THE MANDALORIAN VFX Supervisor Says Season 2 Goes "Above and Beyond" Anything in Season 1

The first season of Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian blew Star Wars fans away, and it sounds like we can expect even more badassery from the series in Season 2! Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and the rest of the crew have been developing the series with new filmmaker technology being played with at Industrial Light and Magic called StageCraft.

StageCraft allows for the crew to shoot their scene with high-resolution environments being projected on a giant screen surrounding them. In a new interview with StarWars.com, the visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff talked about what we can expect from the upcoming season saying that the "magic tricks" they've done with StageCraft in the new season go "above and beyond anything" from the first season.

"I can say for Season Two we went above and beyond anything we did for Season One with this technologically. It has even left the crew open-mouthed with some of the magic tricks that we were able to perform with the video wall technology.”

Bluff also talked about the lessons they learned while shooting the first season and shares which episodes taught them the most about what they can do, and how that work influenced the VFX work on the new season:

"We learned an enormous amount from Season One. Chapter 6 was one of the last episodes that we shot. The Roost hangar was probably the most complicated environment that we did because it was so vast. And in that environment we not only had the Razor Crest in the virtual environment, we also had people walking around the virtual environments. We had sparks dropping, we had steam rising, and cranes moving. So you could tell that by the time we got towards the end of the show, we got quite comfortable with the technology and were excited to just continue to push the boundaries of what was possible.”

I would love to visit the set of The Mandalorian to see all of this in action in person. One thing is for sure, this new filmmaking tech is allowing the creative team to do incredible things while shooting this series. Buff went on to say:

“I don’t believe that the technology would have worked as well as it did without the special place that Star Wars has in everybody’s heart. You can see it in the work that they did and the love that they had for everything that we did. Everybody brought something to this project that you rarely find anywhere else and it all goes back to George Lucas and the wonderful movies he made decades ago.”

We’ll get to see all the glorious work that was done on The Mandalorian Season 2 when it drops on Disney+ this fall.