Really cool article on how the shot The Mandalorian. All in Unreal and pretty much realtime on giant LED screen.
“The Volume was a curved, 20'-high-by-180'-circumference LED video wall, comprising 1,326 individual LED screens of a 2.84mm pixel pitch that created a 270-degree semicircular background with a 75'-diameter performance space topped with an LED video ceiling, which was set directly onto the main curve of the LED wall.
At the rear of the Volume, in the 90 remaining degrees of open area, essentially “behind camera,” were two 18'-high-by-20'-wide flat panels of 132 more LED screens. These two panels were rigged to traveler track and chain motors in the stage’s perms, so the walls could be moved into place or flown out of the way to allow better access to the Volume area.
“The Volume allows us to bring many different environments under one roof,” says visual-effects supervisor Richard Bluff of ILM. “We could be shooting on the lava flats of Nevarro in the morning and in the deserts of Tattooine in the afternoon. Of course, there are practical considerations to switching over environments, but we [typically did] two environments in one day.”
—————————-
And one of my favorites bit is this little Karma payback in here about the LUT they used.
““Our desire for cinematic imagery drove every choice,” Idoine adds. And that included the incorporation of a LUT emulating Kodak’s short-lived 500T 5230 color negative, a favorite of Fraser’s. “I used that stock on Killing Them Softly [AC Oct. ’12] and Foxcatcher [AC Dec. ’14], and I just loved its creamy shadows and the slight magenta cast in the highlights,” says Fraser. “For Rogue One, ILM was able to develop a LUT that emulated it, and I’ve been using that LUT ever since.”
“Foxcatcher was the last film I shot on the stock, and then Kodak discontinued it,” continues Fraser. “At the time, we had some stock left over and I asked the production if we could donate it to an Australian film student and they said ‘yes,’ so we sent several boxes to Australia. When I was prepping Rogue One, I decided that was the look I wanted — this 5230 stock — but it was gone. On a long shot, I wrote an email to the film student to see if he had any stock left and, unbelievably, he had 50 feet in the bottom of his fridge. I had him send that directly to ILM and they created a LUT from it that I used on Rogue and now Mandalorian.”
