Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 10 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets We Learnt From ILM

7. Maz Wasn't Always Going To Be CGI

One of the most interesting things to come out of our conversation was how when deciding the best method to achieve an effect, "The idea was never going to be driven by the technology, it was always going to be driven by the design and what we need to do to capture a performance." This is seen best by Maz Kanta, one of the film's two main fully motion-capture characters; although it's retroactively obviously the best way to allow Lupita Nyong'o to play the character, plenty of other options were considered during the movie's development:

"I think they originally talked about having her as an animatronic puppet, they thought of having her played by someone wearing a suit, but there was a point where the nuance of the performance just demanded a digital version."

Of course, every effort has been made to ensure that there's no handicap to using one method or another, with both practical and computer-generated effects progressing in new and exciting ways that allow seamless integration in both directions:

"For Maz we had a maquette, a physical puppet built that we had in every shot, so that acted as a reference for our digital Maz to match to. [...] We had a digital model available for her in a later digital capture sessions where we were actually able to put a little digital Maz inside a scene which had been shot a couple of months earlier in principal photography and she was able to do the performance capture and see that reflected in Maz in real time."