Mando wears a suit of armor and a helmet he doesn't remove. According to the creed, if a living human were to see his face, he could never wear the helmet again. Mando hosts a variety of clever weapons within his suit, which is upgraded in an early chapter to the all-metal Tesla-sleek version. He reflects the world around him. "On our show, Mando is a mirror ball with a shiny helmet," Porter says. "Normally, from a purely effects standpoint, if I saw some- thing like that I'd groan, 'We'll be painting out greenscreen on every shot. Or making a CG helmet.' But because we had a virtual envi- ronment instead of a greenscreen, we had only a few minor paint-outs. In 90 percent of the shots there were no fixes." Actors in a Virtual Environment "Jon Favreau, series creator and executive producer, had a distinct vision of how he wanted to film the series and the technology that would be required," Bluff says. Thus, more than half the content in the eight chapters of the first season was filmed using a new virtual production workflow that ILM has dubbed StageCra. With Stage- Cra, the filmmakers could capture in-cam- era shots of actors performing within virtual environments. LED screens that encircled the actors displayed dynamic photorealistic digital landscapes and set extensions on curved walls and the ceiling. ILM's visual effects team created all the photorealistic real-time environments that were loaded into StageCra. A key feature of StageCra is that it allowed the perspective in the displayed graphics to be correct from the camera's point of view as the camera moved; StageCra was used to manage and live edit all the environments. The data was then sent through Unreal Engine for final pixel display on the volume. Nvidia GPU-based systems powered that high-resolution display. "The volume we used for Season 1 was 75 feet in diameter and had LEDs for approxi- A practical set piece of the RazorCrest positioned in the StageCra volume for real-time interactive lighting and reflections. The Mandalorian DP Greig Fraser lines up a shot inside the StageCra LED volume. The inset shows the final in-camera shot from the scene.