Radical Behind-The-Scenes Video For THE MANDALORIAN Focuses on The Virtual Production
I’ve got an extremely cool behind-the-scenes video for you for The Mandalorian that you’ve got to watch! This featurette focuses on the virtual production and groundbreaking technology that was used to bring this series to life and it’s pretty incredible!
We’ve seen photos from the set showing off this filmmaking tech, but now we actually get to see some footage of it in action and it also includes Jon Favreau and other members of the crew talking about how it works and what it brings to the creation of the series.
This is so cool and I wish I could visit the set of this show to get a first-hand experience of what it’s like to work in this environment! Here are some details that were shared with the video:
Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1 was filmed using this ground-breaking new methodology, eliminating the need for location shoots entirely. Instead, actors in The Mandalorian performed in an immersive and massive 20’ high by 270-degree semicircular LED video wall and ceiling with a 75’-diameter performance space, where the practical set pieces were combined with digital extensions on the screens. Digital 3D environments created by ILM played back interactively on the LED walls, edited in real-time during the shoot, which allowed for pixel-accurate tracking and perspective-correct 3D imagery rendered at high resolution via systems powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The environments were lit and rendered from the perspective of the camera to provide parallax in real-time, as if the camera were really capturing the physical environment with accurate interactive light on the actors and practical sets, giving showrunner Jon Favreau, executive producer and director Dave Filoni, visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff, and cinematographers Greig Frazier and Barry Baz Idoine, and the episodic directors the ability to make concrete creative choices for visual effects-driven work during photography and achieve real-time in-camera composites on set.
The technology and workflow required to make in-camera compositing and effects practical for on-set use combined the ingenuity of partners such as Golem Creations, Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, and ARRI together with ILM’s StageCraft virtual production filmmaking platform and ultimately the real-time interactivity of the Unreal Engine platform.
That’s so rad! Now, watch the video below and share any thoughts you might have on this filmmaking tech in the comment section.