ILM’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story VFX Reels Show How the Magic is Made

With the 2017 Academy Awards fast approaching this Sunday, Industrial Light & Magic is nominated, once again, multiple times for their visual effects magic. The powerhouse effects shop has been nominated for creating a realistic disaster in Deepwater Horizon, for bending worlds and visiting other realities in Doctor Strange, and of course for once again bringing the galaxy far, far away to life in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

For the latter, they’ve now released three effects reels, showing off various aspects of their work. Whether it’s digital recreation of long-deceased actors, creating entire planets and environments, or those signature space dogfights, they had something for everyone – and a VFX reel to focus it on. Click through the slides to see their newest work.

Recreating Tarkin

This video shows how the actor Guy Henry, using motion capture and advanced animation, was able to recreate the performance (and likeness) of the original Governor Tarkin, Peter Cushing.

“With our digital humans, there was a lot of digital involvement there, but again it was working very carefully with our facial capture system to reinterpret the facial capture from Guy Henry, for instance, as something that looked more like the way that Peter Cushing used his face so that it would resemble Tarkin,” Hal Hickel of ILM Told ComicBook.com. “We had kind of the whole range of things, we had things where we were partnering with capture of different kinds and building on top of that or adjusting it, and then the stuff where the animators could really cut loose with their own imaginations a bit more, you know, being like the space battle and the ground battle.”

Creating the Planets

Jedha and Scarif, two of the main worlds in Rogue One, couldn’t be more unlike one another. Jedha is a desert world, desolate and full of ruins. Scarif is a beautiful paradise planet, with a different kind of starkness, to the architecture, punctuated by the beauty of the natural scenery around them.

Creating the Battle of Scarif

Finally, there’s the space battle component of the Battle of Scarif. Revolutionary camera technology was created for this scene, with a hand-held virtual camera so Gareth Edwards could move in the space environment and create the shots the same way he did in the real world, as shown above.

“Well we have a group that does all those rigid physical simulations that elevate. They live for that kind of stuff,” Hickel said. “We told them we’re going to crash these two Star Destroyers together and tear one in half, so, ‘oooh, oooh, that sound’s like fun.’”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now!