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j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 c g w 1 1 held our hands as we figured out what JJ [Abrams] wanted," Alex- ander says. "Once we got the script, we started building the foundation shot by shot. Then my whole team met with JJ, which was cool. We ended up with a good starting point for a sequence before everyone le LA for London. I previs'd the shot when the 'Millennium Fal- con' flies up into the sky, twists, and does an inverted U-turn. When I saw the final shot with the John Williams score, I got tears in my eyes." Halon artists in LA also previs'd the TIE Fighter escape from the hanger and the Storm- troopers' attack on the village. Then, Alexander followed Abrams and Guyett to London. "They filmed pretty much everything in the village attack in London and the hangar se- quence," Alexander says. "They shot some of the desert chase in Abu Dhabi. The interior of the 'Falcon' was in London, but the exterior was mostly CG." The Halon team continued working on previs through production and well into postvis (see "Postviz," page 14). "We use the previs and storyboards to flesh out ideas," Guyett says. "But on the shoot, we invent new ideas." Those ideas sometimes resulted in blank cards within edited footage. "You'd look at an edit of a se- quence and there would be an actor on bluescreen reacting to something," says Halon Senior Previsualization Supervisor AJ Briones, "then there would be a few seconds of black cards with 'action' written on them." At ILM, Animation Supervisor Paul Kavanagh helped design shots that would replace those black cards. With the exception of the CG characters Maz and Supreme Leader Snoke, a CG creature, and digital doubles, the primary focus for the animation department was shot design and ship animation for the all-CG se- quences – the desert chase with the "Millennium Falcon" and TIE Fighters, the TIE Fighter escape from the hangar, the shots with ships traveling between loca- tions, and an extensive battle between the X-Wings and TIE Fighters in the third act. A N I M A T I O N "Nowadays we see CG ships and creatures doing impossible things for the sake of spectacle," Kavanagh says. "It's tempting to go over the top with CG. But we wanted the feel of the original." To get that feeling and honor the director's guidelines, the an- imation team relied on Guyett, Halon, the original films, and advice from artists at ILM who were on the original crews. "Roger [Guyett] had a real grasp of what JJ [Abrams] wanted as far as shot design," Kavanagh says. "We had a lot of previs from Halon. And, we looked at the old movies. We went back to the original trilogy and looked at the motion-con- trol work as a guide to what we should do. They had restric- tions on how fast the minia- tures could travel. The longest motion-control track was 60 feet, and the camera could go back only so far in the building. We took some liberties, but the 'Millennium Falcon' doesn't fly 2,000 miles per hour." During postproduction, Den- nis Muren would oen look at the work done by ILM's artists and animators, and give advice. Muren had worked on the first Star Wars, received Special Achievement Awards from the Academy for the second and third, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, a Technical Achievement Award, and six more Academy Awards for best visual effects. "He would come every week," Kavanagh says. "He might say, 'Yeah, that's how I would have shot it.' Or, he might have a different idea. He gave us a mini presentation about how they did the ships and camera moves for the original trilogy. The lens- es they used. The depth of field. It was fantastic." Kavanagh's team included 25 animators in ILM's San Francisco studio, six in Van- couver, 12 in London, and 10 in Singapore. He also worked with animators at Base FX and Hybride. Singapore anima- tors handled the TIE escape sequence, some face replace- ments for digital doubles, and a cute moment between BB-8, R2-D2, and C-3PO. ILM London animators worked on the two CG characters, Maz and Snoke. "The San Francisco team did everything else," Kavanagh says. "The 'Falcon' chase. The space- ship sequences. Animators in Vancouver basically worked as an extension of San Francisco." HERE, TIE FIGHTERS ARE SHOWN AGAINST THE SUN IN AN ALL-CG SHOT.