A behind the scenes look at the groundbreaking virtual production technology used on The Mandalorian, Season One.

Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1 was filmed using this groundbreaking new methodology, eliminating the need for location shoots entirely. Instead, actors in The Mandalorian performed in an immersive and massive 20’ high by 270degree semicircular LED video wall and ceiling with a 75’diameter performance space, where the practical set pieces were combined with digital extensions on the screens. Digital 3D environments created by ILM played back interactively on the LED walls, edited in realtime during the shoot, which allowed for pixelaccurate tracking and perspectivecorrect 3D imagery rendered at high resolution via systems powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The  environments were lit and rendered from the perspective of the camera to provide parallax in realtime, as if the camera were really capturing the physical environment with accurate interactive light on the actors and practical sets, giving showrunner Jon Favreau, executive producer and director Dave Filoni, visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff, and cinematographers Greig Fraser and Barry Baz Idoine, and the episodic directors the ability to make concrete creative choices for visual effectsdriven work during photography and achieve realtime incamera composites on set.

The technology and workflow required to make incamera compositing and effects practical for onset use combined the ingenuity of partners such as Golem Creations, Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, and ARRI together with ILM’s StageCraft virtual production filmmaking platform and ultimately the realtime interactivity of the Unreal Engine platform.