For film & photography enthusiasts - The Mandalorian: This Is the Way

[sman]

The Mandalorian: This Is the Way

https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian

 

Cinematographers Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS and Barry “Baz” Idoine and showrunner Jon Favreau employ new technologies to frame the Disney Plus Star Wars series.

Unit photography by François Duhamel, SMPSP, and Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP, courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.

At top, the Mandalorian Bounty Hunter (played by played by Pedro Pascal) rescues the Child — popularly described as "baby Yoda." 

This article is an expanded version of the story that appears in our February, 2020 print magazine.

A live-action Star Wars television series was George Lucas’ dream for many years, but the logistics of television production made achieving the necessary scope and scale seem inconceivable. Star Wars fans would expect exotic, picturesque locations, but it simply wasn’t plausible to take a crew to the deserts of Tunisia or the salt flats of Bolivia on a short schedule and limited budget. The creative team behind The Mandalorian has solved that problem.

Opening shot - At top, the Mandalorian Bounty Hunter (played by played by Pedro Pascal) rescues the Child — popularly described as "baby Yoda." 

[exile360]

It's getting to the point where the biggest films almost universally have as much digital content (or more) as they have 'real' content with so much being rendered on computers now.  It's funny, we play our 3D video games where we are trying to get as close to reality/the look of a high budget film on one side with stories woven into them spanning hours in gameplay time and cinematic cutscenes with sprawling plots that could give 3 season shows on Netflix or Amazon a run for their money with regards to scope, scale, drama, acting (both in the form of voice acting and all the motion capture they now do for big budget games; the same tech used in movies like Lord of the Rings where Andy Serkis played Gollum via mo-cap gear and digital facial capture technology) and then we go to the movies to watch mostly digitally rendered effects/content (and often entire characters or even the entire film in the case of movies like The Lego Movie, Pixar films and most modern Disney animated outings and superhero films like the Marvel and DC Universe films) where they are trying to make digital effects, characters and animation look just as 'real' so in the end we'll likely have AIs playing the role of 'actors', innovating their own scripts as they go, digitally rendering the entire film, directing, producing, and starring and the very same systems will be used for making the video games that we play and TV shows we watch .

Seriously though, it is kind of insane what they can do on television now with the technology they have.  Shows like the one above, Black Mirror on Netflix and countless others are showing that smaller productions don't necessarily have to have small scale effects and it is quite impressive what they are now able to do thanks to digital technology.  The days of low budget B-movies like the content formerly found on the Sci-Fi Channel (Sharknado anyone ) are pretty much over and our expectations are quite high, even for our television series where special effects are concerned.  The sky's the limit now with regards to what they can put onscreen, especially within big budget big screen blockbusters.  If you go back and look at the first Ironman film from all the way back in 2008 (wow, I'm old ), or even back to 2007 the year before when the first Transformers film debuted, everyone thought that was the be-all end-all of digital special effects, but if you compare them to current films they look like fake, silly children's cartoons or ancient video games and they don't hold up nearly as well.  Heck, go all the way back to films like Jurassic Park and Independence Day when Silicon Graphics was everything and the world hadn't even seen what HD really was yet.  Compared to now there basically are no limits and it just keeps getting faster and higher resolution/higher fidelity as computers become more powerful, the software gets better and creative artists learn and create new techniques and tools for making the unbelievable a stark reality.

Edited February 21, 2020 by exile360

[sman]

All for good, entertainment at it's best and upwards.

[exile360]

25 minutes ago, sman said:

All for good, entertainment at it's best and upwards.

Or one could even say: To infinity, and BEYOND!