Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/639267
10 cgw j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 correct with the right levels of respect and diligence, and at the same time bring something new and exciting. A lot was done practically. But, a lot is digital. The trick wasn't worrying about approaches. It was the end result. To convince the audience that what they were seeing was really unfolding." Also joining the project early from the VFX side were the pre- vis team at Halon led by partner Bradley Alexander, and the mod- eling team at ILM led by David Fogler, asset build supervisor. Alexander adds, "We started around October 2013 and jumped right into talking with ILM to figure out file formats and scales that would work, so what we handed over would be nice and tidy. They gave us assets, and we also built a lot." S H I P B U I L D E R S Fogler and his team began working on the assets in Auto- desk's Maya soon aer Fogler started on the project, also in October 2013. "I was 10 years old when I saw the first Star Wars [Episode IV], and I was blown away," Fogler says. "What struck me was the aesthetic. The dirty, worn, rusty, real world. I could relate to it. It has stuck with me to this day. It fed all my decision making for the [The Force Awakens] world." One of Fogler's first jobs at ILM had been building practical models for Star Wars Episode I, and continued that work for Episodes II and III. He became a digital modeler for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and went on to receive five VES nominations and two awards (Transformers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon). "Finding the balance between old and new was hard," Fogler says of the modelers' work on The Force Awakens. "In building our new versions of these ships, we had to figure out the col- lective memory of those ships and then decide where to take them. We'd have conversations about what these things looked like. Was the Star Destroyer white or gray? Well, it was white in the film but gray on stage. We'd look at the old miniatures. We'd look at them on-screen, and then plug that information into our new matrix." For the "Millennium Falcon," Fogler scanned a five-foot-long miniature built for Episode IV and created a mechanically log- ical digital version to match. "If you squint at it, it looks like the five-foot miniature," Fogler says. "But, you can look at full-scale details a foot away." In addition," Fogler says, "we designed and built the Star De- stroyer, which is huge. It's bigger than the Super Star Destroyer in Empire, more armored feeling, sleeker. We tried to strike a balance between things that looked photoreal but did not feel foreign to the miniature work done before. Our Star Destroyer could have been built as a miniature." As for practical ships, the production team built full-scale TIE Fighter and X-Wing ships, which were used on location. The ILM modelers scanned and photographed those models to create digital versions. "Ours needed to function mechanically and work in multiple lighting environments," Fogler says. "The camera gets very close to our builds." P R E V I S Meanwhile, Halon's artists pre- vis'd that short, early sequence in which Rey digs through a Star Destroyer and jumps down a rope, and then began a more complicated sequence with the TIE Fighters and the "Millenni- um Falcon" – a desert chase sequence through the graveyard of starships. "Roger Guyett pretty much ANYTIME A SPACESHIP IS IN THE AIR, IT'S COMPUTER-GENERATED, AS IS THIS X-WING.