American Cinematographer - February 2017 - 46

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Rebel Assault

Above: Tudyk
sports his
motion-capture
suit while
performing as
K-2SO. Right:
Senior visualeffects
supervisor
John Knoll
discusses a
scene with
Tudyk.

designs.' And Gareth was totally on
board with that.
What did your early interactions with Greig Fraser entail?
Chiang: Greig came aboard
maybe two or three months into the
whole design process, when we were
trying some new tools in terms of
design. We had a virtual-set preview
system called VScout, which was being
developed by ILM's advanced development group. I took Gareth and Greig
through that, where we would take an
early concept model of a set from the art
department and project it up into a 3D
space at 1:1 scale. And it was great
because Gareth and Greig could walk
through a set months before we had
anything built, and before we even got
46

February 2017

to the stages. Typically when we design
a set and get it preliminarily approved,
we would go to the stage and mark it
out on the floor and figure out, 'Is this
room the right size? Is that wall in the
right place?' This step is important to
get an overall sense of the set for staging
and construction purposes. VScout
shortcuts that process.
And what I found fascinating was
that Gareth and Greig were able to
adapt quickly and go in the virtual
volume, put in their virtual camera, and
say, 'Well, if we stage things here, that
interesting part of the set is out of
frame, so let's move that down.' And we
could move that part of the set in real
time so that we could start to mold the
virtual set. Then we would take that
American Cinematographer

virtual set model back into the art
department for further refinements. It
was great to get that information early,
because it also started to inform the
overall scale of the sets. One of the
things we discovered was that, with
almost all the sets, we could scale them
down by 20 or 30 percent without
losing the visual impact - and that's a
huge cost savings.
For Greig it was wonderful
because he was able to start talking
about how to light the sets - how do
we make them feel very real? One of the
things he was adamant about was that
the sets would be minimally lit, meaning as much as possible we used practical lights to make it feel like a real space.
And that started to inform set design:
Maybe the ceilings should be lower so
we can actually build in practical light
sources. Those were all questions we
could start addressing right away.
Having that kind of concrete information so early was invaluable; it makes the
designs so much more powerful and
more real when you can think about the
lighting plan along with the set design.
Did the decision to shoot with
the Alexa 65 large-format camera
system impact your work?
Chiang: Yeah, it made it a lot
harder! [Laughs.] Harder in the sense
that we had to build the sets at a greater
fidelity. The request is often to build as
much of the sets as possible and in 360
degrees, but that's a really tall order
because some of the Star Wars sets can
be quite vast, and the budgets and the
schedules just don't allow that. So for us
the challenge was to be as efficient as
possible, to maximize our effort. One of
the saving graces was that, in terms of
the shooting style, Gareth and Greig
liked the shallow depth of field, and so
that gave us some freedom. But the
catch was we didn't quite know where
they were going to put the camera! So,
ultimately we had to build the sets so
that they held up regardless of where
the camera was placed.
How did the use of LED panels,
which surrounded the ships and
enabled real-time interactive lighting,

American Cinematographer - February 2017

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