What's the cargo?
Only passengers.
Myself, the boy, two droids...
And no questions asked.
What is it? Some kind of local trouble?
I remember seeing Star Wars over and over,
and the formula was one that I didn't know yet.
I didn't have a frame of reference of the source.
So that was my entry into all of the things
that helped create Star Wars.
So through that, I learned about the western.
Through that, I learned about samurai films.
What I pitched when I went in, I said,
I don't want to be influenced so much by Star Wars.
Want to be consistent with Star Wars,
but I want to be influenced by what influenced George,
so let's look at the samurai movies.
Let's really look at Kurosawa films.
And that kind of led to the whole Lone Wolf and Cub thing
that also felt like it applied in certain ways.
We kind of had a primer of westerns.
He would come up with movies. "Have you seen this?"
And I'd be like, "No, but we should go over this trilogy again and watch this".
And just kind of dissecting what makes them tick.
The beautiful simplicity,
yet really underlying complex characterizations that you get in them.
Definitely, there's a Star Wars vibe to any of them if you look at them.
I mean, look at Han Solo. He's just dressed like a gunslinger.
I don't know who you are or where you came from,
but from now on, you do as I tell you, okay?
Look, Your Worshipfulness, let's get one thing straight.
I take orders from just one person. Me.
It's a wonder you're still alive.
We'd get together, throw out a bunch of ideas,
work on the logic, and then he would suss it out
and come up with a script.
Once the script was written, the first step was to storyboard.
The Directors and the Producers would oversee the storyboarding process.
We had a story department headed up by Dave Lowery.
And we would get our first look at it in animatic form with pencil drawings,
and we would iterate the story and watch it as one solid piece
using temporary dialogue and effects.
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Let's get out of here!
Stand your ground!
Once we arrived upon something that worked well in pencil,
we would then go to pre-vis.
When I came here and saw the way that they were using pre-vis,
I was like, "This is so exciting"!
The way that I've seen pre-vis used in the past, as an actor,
is that when there's a scene where there's a lot of visual effects...
And typically it's, like, an action sequence
where, when you're shooting it, you need to be very precise.
Filmmakers will create something called pre-vis, which is pre-visualization,
and it's basically like a mock-up of what the sequence would be.
And it's incredibly helpful.
It was the first week we were on The Volume.
And you and I were sat next to each other, and I think I asked you the question,
"What's been the most eye-opening part"?
What you mentioned is that you can go into editorial
and see the story better and clearer.
Yes. Yes.
And I think you were maybe referencing...
And that makes storytelling much tighter.
And the closer we get to that animation process,
where you can iterate on story longer,
there's a permanence to live-action
that requires that when you're on that set,
doesn't mean you can't go back and reshoot certain things,
but for the most part, what you're doing is permanent.
Yeah.
And then you have to move on.
And anything about the process that allows you to iterate
longer on story is...that's gonna make for better movies.
It forces the filmmakers to commit early
and understand and fail early when it's cheap and easy.
It's what you learn from animation, going back to Snow White,
there's still a scene that they talk about being on the cutting room floor.
The idea that anything...
That there's any waste in animation is just antithetical to the culture.
That's why we plan everything.
And that's why I involved visual effects from the beginning
like as though you're my production designer...
They need to be there from the beginning.
Yes.
So that it's not just thought of as a post exercise.
It is fascinating to listen to live-action people talk about this process
as someone from animation,
'cause then I go back to where all the other animators are,
and we get together, and we're like,
"They're really talking about the process we do".
They said 50.
Races age differently.
Perhaps it could live many centuries.
We'll never know.
We bring it in alive.
The commission was quite specific.
The asset was to be terminated.
Something that happened on this show that's very, very, very unique
is that Jon created a workflow where we could actually have pre-vis,
but for the whole episode, for every episode.
Now, that's something that is not done,
and the reason why it was done in this case is because of "The Volume"
and because of all the visual effects and all the things that need to be
rendered way in advance of shooting.
We needed to have a pre-vis, basically, for...
Even though it's not necessarily an action shot
or what you would consider a visual effect shot.
Because it exists in The Volume, it's a visual effect shot.
All of the technology that we're using
is dependent upon planning everything with pre-vis,
and we combine that with what I had learned
on Jungle Book and Lion King,
which was plan everything ahead of time with mo-cap,
figure out a cut, and then figure out what live-action shots you need.
Build the minimum set, and in the case of Jungle Book,
you had green screen,
and so you'd build a whole digital environment.
You'd shoot on a cookie-cutter set, line it up with the motion capture camera,
and combine the green screen with the environment that was digital,
and Mowgli and the little piece of set would lay in
against the digital characters and background.
We took it a step further here.
Go!
On The Mandalorian, we departed from the normal pre-vis pipeline
by using virtual cinema, which was a technique that we developed
and refined on The Lion King.
It uses game engine to allow the actual crew
to operate camera equipment within the virtual world
in order to record performances by either actors or stand-ins,
and then we do camera capture on top of it,
using equipment that's normally used to do photography,
but instead, we've encoded it so that we could record cinematic moves
within the virtual environment.
The Directors had the opportunity to get involved
much earlier than you normally would on a television show.
We combined them with their crew and their editors,
and together, they would come up with a first cut of the show
using virtual cinema.
Sometimes they would direct people in, uh, motion-capture suits
to get a first take at what their vision might be.
Sometimes they would work with the stunt team,
capturing some stunt performances using motion capture,
and they would have the opportunity to put cameras on it
and cut it together and get a first look
so we could tech-vis the episode and figure out what we needed
to build and prepare for the actual filming.
The real advantage was that it allowed us all to come together
and look at a first cut of the episode done using this process,
and although it looked like a video game at first
and there were no real people in it,
it gave us a sense of how the story flowed
to see if we needed to do any rewrites or adjustments
before we actually hit the stage and started filming.
The whole goal was to treat this whole shoot
like we would have on a superhero film reshoot,
where you knew everything and what the story needed,
because I've never been on a more efficient set
than, like, the Iron Man reshoots.
Because you filmed it. You did all the planning. You shot it.
Got some visual effects going.
You cut it together. You can't get it to be perfect.
You're like, "If we only had another week or two, we could..."
Yeah. On the Thor reshoots, I think we did something insane, like...
In, like, five days, like, 360 shots or something.
'Cause, like, you're just like,
"This is all glue now. This is just the bits I need".
They're really in.
You're efficient, 'cause...
Yep. 'Cause you know what it is.
In principal, you're like,
"Let's keep it running. It's a shot of this glass going on the table, but who knows what else..."
We'll be open to whatever can happen.
And on the reshoots, you're like,
Got it. Don't need another one. It's just a shot of the glass.
That's all we wanted, and it fixed everything.
And so, by having us film in VR or with pre-vis,
depending on which sequences they were...
That's what was so good about having you, too,
is coming from animation, everything is pre-vis.
Everything.
So you could jump in there, and for stuff like the Mudhorn sequence or air-to-air,
stuff where there's not actors there,
you can help translate the vision at the Director's end.
Just an animated movie.
And then also, when we're doing...
and we refined it even more for this.
Now we have the MVN suits, which we started on your episode.
With the fight.
How did that go?
This experience was completely different for me
'cause I come from independent film and smaller films,
and there was no boards.
You just sort of go in, you're writing, and you're with your team of bandits,
you go make your movie.
And so the whole process of pre-vis
and building the story out beforehand, uh, was new to me.
So it was like,
"Oh, I wish...that's what happens when you get money. You can actually make the movie first".
Actually plan. It's such a better way to do stunt-vis
'cause it's like they're not trying to do some video
and make all those camera angles that I don't want.
It's like, I can put the cameras in and just get the action.
Drive.
Drive!
It's a very different experience from all other television I've done.
Having the prep time.
Normally, you're getting, eight, nine days, then you're shooting.
This, I was on it for two months before I started,
and we pre-vis'd the entire episode.
So even if, when we hit the set and we hit the ground,
we're pressed for time and running and gunning
at least we've had the time to really develop the material
and really, sort of, creatively put it together
so that we are really dialed in,
not trying to figure it out on the day.
We're trying to execute it.
So that's been pretty amazing.
Please. No. No, no.
I did episode three, and it felt
very much like a cross between a western and a samurai movie.
That was my first thought, a gunslinger with a samurai code.
They all hate you, Mando. Because you're a legend!
A lot of my prep work in developing it, getting ready for it
was going back and watching a ton of Kurosawa, who I love.
I think Yojimbo was probably the strongest reference for it
in terms of the stand-off on the street and a lot of the way we shot it.
Welcome back, Mando!
The stand-off was a lot of action. It was intense.
And action!
It took a lot of planning
because I think we had over 25 bounty hunters running around,
and then the Mandalorians land.
It was three days.
Then we ended up doing additional photography on it as well.
It was a lot to keep track of, that's where you start to feel
if this was a big feature and we were doing a huge movie,
we'd probably have two weeks for it, we had three days,
you have to really work within the constraints
to make it work under that guise,
but you're still trying to deliver the quality of a big feature.
It's Star Wars and action.
You really can't deliver anything that's not up to par.
That was the challenge with that, but it was pretty fun.
There was a moment, I think, in day two or three.
We had shot so many zirc hits,
done many explosions and started to run out.
It was getting to the point where we were trying to preserve them
because we couldn't get any more at that point
'cause of the licenses on ammunition and whatnot.
We shot off, I think over 7,000 rounds of zirc hits alone in those days.
It's crazy.
This is the Way.
What was fascinating from my perspective was this dojo that we had,
that we had a new style that we were coming up with together
and everybody was bringing their own special talents to it,
and every one of you brought a whole different set of skills.
And what you may have seen as, "Oh, this is the way Jon wants to do it",
was really all of us having separate conversations,
and that informing the next conversation I had. So it was a very organic process.
And all of it was spent facing the challenge of,
how do you get something ready with a lot of prep time
and not a lot of post time relative to a film?
How do you borrow from the culture of animation
that I was already exploring through Jungle Book and Lion King?
And having Dave now...
Something I was trying to reverse engineer,
"How would Pixar do this?" Then I had somebody who said,
"Oh, this is how you interact with a Pre-Vis Department".
And all of that informed a cut,
and that cut became the Rosetta Stone for us to move forward with.
And by the end of it was much different.
In the beginning, a lot of it was you giving direction to a pre-vis department,
the third floor guys.
By the end, it was you with stunt people in MVN suits which are gaming mo-cap suits...
Exactly.
...in a set that we taped off to fit exactly what the VR version of it was,
and you did all the fight sequences.
Yeah.
Can you talk about that for a sec? I wasn't on set for a lot...
Talk about it.
"Talk about it"?
Stop holding back.
I'm holding this stuff back.
Yes, I know.
Um, no, and that was, again, when it started to get...
Not that it wasn't fun to begin with,
but it was a different level of how you could use this
because now we were...
Now I could go immediately from what was in my head
to talking to stunt coordinator and his players,
and having that captured in real time and putting that right into the pre-vis.
And so now it's not...
You would set cameras on top of that.
We're setting cameras...
I was watching the cuts as if you had shot it already.
Exactly. And now it's not,
you're having a conversation with THIRD FLOOR and Chris.
You're now creating that on the fly,
and so it was...and I remember when you were like,
"We're gonna play with this on this". I was excited because it was...
You were the first.
Yeah, we had talked about some of the fight stuff that I like,
and we both have a certain affinity for samurai and kung fu films,
and so, you know, this was like,
Okay, we can actually do this with our guys in the moment, as we would for an...
What sequence was that...
This was a sequence when Mando is going to break out...
going to break out Xi'an,
and so he's going through the prison,
and there are tons of prison guard droids
that come out of nowhere and start attacking them.
And Bill Burr being his self, goes,
"Oh, you know Mando. He's supposed to be this ultimate warrior".
"What you gonna do?"
And the next thing you know, Mando jumps into action,
and he starts taking down every single droid
with his Mando bag of tricks, and so...
That's when we had to change the droids. Remember?
I was selling them,
"We'll have droids, but they're gonna be floating droids".
Then it was...
They were big buckets, I'd say trash buckets.
You said,
"I could coordinate some stuff or do some choreography. We could use arms and legs".
Doug Chiang, could you draw some, um...
Yeah.
And now, by the way, so you had human performers,
and now when you see the sequence, it's...
What's crazy is it was what we shot that day,
you know, so it's still that session that we had.
I think it was stage 17 taped off, and it's still that sequence.
So you filmed it there with taped off.
You could pop into VR. Saw all the action.
Set cameras, did a cut, did it, filmed it for real.
Exactly.
And, uh...we didn't have any of that on Jungle Book.
So now it's like, how can you use these tools to inform this process?
It was really good. Now we're doing that for every scene, season two.
Yeah, now that's exciting,
'cause I'm gonna jump back in and do some stuff, once I get the script.