◗ Blurring the Line Top: General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) addresses his troops in a shot with a practical foreground and a digitally extended background. Middle: Director J.J. Abrams discusses a scene with Lupita Nyong'o, whose motion-capture performance provided the foundation for the CG character Maz Kanata. Bottom: An X-wing gives chase to a TIE fighter above the planet Takodana. 84 February 2016 American Cinematographer lightsabers was that we built prop lightsabers that were actual lights. Even on Revenge of the Sith, it was guys fighting with sticks; we were faking all of the interactive light. Dan and I, with the visual-effects team, set out to actually build a lightsaber with a string of LED lights [so] we could then photograph a true light source. That small step is effectively an enormous step; it transforms the way you might light something with a level of realism, because that thing is really shining light. That was a huge deal for the filmmaking process. Are any specific sabers different? Guyett: Kylo Ren's is very complicated - it's a more hot-rod lightsaber that he's constructed himself. It has glitches and matches his character in that it's way more gnarly and out of control. That was fun to put together. Daniel Pearson, our digital-effects supervisor, did a lot of effects-sparks and lightning that travels up and down the blade to show how much more erratically it behaves than a normal lightsaber. Describe the effort put into realizing BB-8. Guyett: Once we had a good idea of what we were trying to achieve, BB-8 [became] a collaboration with the creature department and Neal Scanlan's team. We were pragmatic about our expectations and realized that the practical droid would sometimes be replaced