Rob Bredow

But also, like when we started Star Wars Episode VII, so J.J.

Abrams' film, this was about 12 years ago,

we went back to all those miniature shots, because we were going to do most of it with CG, almost all of it with computer graphics.

We went back to those original shots and said, like, what about that AT-AT walker is so charming in this original?

And what are the things that we want to preserve from that era or emulate with the new tools?

And what are the things that actually are just artifacts of the old way of doing it and actually they should just be improved with the new digital tools?

So a great example of that is the ships that when they were miniatures, the lights could only be so many feet away, like the studio we're in now.

They can only be 10 or 15 feet away because at some point you run into the wall.

You're trying to simulate a sun, but you can only do so well with that.

And it turns out like flying a ship that has mostly flat surfaces with a light that's relatively close and can only be so small.

If you're simulating a sun, it's like infinitely far away.

The computer can simulate it perfectly, but it's a little boring because it's just like an even illumination of light.

But if you have a light that's relatively close as the ship flies around, you get more interesting shading.

And we wanted the hard shadows so you believe it was the sun, but we liked the more interesting shading.

So we were able to keep the elements from the stage photography that we liked and drop the elements that made it feel a little bit artificial.

So those are the kind of details we kind of obsess over.

Well, I love that question.

I think it, especially for storytelling, the constraints make the story, I think we relate to it well because we understand the world.

We understand the constraints of the world and you set up the rules in the first five minutes of a movie and you want to adhere to those.

So that goes for, I think, the visual language of the storytelling, how the camera moves.