ILM @ SIGGRAPH 2017

I just got back from SIGGRAPH 2017 and my mind is full of exciting new technologies and techniques. I’m a big ILM fanboy so their talks were quickly tagged in my scheduling app. John Knoll’s talk for Autodesk gave a quick rundown of the effects used for Rogue One. This article touches on some of the similar topics John discussed live.

Virtual Set

There’s no two ways about it, the Star Wars prequels suffered from some pretty poor greenscreen work. I think John and the artists for Rogue One went out of their way to do as much practical as possible. They also changed dramatically how they did virtual sets. The quick story is they created rough approximations of the environments using “flats” which were roughly the same size and color for actors to interact with. They also used large LED panels to display final environment footage on set. This meant the light on the actors faces was “real” and the set lighting could be much more dark and cinematic. This no doubt led to much more roto work than key work, but the results are pretty impressive.