How The Mandalorian Became ILM’s Guinea Pig For New VFX Tech

With “The Jungle Book” and “The Lion King,” Jon Favreau has been at the forefront of new advancements in filmmaking, and he’s always willing to give us a peak behind the curtain. In a chat with Film Stories, the director spoke about the early days of developing “The Volume” and how the accomplishments they’ve achieved have benefitted other Lucasfilm productions outside of “The Mandalorian”:

“We were doing a lot of R&D with the tools for ‘Lion King,’ trying to figure out if we could get a camera’s position to create parallax on even on a TV screen. If you look at ‘Star Wars Gallery,’ you’ll see there’s some behind-the-scenes stuff of us playing with it. We were working with a lot of different teams trying to figure out if this could be done — Magnum Opus, ILM, Unreal. Everybody knew, in theory, it could, but in order for us to film this at the speed that we needed to, we built these tools to try to accommodate our specific set of requirements.”

Favreau credited Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy for allowing “The Mandalorian” to budget for the necessary research and development that led to finally cracking the code for what became ILM’s StageCraft. He went on to talk about some of the other tech that’s helped improve existing effects. “So, we became a bit of a proving ground for that and a lot of the de-aging stuff, where we had to figure out how to make Luke [Skywalker] work,” revealed Favreau. “All that stuff that is now paying off with other productions, like ‘Indiana Jones.'”