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A Behind The Scenes Of 'Rogue One' Panel Reveals Lucasfilm Employs Nerds

Published Fri, 14 Apr 2017 17:15:35 -0500

Breaking news: the people that work on Star Wars are all huge nerds. At least that was the general feeling we all walked away from in a behind the scenes of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story panel. In a panel that featured very little in the things that people really want to know about the behind the scenes when it comes to reshoots but more the technical aspects of the movie. Unfortunately, the hour and a half panel to get cut short to an hour but they still revealed some interesting information along with a refreshing outlook on the making of modern Star Wars movies.

In the lead up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens all we kept hearing about was that practical effects were back, they were using all of these practical effects, so on and so forth, so that it became something of a joke that Lucasfilm was obsessed with practical sets and effects as a backlash to the prequels. Going into the Rogue One behind the scenes panel, we thought that was what we were going to hear about, more practical sets, but that was not in the case. Instead we got a very interesting look at the other definition of "practical" sets in the sense of balancing the budget of a movie.

John Knoll, the executive producer, talked about how it wasn't "practical" to build some of the sets for brief shots. The idea that a studio should build everything isn't practical when it comes to a budget, and with the onset of digital technology it has made building digital sets look photo-realistic. Knoll talked about the splitting the difference by building a bare bones model of the set and then building a digital set around it. While this might be the sort of thing that makes fans have PTSD-like flashbacks to green screen sets it doesn't make sense to build everything as much as we might want them to.

Knoll also went into detail about what it took to resurrect Peter Cushing in digital effects, and the sheer amount of detail that went into creating that. The technology is still not perfect, and in side by side pictures it becomes more and more apparent that there are still a few things off, but the technology is never going to get there if we don't keep trying. We see how much research everyone did into making sure they got everything right when it came to Cushing, from the way he spoke to the way he walked.

They also went into detail about creating K-2SO and how important it is to have a talented actor doing motion capture. All of the personality of K-2SO is thanks to Alan Tudyk and a good portion of his best moments were improvisation. They talked about they had Tudyk come in and walk around on the stilts while watching his character walk on a screen. So he could see how K-2SO would walk so he could adjust the way he held himself.

He also talked about the giant LED screen that they used for ship battles and how immersive it makes everything feel. There were several "pilots" that didn't want to get out of the cockpits because they were having so much fun. They talked about the assistant director would stand just out of shot as people were in front of this screen yelling out commands about lasers here, more explosions there, and we even got a shot of the giant screen from behind as it ran. The sheer amount of light coming off of the screen is insane.

The best part of technical behind the scenes are bloopers and technological fails. There were several moments where Tarkin's technology would fall apart and he would end up with a broken neck. There was a great scene on the bridge of Raddus' ship during the final battle over Scarf and how they kept turning him the wrong direction.

The best moments were when the visual effects artists proved what a bunch of giant nerds they are. They rendered a Death Trooper's head exploding in a gory mess from a shot from Baze's canon. At one point they were talking about the final scene where Jyn and Cassian die and Knoll said "so no flaming skeletons" and the visual artist went "flaming skeletons?"

The very best, though, was when they decided to pay homage to Tudyk's character from Firefly by rendering K-2SO playing with a stormtrooper and death trooper dolls while playing out the "curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal" scene from the classic series.

It was all rather unfortunate that sound director Matt Wood got only a few minutes to talk about the Oscar nominated sound design of the series. He went through and showed us the various layers that go into good sound design, such as how leaving out one layer can make a serious scene — like Darth Vader cutting through the rebels at the end — seem off or even funny.

This was a behind the scenes panel that didn't give us any more insight as to why Rogue One ended up with so much in the way of reshoots and rewrites, but it is fun seeing how much work goes into making these movies look great.

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