Rob Bredow

If we fast-forward to 2020, we can see the latest real-time virtual production techniques.

This was another creative innovation driven by a filmmaker.

In this case, it's Jon Favreau, and he had a vision for a giant Disney Plus Star Wars series, first time we were ever going to do a series of Star Wars on TV.

This is for The Mandalorian.

And it was a big show, but we didn't have a normal film schedule.

We had to shoot it all very, very fast.

So rather than flying the cast around the world to try to find these exotic locations, we brought locations to them on a single soundstage in Manhattan Beach, where we had configured this LED wall to act as a virtual production background, so we could immerse our actors, our entire crew, all of the departments in these virtual worlds, and even some locations that weren't from our world, they're from outside of our world.

Interestingly, Kathy Kennedy, the same producer who produced Jurassic Park, she now runs Lucasfilm, she was one of the people who got behind this idea early, before any of us knew that it was going to work.

The technology leading up to this had been created hand-in-hand with filmmakers over the years.

So I was supervising Solo, a Star Wars story, and we thought, could we take what they'd done before and could we make the content high enough quality so you could point the camera directly at it?

And we started making shots like this for the very first time.

This is hyperspace in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and you can see my friend, the DP, Bradford Young, and he invented this shot.

We'd shot hyperspace tons of times before.

But in the moment, he saw the light coming in and he realized this was a moment of hope in the film.

So as he pans over to Han Solo, you can see the reflection of hyperspace in Han's eyes.

Just a beautiful collaboration between tech and art that elevates the storytelling and gives our artists new tools.

That's what we love.

So that catches us up to The Mandalorian, where, as always, it starts with words on a page, the script.

And then our artists break it down.

And I'll break it down for you, how they add all the different elements.