Explore the behind-the-scenes details of Light & Magic season 2, now streaming on Disney+.
After a first season dedicated to the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic and the making of the original Star Wars trilogy, Light & Magic season 2 is moving to the 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on the Star Wars prequel trilogy. This season consists of three episodes, all of which will be released tomorrow on Disney+. We recently attended the global press conference in the presence of director Joe Johnston, Ahmed Best, John Knoll, Doug Chiang, Janet Lewin, and Rob Coleman. So, we wanted to share with you what we learned about the new season. Let’s start this with a great quote from Ahmed Best himself, the man behind Jar Jar Binks.
“I always like to say, Jar Jar walked so Gollum could run and the Na’vi could fly.” – Ahmed Best
SYNOPSIS
Light & Magic Season 2 follows Lucasfilm’s visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, as it enters its most challenging and revolutionary period: the dawn of digital. From creating the first fully realized CG character to solving the challenge of digital water, it is an era that finds ILM scaling new heights of innovation despite dramatic setbacks.
THE DIRECTOR – JOE JOHNSTON
After being featured in season one as an interviewee, Joe Johnston returns behind the camera for the second season. Indeed, he is the one directing the three episodes. He was one of the original members of ILM, working on the three original Star Wars films. However, he was no longer working at ILM during the prequel trilogy, as he had left the company in 1985.
Johnston explained that he was asked by Imagine (the company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) to direct them. He believes they chose him because, as he said, “I was an insider in a different age, a completely different age, the analog age. And I think it allowed me to have sort of a unique perspective on ILM then as compared with ILM now.”
In fact, while making this documentary, Johnston learned a lot about ILM since he left the company. As he put it, “a lot of this was an education for me just to be exposed to how the digital revolution sort of came onboard …it was really more enlightening than anything. You also have to keep in mind that when you start a project like this, you don’t know where it’s going. A documentary and a lot of feature films are really made in the cutting room, and this a perfect example of that. It’s finding moments. It’s finding individual stories, in a way, sort of modular stories that can all be connected to tell a bigger story at the end. But it’s definitely a voyage of discovery.”
MODEL BUILDING
When asked what VFX technique doesn’t get enough recognition today, Joe Johnston immediately replied model building. For him, “there’s still a huge scope for practical model building when it is the appropriate and cost-effective method to achieve a great shot, a great sequence.” That’s talked about in season 2 with for example the pod-race model and the Mustafar model. Looking at the Prequels, people tend to forget that The Phantom Menace is actually the Star Wars film that used the most models than any Star Wars film combined.
HOW TO BECOME A VISUAL ARTIST AND PRODUCTION DESIGNER
If watching Light & Magic season 2 inspires you to become a production designer or visual artist, like Doug Chiang, who is now the Lucasfilm Senior Vice President and Executive Design Director, there are various solutions. Chiang recommended that aspiring artists attend art school if possible. The other one, as he explained, is “keep a sketchbook. Just draw. Draw every day. I still do that every day. My morning routine is I draw for a half an hour, you know, I do sketches. And it’s just for fun. Part of that is because during my day job, I don’t have time to do my own personal art. And you have to develop that part of it. So, it’s really important.”
Janet Lewin also added that ILM doesn’t “always hire the person with the advanced skillset.” They are looking for artists. She actually started her career as a temp in the purchasing department, while John Knoll had several letter rejections before finally getting a job at ILM. The important is to keep trying and looking for opportunities. Lewin pointed out that there are many opportunities to get in. “We have a really great Jedi Academy program for training, for technical training, artist training. We have internship programs. So, there’s lots of different ways to get your foot in the door and start building a career.”
DESIGNING THE PREQUELS
George Lucas’ request to Doug Chiang during the Prequels was simple. He didn’t want him to worry about whether what they were designing was possible to create; he just wanted Chiang to design everything without that in mind. “Don’t worry about any of that. Just design. Do pure design. Don’t worry about execution.” So that’s what he did. It was then up to John Knoll with his visual effects team to figure out how to create these designs.
Knoll’s task wasn’t easy, of course. “We’d go through and we would break ’em all down. Like, how do we deal with this problem? How do we deal with that problem? And each one of those problems would be assigned to individual people and we’d eventually kind of work through it, eating the elephant one bite at a time.”
STORYBOARD MAGIC
When he first saw the 3,600 storyboards of the film, he realized that there were already things that were not possible with the current tools they had. It was filled with things they had never done before on a massive scale. There was a lot to figure out. “I was sort of keeping mental note of like, how dense these scenes were, how many characters there were in them. Oh, these are furred characters, so we’re gonna have fur on these. We’re gonna have clothing on these. Oh, these characters are wearing clothing, we need to have cloth simulation package. Oh, these, you know, vast numbers of droids, oh, being cut in half, so we’re gonna need a rigid body system for this,” John Knoll said about his thought process when seeing the storyboards.
THE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Joe Johnston revealed that Season 2 starts with Jurassic Park, as it’s the moment everything changed for visual effects. It’s the film for which digital technology became “viable as a visual effects tool.” The goal for season two was for Johnston “to tell the effect that George Lucas has had on digital technology… and just film itself … All his influences and the things that he’s contributed, to the things he’s come up with and invented and inspired.”
To tell this story, Johnston interviewed numerous people who contributed to that era of visual effects, and he also used archival footage, as seen in the first season. This is thanks to ILM’s “policy where they documented, all this stuff, the meetings, the sort of the casual, just the people working on the projects.”
THE STAGECRAFT TECHNOLOGY – THE LED VOLUMES
To that same question, John Knoll, one of ILM’s visual effects supervisors, answered the LED volume that was first designed for The Mandalorian. He explained that “it’s a really good solution for situations where you need to do dynamic lighting in particular that we didn’t really have a good way of doing previously. And in a way, it’s taking image-based lighting, which has been part of computer graphics for a couple of decades now, but, you know, bringing that back into the real world, and it’s a very powerful tool.”
Janet Lewin, the Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Visual Effects and General Manager of Industrial Light & Magic, also added that the application of the volume is towards “the lower budget projects, commercials, pickup shoots, things of that nature. As well as the bigger, you know, blockbuster type projects.”
RELEASE
Although the volume is not from the time of the Prequels, it’s still a groundbreaking VFX technique worth mentioning. Moreover, this technology is still undergoing advancements. For Janet, “one of the stories about ILM is that we build upon each innovation and I don’t see that stopping with where we are with StageCraft. I think it’ll just continue to evolve.”
Light & Magic Season 2 releases tomorrow on Disney+.
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Star Wars expert and Japan connoisseur.
