‘Rogue One’ Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel Goes Deep Into the Process Behind K-2SO and the Battle of Scarif

SWNN Probe · Dec 23, 2021

In a recent interview with ILM's Publicity Group, Visual Effects Animator Hal Hickel went deep into the making of Rogue One from the visual effects side of things. Hickel worked on the movie as an animation supervisor and had a lot to share, in particular, about the process of bringing the droid K-2SO (played by Alan Tudyk) to life and creating the final battle on Scarif. This comes after director Gareth Edwards was interviewed by StarWars.com, celebrating the five-year anniversary of the film.

Hickel started by talking about K-2SO. Apparently, it was Edwards' idea to create a droid 'with an expressive face.' But that wasn't really something Star Wars had explored before, as Hickel said:

'Droids in Star Wars typically are industrial, with very simplistic designs. Even ones that are anthropomorphic, like Threepio, don’t have moving face-parts. Even their eyes don’t move. That’s just Star Wars. But we thought, 'hey, this is interesting. Let’s look into this.' We did some tests and things. Part of the problem though is that if you’re going to go down the road of an expressive metal droid face, you’re dealing with hard-surface pieces, not rubber skin. You really have to get quite detailed before you can get into something that can express emotion. You have to have, at minimum, eyebrows that can make expressions. A mouth that can do the same. There’s more than that, but those are the basic things. You also can’t just go in a little bit, you have to go quite a ways down the road. With that said, some of those movements can start to feel overly complex, and not very Star Wars.'
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He went on to talk about how they approached K-2SO's eyes, and how blinking was not an option, but the movement of the eyes was a great way to communicate that the droid's face was more expressive than the Star Wars droids we were used to:

'I took an audio clip of Alan [Tudyk] from his web series, Con Man, and did a quick animation with just the minimum of some eye blinks and eye rotations. It looked good, and it became a talking point, so I traveled out to the UK where shooting was being prepped. Alan was there, and he was getting fitted with the K-2SO stilts by the Creature Shop. We had a production discussion about the animation, and we felt that the blinks pushed it a little too far into 'cartoon animation' territory, where you had expressive elements that don’t have an otherwise mechanically practical reason for being there. You could argue that there would be little shudders to protect the eyes from dust, but the idea of them blinking from an expressive standpoint pushed it into a different realm. What we did love though was that the eyes could rotate. While it didn’t communicate emotion, it did communicate a cognitive function.'
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One of the team's main focuses was to make clear distinctions between this new droid and the classic protocol droid:

'We did really want to have a face part though that the protocol droids didn’t have. There was a droid, EV-9D9, who was Jabba the Hutt’s chief of cyborg operations at his palace. She also had an appearance in The Mandalorian Season One and Season Two as a bartender at Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina in Mos Eisley on Tatooine. She had a little flap for a lower jaw that would move up and down. We tried that on K-2. He had a little block that was part of his design, and we tried animating that. It would basically click open when he was talking, and then click closed again when he was done. But again, it didn’t make him expressive, and it didn’t add anything to the performance. We knew it was K-2 speaking, we’d recognize his voice, so we did away with that.'
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But after the design of the character, they needed to bring Alan Tudyk in to 'try on the costume.' Here's the process as he described it:

'We ended up bringing Alan to Industrial Light & Magic, and we spent several hours with him on our motion capture stage. It was the first time he got to wear and walk around in the stilts. It was also where we did a real-time retarget to a simplified version of the asset. Alan could see himself on the screens, and it was a bit like an actor trying on a costume, or looking at themselves in a mirror and figuring out how to carry themselves. He was able to spend a lot of time figuring out how robotic to act versus how natural. It was super useful because he could stow that experience away. He wouldn’t be able to see that on set, or on location, but what he could do is build that exercise into the performance; what the character is for him, just by doing it for a few hours on our mocap stage. Two weeks later we were shooting in Jordan for his first scene, and he was able to tap directly into that.'
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An interesting detail about the making of K-2SO is that there are two scenes in Rogue One that were rendered in real-time, that is, while cameras were rolling. As Hickel describes, this is a technology they were really invested in and genuinely wanted to push forward, which is now something employed quite regularly in projects like The Mandalorian:

'That’s correct, we did. We shot two scenes of K-2 from behind, because at the time, we had yet to find a solution for his luminous eyes, and the refractions, and those sorts of things, but with a little more time we could have sorted that out. Those two shots though were rendered in real-time. There was no demand from the film that we do that, but instead we did it because it was technology that we really wanted to push forward. With the convergence of games and offline traditional visual effects, we knew we wanted to keep pushing into that space, so we worked really hard to do that in a few shots.'
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The conversation then shifted towards the making of the Battle of Scarif, the third act of the film. As Hickel described, this was a rare opportunity for him as a visual effects person to contribute to the actual story that was being told on-screen. Both Hickel and John Knoll (the VFX legend who pitched the story for the movie) were in meetings with Lucasfilm's Kiri Hart, Dave Filoni, and Pablo Hidalgo to discuss what would happen in the third act:

'That was a great experience because I got a rare opportunity to contribute to the story. Working in visual effects, we are involved in projects from beginning to end, but we are mostly thought of from a post-production standpoint. John Knoll is an outlier on Rogue One because he conceived the story, but generally, we aren’t involved in the story aspect. Some yes, (it depends on the project), but quite often, no. What happened though is that John and I started to have these story meetings with Kiri Hart, Pablo Hidalgo, and Dave Filoni, to figure out what would be happening in this battle. 'What are the stakes? Who’s doing what? What is Admiral Raddus up to? How is he communicating with the Rebels planet-side?' That was super fun for me, because as I said, not every project affords me with the ability to contribute at the story-level. Out of that, John had a concern about the specifics of the battle that were outlined in the opening crawl of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. It says 'Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.' We started to ask, 'What was that victory? Is it just getting the plans, or was it a large-scale military victory as well?' We felt that we needed to make good by that line.'

'We felt there needed to be a moment in that battle where the Rebel Alliance lands a significant blow against Commander Cassio Tagge’s starfleet. There’s that great moment from the Death Star conference room scene in A New Hope, where Admiral Motti reminds Tagge that the Alliance is 'Dangerous to your starfleet, Commander. Not to this battle station.' We wanted to honor that too. John came up with this great idea of colliding a pair of Star Destroyers into the Shield Gate and knocking the planetary defense shield out. So if you think about it, the Rebels took down two of the fleet’s prized Star Destroyers, destroyed their shield generator and space station, forced Tarkin to obliterate his own security complex on Scarif, and they also managed to steal 'Stardust', the technician readouts to the Death Star. We felt that that was a satisfying victory for the Alliance.'
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One of the big moments of that space battle was when the Rebels made two Star Destroyers collide with each other. This was handled by animator Euising Lee, who did an amazing job developing the scene off of a brief description:

'I handed that off to a great Animator by the name of Euising Lee. He’s a terrific artist, and he’s especially gifted in his ability to realize spaceship action, and also camera work. He was able to take the idea and just run with it. He made a mini feature out of it; just a huge meal of all these shots. We showed it to Gareth, and kind of boiled it down into the shots that we wanted and made a shorter version of it. But he really took John’s idea and pushed it forward visually into a really terrific series of shots. That was a really fun process.'
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George Lucas always referred to the music as the lifeblood of Star Wars, and Hal Hickel proves why that is the case, as he describes what it was like seeing that final battle in the cinema:

'The thing is, when working, sometimes late in post we might get to hear music that’s being developed, but more often than not we just hear the scratch sound design, and we don’t hear the music until it’s in cinemas. Let me tell you, sitting in the theater at the premier, and that moment in the scene when it goes quiet, and Michael Giacchino’s score swells, and the Star Destroyers are plunging down into the Shield Gate, I just thought, 'my god! What a moment.''
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Hickel has always been someone who likes to dive deep into his craft. In an interview with our own Resistance Broadcast crew in early 2021, the longtime ILM animator talked at length about the visual effects that were used in The Mandalorian Season 2.

The legacy of Rogue One will continue in 2022 with the release of Andor, the spin-off prequel series led by Diego Luna. It will be released between July and September on Disney Plus. We look forward to what Hal Hickel and the pioneering effects team at ILM have in store for us in what will be the biggest year in Star Wars content history.

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daRinze · Dec 23, 2021

SWNN Probe said: ↑

In a recent interview with ILM's Publicity Group, Visual Effects Animator (...)
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Dear @SWNN Probe there still is a bug everytime you report a hotlink : extra characters are added to the end of the link, making it unusable.

For example, if you explore the link above in the quote excerpt, you'll notice the associated URL is : https://www.ilm.com/hal-hickel-discusses-rogue-one/'%20 rel='noopener
The latter part, from the last slash to the last character, /'%20 rel='noopener, is really unwanted, and what makes the link fail.
Hope you'll be able to fix that in the future.

‘Rogue One’ Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel Goes Deep Into the Process Behind K-2SO and the Battle of Scarif

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‘Rogue One’ Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel Goes Deep Into the Process Behind K-2SO and the Battle of Scarif

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