Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 10 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets We Learnt From ILM
We sat down with the effects studio to talk all things Episode VII.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a success on every conceivable level, dominating the box office, scoring across the board positive reviews and winning back all but the most curmudgeonly fan burnt by the prequels. But its biggest success can't be quantified by numerical measures; put simply, on a basic level it felt like Star Wars. And while some of that came from John Williams' typically evocative score and the presence of a Harrison Ford who cares, a lot of it is down to how the visual effects accurately recreated and advanced that galaxy far, far away.
However, thanks to the movie's extreme pre-release secrecy, how exactly they were all achieved has been rather mysterious. In an attempt to shed some light on the film, we got a chance to sit down with Scott Pritchard, a Compositing Sequence Supervisor at ILM (who has previously worked on Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Spectre and The Martian), at Escape Studios' VFX Festival 2016 last month (check out there website for information on next year's event) and talk about his and the company's work on Episode VII. You can check out the highlights of the interview in the video below, but here's a full breakdown of the ten most interesting things we learnt.
Bonus: Rogue One Is Going To Have A Similar Mix Of Practical And CGI Effects
Given how unbearably secretive Lucasfilm are being about the future of Star Wars, there wasn't much in our conversation about upcoming films in a galaxy far, far away (it was almost like Episode VIII doesn't even exist).
However, we were able to learn one incredibly interesting thing about this year's Rogue One. In terms of the film's special effects, you can expect a "similar mix to Episode VII", meaning we'll once again see extensive practical effects augmented by more CGI than you may expect. This isn't that surprising, although given how much of the (minimal) word on the film has been about its down-and-dirty style, this suggests there'll still be an epicness to its scale. Exciting.