{"id":707485,"date":"2026-06-01T03:28:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T03:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/707485\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T03:28:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T03:28:18","slug":"star-wars-the-mandalorian-and-grogu-visual-effects-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/707485\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Visual Effects Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2018Best tool for the job\u2019 \u2014 that\u2019s always been the credo for this show,\u201d \u201cStar Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu<\/a>\u201d VFX supervisor John Knoll told IndieWire. \u201cWith the one twist being that [director] Jon [Favreau] really likes having a bit of a handcrafted look.\u201d He\u2019s worked on \u201cStar Wars<\/a>\u201d movies as a visual effects supervisor dating back to \u201cThe Phantom Menace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Favreau-directed sci-fi spectacle (which has so far grossed $176 million globally<\/a>) blends virtual production techniques with every trick in the Old-School Hollywood special-effects book. Knoll explained, \u201cJon\u2019s philosophy is that it\u2019s OK when you see a puppet, that you can tell it\u2019s a puppet. When you have a character in a rubber mask, that\u2019s OK. And if you\u2019re looking at a miniature or a stop motion sequence, it\u2019s OK that you can tell, because in Jon\u2019s mind, that\u2019s part of the charm.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a> \"Tom<\/a> <\/p>\n

Knoll won an Emmy for his VFX work on Favreau\u2019s \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d TV series, shot largely within a 110-foot-wide ellipsoid-shaped \u201cLED Volume\u201d in Manhattan Beach that generates digital environments by projecting high-resolution imagery onto wrap-around screens. <\/p>\n

When Disney decided to expand the show as a standalone feature about intergalactic bounty hunter Din \u201cMando\u201d Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and sidekick Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, Knoll went to work on their Razor Crest spaceship. He recalled, \u201cFrom the beginning of the series, I\u2019d wanted to have an LED volume for shooting miniatures in, so for this movie we built an 8-foot-by-8-foot LED cube, with one face open so we could get accurate reflections and realistic lighting on our characters and sets, in-camera. I had this gorgeous 48-inch model of the bare metal ship, so if we\u2019re flying amongst clouds, we made sure that you\u2019re seeing clouds reflected on the side of the ship. For the same reason, we would shoot Mando in the LED environment, instead of [in front of] blue screen, to get all those reflections on his highly polished armor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(L-R)\u2018The Mandalorian and Grogu<\/a>\u2018LUCASFILM LTD<\/p>\n

In collaboration with production animation supervisor Hal Hickel, who oversaw digital characters including Rotta the Hutt, and Legacy Effects puppeteers, in charge of Grogu, Knoll conjured a virtual travelogue of exotic planets that included the snow-capped mountains backdropping Mando and Grogu at the start of the film<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew one thing: It\u2019s mountainous with pine trees, so we did a bunch of scouting. Andrew Jones, our production designer, identified an area north of Vancouver called Mount Waddington as a real-world location we could base our environment on.\u00a0My co-supervisor, Justin van der Lek, went up there and did a four-day helicopter scout-and-shoot, photographing thousands and thousands of stills. A lot of the imagery you see in that opening is Mount Waddington.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other environments were built as massive physical sets, including the \u201cBlade Runner\u201d-like cityscape Shakari. \u201cWe found this big industrial warehouse in downtown LA\u00a0and built the main drag there,\u201d Knoll said. \u201cWe can see way off miles into the distance, and rather than put a blue screen at the end of that street for the [digital] extension, we built LED screens at both ends of that street, put in motion tracking cameras, and generated the extension of the street that way. It was a nice use [of LED volume] where it\u2019s not a 110-foot diameter round set.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Shakari, Mando and Grogu meet the gregarious Hugo, a four-armed food truck vendor voiced by Martin Scorsese. Hugo was ultimately computer-generated, but during production, Knoll wanted a real actor to temporarily perform the role. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re doing synthetic characters, Hal and I strongly believe you should cast an actor to play that role on set if at all possible. It helps camera operators frame up, it helps the other actors to have somebody they can play against, and it helps the editors cut the scene. So we had Misty Rojas, who\u2019s a little person, performing the Hugo role. We didn\u2019t know that Marty was gonna do the voice until the whole scene had been shot and Jon did the deal. God bless him \u2014 Marty did a hilariously great performance with all that hemming and hawing. We had a camera on Marty while he was doing the voice, so our guys were able to incorporate some of his gestures and facial expressions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one of the film\u2019s more thrilling chase scenes, Mando races across dunes (modeled on Nova Scotia\u2019s Magdalen Islands) in a low-flying \u201cspeeder\u201d with droid thugs in hot pursuit. Old-school practical effects made the sequence rumble and jump, Knoll said. \u201cThe full-size speeder prop was sitting on what we call an inner tube rig, this very low-tech, springy mount where some of our grips could shake it around to give it a bouncy motion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(L-R)\u2018The Mandalorian and Grogu\u2019Lucasfilm Ltd \/ Francois Duhamel<\/p>\n

To dramatize the film\u2019s climactic battle pitting Mando against two very tall droids, Knoll enlisted Oscar-winning \u201cJurassic Park\u201d legend Phil Tippett and his stop-motion team to apply their mastery of a technique immortalized back in 1933. \u201cIt\u2019s straight out of \u2018King Kong,’\u201d Knoll noted. \u201cThe droid puppets were 12 or 14 inches tall and had three arms, lots of moving armor plates, a lot of articulation points. The Tippett folks said that that was the single most complicated thing they\u2019ve ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cStar Wars\u201d canon provided plenty of inspiration, but sometimes, the iconography required upgrades, which Knoll learned a few years ago when he tried to revive the original Stormtroopers look for \u201cRogue One: A Star Wars Story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went out to George\u2019s archive building where he\u2019s got a lot of the original \u2018Star Wars\u2019 costumes,\u201d Knoll said. \u201cWhen you see the Stormtrooper helmets in person, it\u2019s a little shocking because they look like high school craft projects. It was clear that those helmets weren\u2019t gonna hold up, so we made entirely new ones, way more polished.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in the day, nobody complained about fake-looking helmets, but now, Knoll observed, \u201cWith digital cameras and better projection systems, you can see things more clearly than you could see them before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relatively modest in scope, this \u201cStar Wars\u201d installment fits comfortably within the tradition of pulp entertainments like \u201cFlash Gordon\u201d and \u201cTarzan,\u201d which George Lucas famously admired in his youth.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m pleased that this movie is mostly being received in the spirit intended,\u201d Knoll said. \u201cJon wanted to do a kind of old-fashioned adventure. \u2018Oh man, do I have to do a load of homework to enjoy this movie?\u2019 No, it\u2019s just sort of a fun adventure you can see without having done 40 hours of homework.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStar Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu\u201d is now in theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201c\u2018Best tool for the job\u2019 \u2014 that\u2019s always been the credo for this show,\u201d \u201cStar Wars: The Mandalorian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,1689,344,31331,106875],"class_list":["post-707485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-star-wars","tag-the-mandalorian-and-grogu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}