General Andor Series Discussion

You're right it's about how you use it.

As you already said- in Andor they didn't use a standing StageCraft set, they only used single screens or panels to enhance sets.

For example:
"We built a specific LED screen around the embassy where Mon Mothma works, and so they're having their party and you've got wonderful screens. And it's like, well, now we've got a wonderfully practically built set. We're immersed with our environment of people, we're utilizing new technology in terms of StageCraft and blending everything together."

So, Andor did not use any of the full 360 volume sets used in Mando, Kenobi and TBOBF. That's what my original post was about.

This was actually filmed on a set/location. I've seen a behind the scenes picture of that very scene. But unfortunately I don't find it anymore.

 

Yes, that makes sense. That was how they did the space scenes outside of the Milennium Falcon windows in S:ASWS, too. (I believe they might actually have premiered its use there?). So yeah, you're right; it's the "Volume" technology but not the actual Volume.

 

For what it's worth, no one I now know in my new career considers the virtual studio* to be more than a novelty shtick.

It's worth noting here, these same folks love LED walls and Unreal, just not shoving them into a horseshoe soundstage. And the reason is that's like asking someone to pay for a limousine so they can use it as their dance hall. There's very limited range, obviously.
And even Mando had to jump outside and revert to standard approaches.

But the "volume" was never a full solution. It was a tech pusher. It pushed the industry forward. Now virtual production is more common at varying levels, and the tricks learned in the volume moved stagecraft forward, which moved vfx forward. That's another reason folks don't think too, too much of it... they get all the benefits of Unreal's advances from its stagecraft stuff, but with the agility to apply it anywhere.

Everyone I know is far more excited about putting AI to work in vfx than a heavy cost, heavy weighing, and clumsy static set system.

It's like Avatar. Yeah. It works. There. Nowhere else. Meanwhile things like AI trained animation group behavior works everywhere.

Anyway. Long way to say, if someone thinks something's practical these days, scratch a little and a thousand vfx hands will be found just below the surface of that sequence some director or stunt coordinator is bragging about doing in the real world. It's getting comical at this point listening to some of these folks make claims about their shows and movies. Either they're ignorant, not considering a whole host of vfx work to count towards using "cgi", or just full of it.

Usually a mixture of the three. Which was what happened with Andor. Someone spoke out of turn (fyi, directors almost never have a clue on how vfx works or where it will be applied), only to be corrected by someone else.

I'll never forget seeing a director look at their own already released film, turning to a vfx supervisor and asking if that looks finished.

Anyway. "Real" is at best 50% real anymore on these big deals.


*general term for the confined space LED with Unreal solution branded as "the volume" when ILM uses it

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The virtual studio is here to stay. The old ways will continue but The Volume has revolutionized film making. The only changes will be that the technology will continue to get better and better.

I recall my initial reaction to the first episode of The Mandalorian was "Holy Cow, how could they afford such a large travel budget for a TV show!"

 

I didn't say it was going anywhere. I said folks in vfx aren't blown over like Beatlemania by it. Because it has a lot of rigitity that comes with it and a high cost.

The volume is a specific branded kit, and highly restrictive.

Stagecraft is the technology it uses. Virtual production is the generalized application of in-camera synchronized real-time postproduction vfx. Avatar is a virtual production, for example. Several Youtube shows are as well.

The Volume is like saying Rolls Royce, not like saying Car.

It will remain present, but the vast majority of what you see won't use it. It won't because it's already being surpassed with even more practical solutions which already use Unreal (Unreal is the rendering engine used for just about everything vfx now - including the Volume - Stagecraft is Unreal's technology), and cost a heck of a lot less.

The quantity of movies coming out in a year far exceeds that which are using The Volume. And that's because to use it, you first have to want to, and be able to, afford ILM. That's not a high count of projects.

But folks can, and do, afford to use Unreal, and that means applying things like Stagecraft solution when it makes sense to do that, and apply a different method elsewhere where appropriate.

There's no one best technological approach to making a movie anymore than there is one lens to shoot them. So, yes, The Volume is staying put, and yes, most vfx shops still won't care that much.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I agree. Anytime a new technology is unleashed, there are old-school grizzled veterans who say it's "just a fad". The tech will improve, making older versions still viable and more affordable, which will result in more widespread use. Right now, you either have "it" or you don't. It's cutting edge. Give it time and you'll see the lower budget cable TV productions using what the Big Guys are using now, while the Big Guys will have the latest cutting edge tech.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 8, 2022, Original Post Date: Dec 7, 2022 ---

As far as how it applies to Andor, I think there are some very valid points to be made. The biggest argument in favor of practical sets as opposed to Volume came in the early interviews with the cast. Being able to touch the actual wall, open cabinets, etc... those things impacted the actors. It gave a realism that was crucial to the tone of the show. They were quite literally in that place.

Flip side is The Mandalorian. It's shot entirely on a Volume soundstage, but it works wonderfully. Firstly, the main characters are a guy with a metal bucket covering his face and a puppet. The tone and emotion do not need the same feel. The actors are still able to react with the environments, which is a huge plus in contrast to the old greenscreens where actors had to imagine the backgrounds.

 

It's not cutting edge anymore. I work at Crafty Apes VFX.
AI is cutting edge now.
VFX folks care leagues more about AI assisted rotoscoping than The Volume. Leagues more.

The speed of VFX technology growth is far faster than you're thinking it is, and far more diverse.
No one in VFX is resisting The Volume because of "old-school" mentality. There's no such thing in VFX. It's a field filled with people who want to get crap done in any manner possible with any lesser fighting the machine that can possibly be achieved - and most of VFX time is spent fighting the machine to get what you want.

The reason that no one's fawning over The Volume that much isn't because they don't love LED walls and camera parallax rendering. The reason no one's fawning over The Volume is that it's simply not present in 99% of the workload. And it's not present because it's really not practical as a solution logistically. No one outside of a few Disney ventures are writing shows and movies by restricting themselves to what fits in The Volume. Everyone else is just simply writing and buying movies. Then it's shoved at VFX shops to assess what it takes to accomplish whatever laundry list of things are required (and even the most benign of shows involves VFX now - Hallmark shows even have it). Perhaps a certain percent of things in a given movie could be done in The Volume, but you're not pulling off Top Gun: Maverick, Mission Impossible, or Fast and Furious that way.

Heck, even Marvel, which is also a Disney franchise, isn't employing The Volume all that much, because - and I cannot stress this enough... there are a total of FOUR "Volumes" in the entire world and only TWO of them in America (the other two are in the UK and Australia).

These things are like the Concord. Yeah, it exists. Does that mean that all of aviation is now going to be supersonic aircraft? No. Because it's a massively expensive solution with ungainly logistics that only fits a specific set of customers with highly trained technicians from one specific company required to operate it, and there's not even enough of them in existence to be able to provide operational support to anywhere close to a diverse range of clientele. It's basically nearly a "Disney only" system, and even they aren't using it exclusively. It's simply not practical in terms of business sense.

It's one tool out of thousands. It's not "The Tool" that replaces everything.

And honestly, with what's going on with AI at the moment - I don't know that The Volume will really matter a whole lot for that much longer. LED walls, however... those are passionately loved.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

It has certainly had an impact on TV productions like The Mandalorian. Eight TV productions and three feature films have utilized it this year.

Given that the StageCraft process Favreau first developed in The Lion King and implemented in a full-scale LED set using the Unreal Engine technology used in Epic Games for The Mandalorian was only three years ago, that sounds pretty good.

If some new technology you know all about already has it beat, okie dokie---you're the VFX expert. But my gut says Stagecraft is going to continue to grow in popularity. As with anything, it has its limitations but it solves a wide variety of production problems, particularly with sets and lighting.

 

didn’t they build a huge Ferrix set in England?

 

There's perhaps a bit of confusion.

I'm not saying it's a useless piece of technology. What I am saying is that it is restrictive in ways, especially financially, which limit a wide set application. Regardless of anything, you can't use StageCraft for massive sets which move a lot. That's just not its purpose.

Stagecraft's attraction, if you have a big enough budget for it, is the ILM team that comes with it and can establish it for your shoot and operate it. That inherently makes it a very limited piece of technology that is inaccessible to the vast majority of the industry's workforce.

Conversely, StableDiffusion, for example, is open source and just about every VFX shop has ingested it and created some form of workflow solution or another using some tailoring of it in some capacity.

Likewise, NeRFs could likely do the same. And if NeRFs truly take off like they might, that pretty much changes a lot of things.

It's not about the kit of StageCraft, as far as most VFX shops are concerned. It's the general approach of Virtual Production that is interesting. The difference is that one is proprietary, and one isn't. The draw for the brand name at the moment is all of the experts you get when you pay for StageCraft. Not so much the Unreal engine's parallax response capability which everyone can get by downloading Unreal Engine for free and applying some work hours to set it up themselves - see,

.
In fact, this is what most do when they need such a solution (decently being adopted by low-budget productions particularly).

So, it's not that StageCraft is junk. Far from it. It's that it's a limited installation option, and one that can be replicated if someone wants outside of the ILM offer because Unreal offers the foundational components which make it possible. The rest is down to man hours of tailoring to your need.

Now, that said, most productions don't bother. Instead, they toss up a green screen (in some cases, not even that) and then shove it at the VFX shops to just chop in whatever they need. Or they just film on location with maybe a couple markers for reference and hand it to the VFX shops to extend and replace as needed.





Both of these, especially the last one, continue to be far more frequent because it's far cheaper for a production cost as well as considerably easier logistically to do it this way. They don't have to ask questions about what fits into something, there's no questions about anything really. It's just toss up three to five cameras, let it roll, capture in camera, shove to VFX to "automagically" make it what you want (note the considerable sarcasm in that part).

Keep in mind that only approximately the top 1% of productions even have storyboards. Please consider the ramifications of this reality. Most crews walking in, most directors walking in, don't know what they are going to shoot. They just know that they are going to shoot a given scene or scenes at a given location (studio or otherwise) at a given time. More than most folks realize is essentially "shot from the hip" in the industry. All the big previsualizing and storboarding that folks see in behind the scenes documentaries, if one stops to consider it, are for very large-scale productions. It's not uncommon for a VFX supervisor to ask a director what they want things to look like and the director reply that they're not sure, but they'll know it when they see it. That is, they don't have a visual plan.

But again, it's not about whether there's a better virtual production solution out there than StageCraft. No, of course not. Just as there wasn't a better supersonic commercial airline than the Concord. But that's the wrong question.

The right question is do VFX houses find StageCraft functionally beneficial and are they trying to get to making their own competing solutions? No. Any VFX house can create a StageCraft rival solution, as mentioned above, but they aren't. It's not that ILM holds some alien level technological secret. It's that VFX houses aren't interested in blowing the money on it when it doesn't help them serve their client's needs as often as the general population thinks it would.

VFX is far more broad than simply a digital set. In fact, the vast majority of VFX has nothing to do with that. Set extensions and clean up probably account for the largest share of labor, and set extensions don't require going all the way to a virtual production solution to accomplish.

Here's something, for example, that VFX folks get excited about. Autorotoscoping.
Seriously. It's not splashy or glamourous, but even getting 5% more accuracy in an autoroto solution is a major moment. Tossing up scenes and set extensions is typically not that terrible. What is, is cutting people out frame by frame so you can matte them and do what you need to do to their surrounding.
Contrary to popular belief, green screens don't just automagically make cutting someone into whatever you want work most of the time because lighting, no matter how good, is at some point going to fail to give a clean chroma key to universally cut out and you'll just have to rotoscope the actors anyway.

Which, again, is why everyone loves LED screens. Unfortunately, LED screens are more expensive than a cheap green screen, so while it's cheap to get LED screens by comparison to StageCraft, it's even cheaper to just toss up a green screen and shove the problem onto the VFX house to clean up (because... they will).

Therefore, autoroto is far more attractive. Far more. Because if you can dynamically autoroto people out with near perfection (we're getting closer to that reality every day), then you don't really care what is behind them at all. You spin up Unreal, model out a virtual setting, match its camera to the camera from the set, and then the compositors blend them together.

So, it's not that StageCraft is junk. Not at all. It's just not going to become the studio of tomorrow. That's too narrow of a view. The "studio" of tomorrow is like Jackie Chan's fights where his character grabs randomly anything at hand improvisationally and rolls with it. StageCraft, by comparison, is like heavyweight boxing.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Yes they did. They also shot on locations where they built practical sets. They used Volume/Stagecraft/LED panels in limited capacity. The best example given was in Mon's apartment, that was a constructed set. They used the panels for the windows so that the actors were actually looking out at the buildings and traffic just as we saw it in the finished product. Ten years ago, they would have been looking out at a green screen.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 8, 2022, Original Post Date: Dec 8, 2022 ---

Really interesting stuff! Man, I love this place, and having the input of a working pro in the VFX game is truly awesome. I think post-production in general is way under-appreciated. Tony Gilroy made a point of that in a recent interview where he was justifying why it would take two years for season 2. They're filming now, but that will be done in a few months. Post takes the most time and money.

 

The reason things are so jacked up is really about process. The process doesn't match the need anymore.
It's still operating like we're in the 20th century, but the demand placed on it is 21st century rooted. If anyone stops to consider it for a moment, obviously these two are grossly incompatible.

Imagine if social media operated like a 20th century telephone exchange system, while simultaneously everyone wanted to use it like we use it today. That's about how it is right now.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

So is that demand becoming a runaway case of the old "meh, we'll fix it in post" mentality? That's definitely a trend that I fear where directors and DPs start to half-ass it and depend on you guys to do the heavy lifting.

 

Oh, it's well past it.
vfx artists strike - Google Search

We're at that point in the early 1960's crossing into the mid 1960's right now. Back then, the problem was running directors and actors into the ground like meat on a processing line one movie after another after another since they weren't paid by movie, but by salary. With rational scheduling, salary is a better system than any other, but there became a run of irrational scheduling because of irrational requests (read: high demands for lots of quantity to market deliveries on frequently short deadlines). It helped none at all that such individuals were also getting less recognition for what they were doing than they felt that they deserved.

Therefore, New Hollywood happened. A free agency system requiring union membership was developed instead of corporate ownership.

Well, we're at that same kind of moment in time here, just with VFX. I'm not discussing whether or not union solutions are good or not, but I'll say that the issue is one of process and regardless of which system develops through the end of this, it will change the process more than any technology is capable of impacting. Union or not.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

Really cool Andor concept art

 

Concept art PT. 2

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 14, 2022, Original Post Date: Dec 14, 2022 ---

Concept art PT 3

 

@Rogues1138 My good Sir, you are the resident expert on the “Art of _____” book series for Star Wars…..

Have you heard or seen anything on possible “Art of Andor” book?

@MBWilson ’s concept art has me desiring that book….

 

I haven't heard anything on the interwebs yet, I would imagine that one will be developed right before the release of Andor season 2. That's how they market these art books, so they have roughly 2 years to put together a marketing plan.

 

Concept art PT 4

 

Hey all, need help on something....I seem to remember a scene in a trailer from Ferrix, with Andor and a bunch of other Ferrix/Rebels, all with blasters/rifles, behind a wall, Andor peers over the wall and Imperial troops are marching by.....did I see this correctly or am I imagining things?