So, what’s it like to get to work on lightsabers?

How beloFX contributed to ‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’.

In this interview with beloFX visual effects supervisor Russell Bowen, befores & afters finds out all about working on lightsabers and a range of other VFX crafted by the studio for Star Wars: The Acolyte.

Bowen worked with production visual effects supervisor Julian Foddy on the series. For it, beloFX crafted effects for several sequences, including the cold open fight between Indara and Mae, and a number of establishing environments. Many of those environments capitalized on how the studio uses Unreal Engine in its pipeline. The interview also delves into the making of invisible visual effects scenes in the show.

b&a: It’s pretty cool that one of the first sequences in the series involves some lightsabers with Carrie-Anne Moss’ character, Indara. How did you approach it?

Russell Bowen: Lightsabers are interesting, on paper they should be the simplest visual effects to do. It’s a glorified glow node, but actually, it’s not, because there’s an artistry to it and a history or legacy to lightsabers and how they look. Also, if you look at the franchise, lightsabers change. There isn’t one consistent look to a lightsaber.

There’s a similarity across the Star Wars universe for sure, but we obviously know there’s the character it is attached to, and that influences the look of it. Whether that’s color, intensity or even the frequency of the beam itself.

Overall, our approach was to look at all of them across the board, every lightsaber style, and find similarities: what works and what doesn’t, especially those that favoured the look of the show and our main character Indara. We went back and forth with Julian a lot on this particular topic. Julian had his preferences on his favorite lightsabers as well as the showrunners. Some of that was already present in the onset material, the light rods used to cast light for example.

Then obviously there’s the fact that it’s Indara and trying to play into her character. She’s very stoic, experienced and calm. Even in that fight sequence, we didn’t want to have her lightsaber counter that in any way.

It was actually very nerve-wracking to have lightsaber shots. It’s not something that Lucasfilm gives away lightly. They mean a lot to people, and especially to fans. So to even have those shots was a privilege and not something we took lightly. I think I drove my team insane because we went over and over and over everything. We fine-tuned every detail, from the motion blur and amount of glow, to the glow’sfrequency and breakup, how it attached to the hilt and the effect it had on the world around it.

b&a: I really like the establishers that beloFX has done in the series. In the same way as lightsabers, these are almost hallmarks of Star Wars films and series and they’re quite important to establish locations. Tell me a little bit about how you dealt with environments in the series.

Russell Bowen: For the most part, It was more of a traditional approach, where environments can be solely matte painting or a blend of 3D approaches and projection work, depending on what that environment was. If you look at the cold open, set in Ueda, that was more traditional matte painting. In that opening shot, Mae comes to the edge of the cliff and there’s the ocean and peninsula, and then Ueda is up on that cliff face. That was more traditional matte painting. The art department at Lucasfilm had done some concept work or initial studies, Julian had done some work in the prep for the location. We took that as our starting point and from there we developed it into the shot.

When she walks into the city, however, it needs to be more of a 3D workflow. Most of that is 3D with a little bit of matte painting for the temple at the very top. But the majority of it was 3D and done actually laid out in in Unreal. That was a great workflow because we could get 90% of the way really quickly, especially when Teaser Trailers are on the schedule, and that was one of the big shots on everybody’s radar. We had to turn a version of that shot around in about two and a half weeks, from start to finish. We were in Unreal up until about two days before delivery and then the rest was paint over and final comp. Unreal allowed us to work as quickly as possible, using procedural tools and shaders.

Being able to have interactive dailies with the artists driving, discussing layout through to lighting all in one session was amazing. Without it, I don’t think we could have gotten that done. It was also great to have really fast turnarounds on Client notes, we could iterate mostly in the same day and turn around shots over night.

The final pixel ended up coming out of Houdini Solaris. We have a set of tools that allows us to port from Unreal scenes out into Houdini through USD. The reason for that is you need to harness Unreal for what it is, which is a very powerful building and visualisation package. As far as the rendering side goes, we needed more of a traditional path tracer.

We took that same approach with Olega, the big refinery city the Polan ship flies into. All our layouts and animation, even just the general block of the city, was done in Unreal. That was great for iterating and it helped us to very quickly demonstrate our work to the client. The first iterations already have some texture and shading, lighting direction and atmospherics — all baked into the playblast we’re showing them. I think that gets you there sooner. When our clients are looking at a more finished product, they’re able to focus on the details that matter most. You know you’ve done it right when you start to receive lighting notes, even though you’re just trying to show a blocked city. ‘Okay great. They already like the layout of the city. We’re already into the final stages of the shot’.

b&a: I also really like that moment that Sol is having a duel with Mae when they first try and capture her, and he uses the force to prevent her from falling. On set I think they used a rig to support her for that moment. Many people might say, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty simple setup,’ but it’s very convincing and probably takes a lot more work than people realize, I’m guessing?

Russell Bowen: Yes, a lot of that comes down to the stunt work and the performance which really helped to sell the idea that he is stopping her with this invisible force. However, you just can’t put somebody in there to hold and grab the arm. That would break from the choreography. Getting somebody to jump into the middle of the fight and restrain an actor to make it feel like she’s being restrained by something doesn’t really work. It came down to painstaking re-time and clean-up and prep work, to lock limbs or whatever is being restrained and freeze that in space while the camera is still moving around it.

You see these micro and sometimes macro movements because they’re in the middle of a fight sequence. Their blood is pumping, their adrenaline is going, so the actors are shaking or they’re moving around, but you really want that to feel locked. So, a lot of that was post-manipulation and prep work. Even in terms of compression in hands and fingers. If you’re going for a punch and something is stopping you, if you push up against a pane of glass, you see that your skin compresses and the blood moves away from that area and it goes a little paler. We were doing things like that, so that was a lot of paint work into knuckles and hands to get that to feel right.

b&a: Finally, just back to that cold open fight, there are not just lightsabers, but also blades. I feel like there’s a lot of invisible effects work there because, there may have been props, but you’re also inserting these blades into scenes because of the danger of having them on set.

Russell Bowen: I think you hit the nail on the head there. You have to really believe that there is a very sharp blade that she’s holding or throwing around. Some lovely look development was done on the blade to make it look as real as possible across different scenarios, where it was very small in frame being thrown through the shot, or it was very close up in her hand. Pretty much every single shot where you see a knife, it’s CG. That’s because it’s (obviously) too dangerous for them to hold a razor-sharp blade in their hand while filming. So, nine times out of 10, it was either a plastic blade or a rubber blade that we were replacing, or no blade at all, which was the case in quite a few shots.

Then there’s the shots where she has them on her belt and she uses the force to pull them out. We were attaching them to her utility belt and doing a lot of painstaking animation to make all that work. The actress Amandla had a lot of fun doing some of that stunt work, and her stunt double did a great job, too.