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How much of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" was real and how much was CGI? Even the film's special-effects (SFX) team had trouble keeping track. Fxguide met with Industrial Light and Magic, the effects team behind "The Force Awakens." ILM revealed amazing behind-the-scenes footage of how they created the SFX in the latest "Star Wars" movie.
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"The technology that's available to you is just mind-blowing, really, even for me," Roger Guyett, a visual-effects (VFX) supervisor said in the interview. "I work in this business and I'm shocked at how much we were able to just blur the line between the reality of shooting something and the stuff that we [added] later."
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A second video, released through Wired, went into detail about Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) and the "Medusa" capture technology the VFX team used to bring the character to life.
See the incredible before-and-after images, and the full video, below:
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When we first meet Rey in the film, she's scavenging a derelict ship on Jakku.
Daisy Ridley scaled a replica of the hanging object, which then became the ship.
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"People clearly wanted some kind of return to the ... DNA of those first three movies," Guyett said.
We're introduced to Kylo Ren as he exits a ship accompanied by a squad of stormtroopers.
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The ship and background were added digitally, but the sound stage featured sand and exhaust from the ship.
"We really set out to build as much as we could in camera, to go to as many locations as we could and to photograph as much as we could in camera," Guyett said.
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We see Maz Kanata — one of many new aliens — halfway through the film at her castle.
Nyong'o performed on set while wearing a suit designed to capture her movements and facial expressions.
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"We used a lot of different techniques to allow her to play her part on set and interact with all the actors," Guyett said.
Rey does a lot of climbing, doesn't she? Here we see her in the First Order's base.
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Similar to Jakku, Ridley actually scaled a large-scale replica of part of the base.
"Even I sometimes would just look at the shots and couldn't remember, you know, which ones were real and which ones weren't," Guyett said.
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This hangar belongs to the First Order. We first see it during Poe and Finn's escape early in the film.
The hangar was a mix of green-screen and physical elements, with the TIE fighters and view of space added digitally.
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"You want to have that feeling where [the audience is] watching it and they start to ... forget that they're watching visual effects," VFX supervisor Pat Tubach told Fxguide.
Here's the full video:
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