Ahsoka keeps awe alive in the galaxy. One of the latest additions to the Star Wars franchise ensures the magic by preserving the flaws. It’s not an immaculate galaxy, so neither is the aesthetic and all the world building. For Emmy-nominated Ahsoka visual effects supervisor, Richard Bluff, he wants the effects to tell as much story as possible without a clean and squeaky sheen.
There’s plenty of lavishness to certain environments, CG characters, and vehicles, but Bluff and the visual effects team always seek to ground the remarkable. It’s a winning creative choice, which resulted in an exceptional Star Wars story, that Bluff recently spoke with Immersive Media about.
Instead of going for the fantastical for fantasy, you like to go for what’s real. So, how do you accomplish that with VFX artists? What references do you use?
I’ve certainly learned a trade at ILM in terms of wanting to make sure that everything we create is grounded in as reality as possible, regardless of how fantastical the story might be. Dave’s very, very similar. Dave, as far as he’s concerned, doesn’t want to reinvent Star Wars. He wants to continue that tradition.
Cameras were always grounded in reality, primarily because that was out of necessity at the time. So for us, even when we’re working alongside previs and Dave is developing early in the process, we’re always throwing references around in terms of scenes from movies. Let’s ground the camera this way, let’s not do this with the camera.
Because otherwise we would question, well, where is the camera? How would George have done it in the ‘70s? And that goes right back to working with Dave and Jon Favreau. In the original Mandalorian, it was almost a weekly occurrence. There’d be a big conversation about where’s the camera.
Even when we do the dog fights, Paul Kavanagh, the animation supervisor, insists that if you are pulling or following a spaceship, flying through an environment, the camera is actually animated on a ship as if it is air to air. If we were to go out now and shoot an airplane in the sky for real, your camera would be on a plane flying alongside it. There are limitations to where those cameras can be, so we build those limitations into the CG cameras in the CG world in order to that the visuals are grounded in reality, even though the subject is fantastical.
Let’s talk more about limitations. What are other flaws you seek? Where do you want to emphasize mistakes in the galaxy?
Oh, absolutely. I think the biggest thing is the camerawork. Obviously, the DPs we’ve worked with have all been supremely talented and know what it is to bring those flaws into the camera operation. The Sabine Wren speed bike sequence in episode one, it doesn’t look right if the camera keeps her in frame the whole time. Because again, if you are photographing a real motorcycle rider on a freeway and got a camera car next to it, you’ll struggle to keep them in frame. Sometimes your camera will slightly overtake them. You’ll correct them to come back into frame or they’ll slightly accelerate a little more.
There’s the familiarity that audiences are aware of that when you don’t do that; it can instantly look fake. We were shooting Sabine on the speeder bike and it was on a stand on a concrete floor against a blue screen… With a camera on a dolly, the tricky part was imagining the background moving behind her. [Cinematographer] Eric [Steelberg] working the camera felt like they were constantly battling to keep her in frame and focus as well.
There’s a CG shot where she is coming towards the camera and about to drop to go under the ship. We talked about how we need to mess the camera up a little bit more, need to lose her, and need to lose her focus for a little bit. Again, it’s those subtleties that mess the shot up a little bit that helps provide the audience with familiarity they’re used to, which helps the realism.
Like you said, there’s a visual shorthand. For the world of Star Wars, what does and doesn’t work aesthetically?
Since Disney started moving forward with this IP, we’ve had a number of filmmakers. I think they’ve all brought a little bit of something different to the IP that is healthy. It does push it in slightly different directions. You can look back to what Gareth was doing in Rogue One, even though that really felt like an extension of A New Hope, which obviously story-wise, you needed. There were also new camera techniques. George wasn’t particularly known for crash zooms, even though there was one I believe in Attack of The Clones. Some of that camerawork from Greig Fraser came into Rogue One that, for me, continued to elevate and keep Star Wars relevant.
I think that’s important, because the original movie was made a long time ago. Some of the constraints that George was working under, he would’ve likely have chosen to do something different. He had the technology, but by the same token, you have to be very mindful and careful of being a good steward with the IP. The use of puppets, it’s charming. A lot of movies nowadays are always likely relying on CG, but puppets have always been part of the charm of Star Wars. It’s important.
So, understanding when to introduce that technique, and also even if you are relying on CG to do more complex character moments with those puppets, making sure that your CG feels like a puppet because, again, that’s traditional Star Wars. It also goes to making sure that we don’t box movies and box the series in too much because the original movies never felt that way.
And so, it’s tricky. Depending on what it is that you are doing and what the scene relies on, there are lots and lots of pitfalls. There are lots and lots of things to be aware of, because things have been done in very, very different ways over the years.
I’m sure you can give a million examples, right?
I’ll give you one quick example with lightsabers. The original lightsabers and the original trilogy weren’t submissive light sources like they are today. Now we have wonderful LED technology. The prop masters do a wonderful job in recreating them and throw off all of this light. Various filmmakers have used that to help set the tone of a scene; it’s worked beautifully. Rain in the forest, for example, and with the snow worked beautifully well, but also, it can be too much. It can start to feel like a missive light rod.
And so, that’s something on Ahsoka that Dave wanted to pay strong attention to and work with his gaffer and the DPs to make sure that it gives off just enough light, but not too much that it overpowers the effect that we layer on top that everybody’s kind of familiar with. We don’t want to break that while introducing something new because technology has allowed us to do it.
You have 4,000 visual effects shots in Ahsoka. Which of them came with the most potential pitfalls?
The scenes with the howlers. David wrote a wonderful episode we called the western wagon chasers. If we were a movie, it would be less of a challenge. We’re doing eight episodes with 4,000 visual effects shots. The time that we have to work within and the constraints we have to work within…. I like working within constraints, because I think it breeds creativity.
We knew that was going to be a big challenge, and at no point in the process did we want to have a conversation with Dave telling him he needs to scale things back. What we want to do, and the way that we always like to work, is the filmmaker needs to bring all of these wonderful ideas, this wonderful script, and then we work in partnership to figure out what’s the best way to achieve everything that filmmaker is imagining and then make it better than they imagined.
So what was the best way to achieve his vision there?
In that particular instance, we knew we would need a motion base. The question of how many shots we had was going to be the pivotal, and that was going to be if and where we needed to pivot to using horses. So, what I’m doing very early in prep is trying to look three months down the line at the problems shooting and then the problems during the turnover to the vendors. Then focus on the work that the vendors obviously have to execute to provide back everything that Dave has imagined.
For me, it’s about reality. We’ve worked on shows where we worked motion bases. We know where the limitations are. To me, from the very beginning we were going to need to have to leverage horses, because we weren’t going to be able to execute all the work on the motion base.
[Animator] Hal Hickel brought up the very good point that the anatomy of a horse is very different from the anatomy of a dog, which is what the howler is based upon. So, we talked about doing a test where we took old footage from western movies and then we took the creature of the howler, slightly adjusted the anatomy. ILM was doing this work and then tried to animate the dog in place of a real horse, but maintaining the rider in whatever western footage we were looking at and trying a run, trying a trot.
How’d that go?
We got to something that was really compelling really quickly through the work that the wonderful ILM supervisors and [Animation Supervisor] Rick O’Connor were doing. Dave knew we were going to be doing these tests, so then we took it to him. It became very clear to all of us that if the scope of the previs was what we thought it was going to end up being while we’re in prep, we were going to have to pivot to this.
Like you said, you like constraints, they breed creativity. However, what new advancements did you appreciate on Ahsoka?
Honestly, there’s so much technology out there right now that artists use. I could mention numerous different things like where we are right now with being able to do face swaps of actors onto a stunt double, which has been a visual effect requirement in movies for decades. It’s nothing new having a stump performer in a shot, but of course, the advancements of technology now are such that it’s so much easier and so much quicker. Whereas in the past it would be a huge lift to do that.
We got to the point on this show where we were building camera rigs and partnering with the actor and production to make sure that we had the opportunity in the lighting where the stunt double was performing. We’d bring the actual actor or actress on set that couldn’t be thrown around on the wire. We would photograph them in that lighting and maintain all of that data in a particular container, just to execute that one face swap for that one particular shot.
Rather than us keeping a library of data or doing a shotgun approach on data collection, we don’t need to do that anymore. The technology requires far less data that we can actually go in there surgically and improve the outcome by photographing the actor in that specific lighting environment where that stunt is actually taking place.
Faceswaps used to really stand out, but now that you mention it, they’re pretty seamless these days.
And there’s some wonderful work being done that’s completely invisible to all of us, including me for shows that obviously I’m not involved in. What it’s highlighting is it’s allowing everybody to see where their contribution in the work either succeeds or needs to continue to improve, whether that’s the lighting on set, whether that’s the visual effect or whether that’s hair and makeup.
We would typically have CG heads with CG hair when we needed to do a face swap. Often if it wasn’t a 2D element when we were tracking in there, but now we’re able to rebuild the face all of a sudden, it highlights the fact when there is a discrepancy between the hair on the stump performer and then the hair on the actual real actor or actress. So, that’s something else that we can now partner more closely with those departments to show them some of the differences, which they relish. Everybody wants to continue to improve and see where they can help the overall quality of the show.
Ahsoka is available to stream on Disney+.
