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e d i t i o n 1 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 1 5 and animators performed digital doubles on motion-capture stages in London and San Francisco. Although the crew motion-captured Lupita Nyong'o's performance as Maz Kanata, because Maz differs so wildly from Nyong'o in appearance and action, anima- tors keyframed the character that appears in the film. A SHIPYARD IN LONDON Work on the space battle at the beginning of the film and on Kylo's attack on the resistance cruiser began in London with previs from The Third Floor; the two stu- dios shared Autodesk Maya scenes. Once Johnson approved the previs, ILM artists rebuilt the shots using assets from a library managed, updated, and, when needed, created at the London studio. "We looked aer all the spaceship assets," Mulholland says. "We updated the spaceships from Force Awakens to bring the shaders into the new Pixar RenderMan RIS library, and reworked and remodeled ships like Poe's X-wing that had close-ups. And, we had a whole set of brand-new ships including the A-wing, Resistance Bomber, Dreadnought, and Resistance Cruiser. We distributed the assets around the world." Jenkins designed a majority of the ships working with Director Johnson and Pro- duction Designer Rick Henricks, printing out some models with a 3D printer. At ILM, artists in the digital modeling studio added details and textures. All the artists used digi- tal model kit libraries scanned from practical model kits for Rogue One. "We added a few more pieces to go into that library," Mulholland says. "It's a fantastic resource that gives us a common language, a common geometry, and an established methodology for adding huge amounts of detail to the ships." Modelers built some ships from concept art and models that Jenkins created, al- though for the A-wing, they needed to match a full-size, practical A-wing on a gimbal. On the other hand, knowing that the Resistance Bomber would be blown up, ILM modelers built it from the inside out, constructing it with destruction in mind so that during the explosion, it would reveal the interior details. Various set pieces, which would be scanned for digital models, gave Veronica Ngo (who played Paige Tico) a practical bomber to work inside. "The special effects guys built a full-size magazine 20 or 30 feet tall that could drop bombs downward and curve away onto a horizontal plane, which enabled a practi- cal bomb drop," Mulholland explains. "We matched the set and tracked all the bombs individually so we could take over and have digital bombs keep falling vertically." For the huge Dreadnought and Mega Destroyer ships, modelers approached them as if they were building a city. "We couldn't load the entire models," Mulholland says. "So we built them in a hierarchical style and approached them in layers with large forms, silhouette shapes, and then three or four levels of details that were almost like fractals." SPACE BATTLES IN LONDON Approximately two-thirds of London's space battle shots created in previs held the same shot composition through production. The rest were redesigned or needed different camera moves. "We simulated everything having to do with the camera," Mulholland says. "We tried to make sure our virtual camera didn't fly too close to anything. And, Rian [Johnson] wanted our virtual camera to have a volume behind it like a real-world camera, which would have had a physical size and a crew." Animators referenced footage of planes in dogfights and watched the early Star Wars films to learn why shots in those movies felt the way they did. "[Senior visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren gave a great talk and did a comparison," says Steve Aplin, who was overall animation supervisor for the film. Muren has worked on LIGHTSABERS "Rian [Johnson, director] and Steve [Yedlin, DP] wanted a 'filmic' look for this movie," says Ben Morris, the overall super- visor for The Last Jedi and ILM London's creative director. "They felt some of the final composites in the earlier prequel films and The Force Awakens contained color values beyond what could be captured and projected on film. Steve created a color pipeline used by our compositors that bounded our color gamut to ranges available on film. This gave our sabers a less saturated feel, more like the ones in the original trilogy." Rey's blue lightsaber shied to a paler, whiter color as bright values can't hold saturation on film. "Initially, I thought this might not read well, but when we started to dial down the saturation in the bright core and let the glow contain the color, it felt really good," Morris says. "So we stayed within those bounds." The effects artists started with lightsabers created for The Force Awakens, the previous film, and modified them to fit Yedlin's aesthetic. On set, the actors held faintly colored LED tubes. One of the most dramatic lightsaber scenes in The Last Jedi is a fight between Rey and Kylo that takes place in Snoke's throne room. Some of the pivotal scenes in the overall Star Wars saga, though, are flashbacks with Luke Skywalker and Kylo Ren. Artists in ILM Singapore, led by Visual Effects Supervisor Alex Prichard, created lightsabers for those shots. "We matchimated the filmed light tubes to get geom- etry for running our render passes," Prichard says. "We had one pass with high-frequency flickering lines, like an electrical current. A more solid pass with a core of light that falls off toward the edges. And, a few utility passes that compositors used to rebalance the light based on the scene. We had dark, moody environments, so the lightsa- bers looked really cool. We added nice flares and reflec- tions in the [actors'] eyes." There are certain rules you can't break with lightsabers, according to Prichard. "We can innovate, but lightsabers will always kinda look like lightsabers," he adds.