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e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 c g w 1 5 we had a stroboscopic blaster light up the creatures as they come into view." Baby Yoda The character in The Mandalorian garnering the most attention, however, is The Child, which has become known as "Baby Yoda." Lucasfilm concept artist Christian Alzmann designed Baby Yoda, and John Rosengrant's team at Legacy Effects built and puppe- teered him. "Our job was to match the puppet," Hick- el says. "There have been articles about what a success Baby Yoda is because it's a puppet. But, the banner photo they oen use is one of our CG shots. They're not wrong – the skill of the puppeteers made it a massive success. And if the puppet works, the shot is done except for maybe having rods to paint out. So, we can go to town on other characters." However, Baby Yoda was digital in many shots: when the baby tries to eat a frog, most of the time when it's walking, and in a scene in Chapter 3 when the baby crawls out of its pram and pulls a knob off the dashboard. "It's hard to have a puppet perform something like that," Hickel says. "But also, that scene was shot early in the schedule and everyone was unsure about how much puppet and how much CG we'd use. Later in the schedule, it might have been the puppet." Droids Of course, there are also droids in The Mandalorian – security droids, mechanics, and a star, the droid IG-11, who in the early chapters is a bounty hunter, too. Taika Waititi, who directed Chapter 8 of The Mandalorian, provided IG-11's voice. "There's a Butch and Sundance thing between IG and Mando," Hickel says. "The shoot-out they had happened on a backlot for the real sunlight. But the majority of IG-11 shots happened in the volume." Prop master Josh Roth built a full-sized IG- 11 prop from the waist up for on-set lighting reference. However, aer seeing how good it looked on camera, Favreau asked Legacy to add rods in order to puppeteer it some shots. "As with Baby Yoda, we looked at the pup- peteered performance for reference," Hickel says. "IG-11's torso wobbled when its arm came up, for example. We emulated that." A motion-captured actor also contribut- ed to the performance. "If he did something on the day that was great, we'd use it, but IG did things humans can't do," Hickel points out. "We knew we couldn't use most of the motion capture, but he gave the actors eyelines." Animators at Hybride led by Ken Steel created most of the IG-11 performances, with ILM matching Hybride's IG. Crawler, Walker, and Speeders The Sandcrawler was a physical set with a cast of small people playing the Jawas crawling over it, but the walker and speeder bikes were digital. A transport vehicle, the two-legged AT-ST walker was briefly seen in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and more prominently in Return of the Jedi. It crashes through a forest on the sanctuary planet in The Mandalorian's Chapter 4 and stops, hesitantly, at the edge of a pond. "That was great fun," Hickel says. "We had a devil of a time getting the step into the water right. It was the nexus of editing and animating, of trying different orders of the shots. Jon really wanted it to be a character, so we don't look inside. The speeder bikes were also digital. For their animation, Hickel referenced speeders from the first Star Wars films. "I put together a reel of all the practical shots of Luke Skywalker's speeder," Hickel says. "They had mounted it to a pole and swung it around like a merry-go-round. Some speeders were three-wheeled vehi- cles with mylar around the base so they'd The Child, aka Baby Yoda, in the StageCra volume. The character was oen digital when walking.