So what changed fundamentally when you went from supervising a streaming series to doing an IMAX theatrical release? Lots.

Well, yeah, there's sort of two opposing forces here.

One is that For all the people who have watched and loved the show over the years, you don't want to do something that's jarringly different than what they've seen before.

So it should feel familiar.

And some of the things that we talked about in pre-production were...

the handcrafted nature of the show as being a feature that we wanted to keep going on.

So we wanted to still feel like it's the same, it's coming from the same group.

Um,

And I wonder how that came about.

Yeah.

Well, I'll just say one thing about working for Jim Cameron is, you know, he's notorious as a tough director.

But I think in a lot of ways, he's an ideal client.

What you want is in a director is you want somebody who's got good taste.

who knows what he wants, can describe that thing in detail with specificity and is consistent about it.

And boy, that's Jim.

And was it TMZ? Was that the main goal, was to get onto Instagram? Yeah.

And

George had just sold off the Lucasfilm computer group as Pixar.

But part of the deal with Lucasfilm is we kept a lot of the equipment.

So ILM had been working with that group on projects like Young Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek II and Return of the Jedi for doing little bits of computer graphics.

And I think there was some recognition that computer graphics and image processing was going to be important to the future.

So we wanted to take the equipment that had been left behind and kind of start a new group to keep pushing that forward.

So I think they had just hired Doug Kay and George Joblove to run the ILM computer graphics department.

place where

Do you want to tell me about that with a miniature version? Yeah, we built a little miniature LED volume to go with the miniature ship, yeah.

That was something that I really wanted to do all the way from season one.

And I took a stab, I took a poor man's stab at it on season one where I built an enclosure out of foam core around the ship and used projectors to project imagery onto it to try and get sort of a poor man's version of the volume.

Uh, and it sort of worked, uh, you know, the color wasn't great on it.

And, uh, uh, in the, in the end, uh, As we were putting those shots together, you know, we got a first version of the shot together and Favreau wanted to change the flight path of the ship.

And then like, all right, well, we've already shot it.

So you've got to switch to CG on that.

I was dead curious whether that was the only time that was used and also whether or not that facilitated the camera moving to change perspective and like you were actually tracking that through a, or was it more just like a sort of a static POV? Yeah.

Uh, if, if you look in, I think in the front of that room, there are two stop-motion puppet droids there that are featured in a pretty extensive, complicated fight scene that, uh, Mando has with these, these droids.

droids.You know, classic stop motion right out at King Kong.

Um, we built a, a four-foot-long Razor Crest miniature.

Uh, you'll see it in that room over there.

Um, the one that we built originally for the TV show was two feet long, so this is meant to hold up for much closer views.

Um, I shot a lot more miniature shots of it in the film.

So, um, and something I've wanted to do since season one but, uh, we didn't have the time or the budget for it is... you know, it's a bare metal spaceship, it's all about reflections.

Tell me a little bit about bringing the ship, uh, to life in, in this film.

Can you talk a little bit about how that con- tradition continues on this film?

Uh, yeah.

Yeah.

Th- th- this film is a pretty broad sampling of, uh, technology all the way from some of the, you know, earliest Willis O'Brien stop motion kind of stuff all the way up to some of the latest developments in computer graphics.

Uh, and it's been tremendously fun to, to play with a lot of the different techniques.

Uh, if, if you look in, I think in the front of that room, there are two stop-motion puppet droids there that are featured in a pretty extensive, complicated fight scene that, uh, Mando has with these, these droids.

And, uh, you know, classic stop motion right out at King Kong.

Tell me a little bit about bringing the ship, uh, to life in, in this film.