The Mandalorian: This Is the Way
Cinematographers Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS and Barry “Baz” Idoine and showrunner Jon Favreau employ new technologies to frame this Disney Plus Star Wars series.
A live-action Star Wars television series was George Lucas’ dream for many years, but the logistics of television production made achieving the necessary scope and scale seem inconceivable. Star Wars fans would expect exotic, picturesque locations, but it simply wasn’t plausible to take a crew to the deserts of Tunisia or the salt flats of Bolivia on a short schedule and limited budget. The creative team behind The Mandalorian has solved that problem.
For decades, green- and bluescreen compositing was the go-to solution for bringing fantastic environments and actors together on the screen. (Industrial Light & Magic did pioneering work with the technology for the original Star Wars movie.) However, when characters are wearing highly reflective costumes, as is the case with Mando (Pedro Pascal), the title character of The Mandalorian, the reflection of green- and bluescreen in the wardrobe causes costly problems in post-production. In addition, it’s challenging for actors to perform in a “sea of blue,” and for key creatives to have input on shot designs and composition.
In order for The Mandalorian to work, technology had to advance enough that the epic worlds of Star Wars could be rendered on an affordable scale by a team whose actual production footprint would comprise a few soundstages and a small backlot. An additional consideration was that the typical visual-effects workflow runs concurrent with production, and then extends for a lengthy post period. Even with all the power of contemporary digital visual-effects techniques and billions of computations per second, the process can take up to 12 hours or more per frame. With thousands of shots and multiple iterations, this becomes a time-consuming endeavor. The Holy Grail of visual effects — and a necessity for The Mandalorian, according to co-cinematographer and co-producer Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS — was the ability to do real-time, in-camera compositing on set.
