Industrial Light and Magic is at the top of their game when it comes to technology and advancements in visual effects. The work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story done by John Knoll, Mohen Leo, Hal Hickel and Neil Corbould was even nominated for an Academy Award this year, though sadly they didn’t walk away with the trophy. Now we’d like to offer a sneak peek at some of the tools they use to bring Star Wars to life.
A couple weeks ago, /Film visited Industrial Light and Magic as part of a press event for the home video release ofRogue One: A Star Wars Story (available on Blu-ray and DVD today). While there, we were given a demonstration of how ILM used their state of the art technology to give director Gareth Edwards the freedom he needed to shoot complicated visual effects sequences in such a way that he was able to create a shot one day and see it fully rendered in the first teaser trailer for Rogue One just five or six days later.
Industrial Light and Magic has a virtual production system that allowed director Gareth Edwards use a virtual camera to capture the camera movements and angles that he wanted for sequences that were composed entirely of visual effects, such as the space battle over Scarif at the Imperial shield gate surrounding the entire planet, for example.
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This is a system that allowed us to have Gareth Edwards essentially show us what kind of camera moves he wanted as opposed to describing it…kind of a show rather than tell form of communication really. Mike Jutan, virtual production team at Lucasfilm, explained to us:
“Gareth is a down and dirty filmmaker. On set he likes to camera operate himself. He did a lot of the camera operation on the real life set himself, so we wanted to simulate that experience for the all CG shots.
A big goal of executive producer John Knoll was that he wanted us to have consistency between the real life shots and the all CG shots. So certainly it’s possible to simulate what the director wants, and that’s what we have tended to do in the past, without them holding a virtual camera for you at any point. John wanted to push that a lot further and try to have Gareth be the camera operator for everything.”
So how did they do that? Basically, they’ve created a virtual camera rig through an iPad Gamevice controller with an HTC Vive motion controller and proprietary software that links to their computer system so they can simulate the camera movement inside a pre-visualization of any given pre-recorded visual effects sequence. If you can’t entirely wrap your head around that, here’s a quick demonstration from ILM:
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Source: /Flim