CINEMATOGRAPHYI

had a conversation with one of the principals of Lux Machina, Phil Galler, on whatkinds of experiences they had on the setof Solo: A Star Wars Story and what types ofinnovations the company brought to thefilm. You’ve seen Lux Machina’s work before, on broadcast shows like the American
Music Awards, the Country Music Awards,
the Golden Globes, and one of my favorites,
the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise, Morgan
Freeman, and Olga Kurylenko, et al. The sky
tower work, all of that gorgeous scenery ofa residence above the clouds and all of thereflections that happened in every reflective
surface of that set were created largely inpart from the methodology that Lux Machina brought to that production, alongsideprojection rig to also handle the Falcon cockpit. We also did some interactive LED lighting, surrounding a vehicle or set with some
low-res LED and driving some plates throughit, and getting the interactive lighting fromthat setup. We also did that for the Falcon, allof the speeder work, and a handful of otherships like that. The main three key sets werethe Speeder chase and the LEDs, the large
projections for the space yacht, and thehigh-res projection and camera work on theFalcon.

projections. It’s so difficult to pull a green
screen off of an LED wall at the quality level
ILM needs. If you punch in an LED wall when
you are using a very high-resolution camera,
like a 6K camera, for example, you can still
see the pixels of the wall, even if you’re 40
feet away. If you’re trying to do any kind ofrotoscope work around anything with frizzy
hair on a LED wall, it’s incredibly difficult. So,
we headed back to projection. We actually had 4K projection for the Falcon cockpitwork.

The technology — is it a mix of high resolution projection and LED wall together?
We never mix the technologies on thesame set, it’s always one or the other. For ex-

Essentially, the work you’re doing can replace the green screen process work? Can
you speak a little on how the chiefs andprincipals are looking at the replacement

By JimHutchison

JONATHAN OLLEY (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDJOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A Chat with Lux Machina’s Phil Galler

Solo: A Star Wars Story. Everyone’s going to see it; it’s aphilosophical requirement at this point for Star Wars
franchise fans. An inane difficulty even exists in writing
about a film series so widespread because the film series isabsolutely timeless and the special effects were so cuttingedge at their time that the excitement persists into 2018.
Trying to out-invent the camera work, lighting, and film mastery created in the entire Star Wars franchise, let alone theinventive work from the original trilogy (Episodes 4, 5, and 6:
A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Returnof the Jedi (1983) has proven to be one of our industry’s mostpowerful challenges.

66 JUNE 2018 • plsn.com

The screen was 11 feet from the front edge of the cockpit.
The heavens were projected onto canvases, and LED walls wereused to approximate the amount of light an event would create.

Technically, this movie not only tells the story of a young
Han Solo and his journey, but it continued to innovate someof the commonplace cinematic conventions, like green
screens and chroma keying of the worlds in the background.
Green screen work is expected in a movie that takes place inouter space, because we obviously can’t do location shootsin “galaxies far, far away,” but Solo: A Star Wars Story takes thesuspension of disbelief created from the background worlds
to an entirely new technical level.
Instead of filming some of the scenes and color keying theheavens into the background, the heavens were projected
onto canvases, and LED walls were used to make the best rep-resentation of the actual light an event would create, on actors and in reflected surfaces. How does one capture the actual light that jumping to lightspeed would create, or what theexplosions from an energy weapon-induced explosion mightlook like? This movie is visually stunning to an order of magnitude of mastery. In addition to the work the visual samurai
at Lucasfilm did to make Solo: A Star Wars Story, there’s a company in Los Angeles that has been innovating the way filmmakers are able to give life to the world in the background.
Meet Lux Machina, and the idea of extremely high definition
projected backgrounds and LED wall-induced environmentallighting.

VER/PRG. Tom Cruise said that having thoseprojections in the environment “gave thefilm a very epic feeling.”
PLSN: Tell me a little bit about what Lux
Machina has done with the Solo project.
We’ve got a pretty close relationship withLucasfilm, so we’ve been working on R&D
stuff for quite a while, and in the process of
doing so, we were invited into Rogue One
and then into Solo. For Solo, the original goal
was doing really large format projection setup for a “space yacht,” you could call it — andin doing that, the rest of the group, and inparticular, visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow, also wanted to explore the possibility ofreplacing the projection with the LED work
they were doing for the cockpit and otherspaceship work. We ended up setting up aample, there’s a version of the cockpit where
we did everything in this high-res projection, then we took all the projectors down.
There was a point when the production rewrote part of the script, and they had to go
back and get dialogue, so we replicated thelighting from the projection on LED screensthat we had already hung to do the speeder work. The LEDs are never in camera, it’s
just the interactive lighting work from thescreens themselves.”
Can you explain how the LED reflection
work that you do plays into the lighting ofthe film?
So the ultimate goal of the projections
was to get really crisp high-res reflections
and lighting, but to also capture all of thatin-camera, which is why we went with theof the green screen work and the work thatLux Machina is doing?
I think the general feedback is that when
the technology is in sync with the cameras,
when it is all programmed correctly, andwhen all the complex boxes are checked,
it looks great. It works really well, the lighting is phenomenal, and it’s something theywouldn’t be able to get or do with the green
screen process. Also, the immersion for theactors is significantly better than anythingthat has come before it. Take the Falcon
cockpit scene for example: it’s surroundedby 180-degree screen, 11 feet from the frontof the cockpit, and it encapsulated the entire
cockpit. When you were sitting inside there
and it goes to hyperspace, that’s all you saw— there was no break from the immersion. Itwas almost like being on a ride. Because ofthat, it’s a lot easier for the actor to be able
to tell a story because they feel like they arein the place they’re supposed to be in, surrounded by the environment in which thestory they’re telling exists.
At the core of it, I think that was reallyone of the best value adds — you’ve got thelighting, you’ve got the projection whichlooks outstanding, but for actors to sit in an
imaginary part of space on a green screen
set and have a conversation is a little bit
more abstract than, say, a scene taking place
on an actual mountain where the visual field
for the performer is more realistic. Because
we’re able to provide that environment, I
think it added to the huge wow factor andhelped rebirth the Falcon, but also helped
the actors better tell the story. There werea lot of techniques we use to improve theactor’s quality of life, like providing eye lines
in camera — places for them to look — with
content that really helped with the environmental immersion that they wouldn’t get
any other way.
Back end question, who provided theproduction for the filming?
Our projectors and lead projectionists
came from Sweetwater, but the LED camefrom VER UK. Projectors were a considerablylarger part of the overall production budget for us than the LED wall was. The project used all brand new Panasonic 30K laser
projectors, and we provided the servers. We
actually did two iterations of the large format projection — one on the main deck,
which was like the first floor, and one on theupper deck, which we did a few weeks later.
The main deck used 15 of the HD projectors,
and the upper deck used 11. When we didthe Falcon, we used five of the 4K projectors
for that environment. For the Space Yacht
scenes, we used all 0.36 lenses, so all of thenew snorkel lenses. We’re actually the production company for our portion of the project; the client is our client.
We worked directly with Industrial Lightand Magic, and provided everything fromdeveloping content templates, designing
the screens, previsualization of the screens,and then working with the actual production side with respect to getting labor, installation, and getting everything in place.
We came in with two or three people, twoprogrammers, and a few project managers.
It was quite an undertaking, and the work
really paid off in the visual fidelity — totallyworth it.”
Our use of disguise media servers playeda large part in the playback side of the production. We used quite a few d3 4x4xs andgx2s, TouchDesigner and Notch, to build
some really nifty real-time controls, and wegot a lot of support from disguise and theirteam along the way.
Tell me a bit about how you handled thepre-viz environment. How did you visualize
all of this work with the client?
Industrial Light and Magic — ILM — does
all of their work inside Maya, so we did all of
our work inside Maya. How we worked thiswas that we’d start inside Vectorworks andcome up with a general idea — we would
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67

CINEMATOGRAPHYSECTIONHEADLINEJONATHAN OLLEY (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDJOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

HeadlineDeck

VFX Immersive Environments Consulting Designers and Crew
Design and Execution: Lux Machina Consulting
VFX Media Server Project Managers:

The Benefits for Actors

Philip Galler, Zach Alexander, Wyatt Bartel
Jason Davis, Kris Murray, Jake Alexander
Sweetwater Lead Projectionists:
Jason Riggen, Jim Gold
Projectionists: Kevin Evans, Dan Croft
Sweetwater Accounts/President: Ron Drews
Lead VER (PRG) LED Tech: John “JR” Richardson
VER (PRG) Accounts: Ellie Johnson, Jonny Hunt

JOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

One thing that became evident to me as I interviewed Phil Galler
was that the work Lux Machina is doing not only enhances the lightingof the picture, but also gives the performers an actual environment inwhich to interact.
On the technical side, we get very involved in how we can makehigh-tech magic with a bevy of equipment, digital processes, and software, but we often forget that it is the actor who is telling a very large
portion of the story.
So while much of the movie work that is done is cost quantified on
how it adds to the overall look and feel of the picture, the award-winning
performances that we hold in such high regard are often performed in
front of green screens.
How do you quantify technology that gives the actors an actual environment in which to act? Lux Machina’s work literally places the actors
inside the world with which they’re interacting, and allows them to tell
the story not only individually, but as a group.
I don’t think that we consider this enough as an essential componentof movie making and storytelling, but Lucasfilm and Lux Machina areturning the page and giving life to the background. —Jim Hutchison

VFX Media Server Programmers:

LED walls were used in some scenes.

Can you speak about the production process, timings, schedule, things like that?
We did our first camera test in Decem68 JUNE 2018 • plsn.com

were dropping our first projectors, and byThursday, camera testing was taking place.
Dryden was covered with the use of
15 projectors, 375 feet by 24 feet, all withthose 0.36 lenses. The Falcon cockpit wasa little more challenging, taking about aweek’s worth of time. Because we designed
a 180-degree curved screen, we had to getcurved pipe made and rigged, that screen
was about 60 feet by 30 feet. We used fiveof the 4K Panasonic projectors, which took
about a week to load in. We had about six
weeks of shooting for the Space Yacht main
floor and study, and a week turnarounddisguise servers were used for image blending and playback.

JOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The project used all brand new Panasonic 30K laser projectors.

The team opted on in-camera projection in June 2017.

The 180-degree curved screen
69 JUNE 2018 • plsn.com

JOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ery projector placement and its beam information before we try to drop it into anything,just so we have a real groundwork for it andwe’re not replying on anyone else’s calculations. The cockpit work for the Falcon was abit more intense — ILM did tech viz in Maya,
and we passed Maya files back and forth. We
did screen design and projector placementin Maya as well, and then ported back into
Vectorworks for construction drawings.

Working outside the cockpit.
JOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED“For actors to sit in an imaginary part ofspace on a green screen set and have a conversation is a bit more abstract than, say,a scene taking place on an actual mountainwhere the visual field for the performer ismore realistic.” —Phil Galler

JOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ber of 2016, where we did a test between
in-camera LED and in-camera projection
and decided on going with the projection.
In June of 2017, we went to London to install the Falcon cockpit and Dryden Vos’ (thevillain’s) Space Yacht. For each of those, wewere able to get down to three days of installation and alignment. When we did Oblivio,for example, it was 21 projectors, which wasabout 400 feet by 21 feet, and the tools thatwere available back then were not as goodas they are now, so there were challenges toovercome in the installation process. WithSolo, we were able to get the process down
to those three days — so on a Monday weJOHN WILSON (C) 2018 LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

pass Vectorworks drawings back and forth
as well with ILM — production for Vectorworks drawings, ILM for Maya scenes. TheSpace Yacht, for example, was all Vectorworks because the way the shots were setup, it was less important that the screen
have full coverage because of the nature of
the set and the distance from the screen to
the set was a little bit larger. That particular
screen setup was done in Vectorworks, withthe screen mapping portions done in both
disguise, Mapping Matter and Vectorworks.
We’re very traditional with respect to themath, which we do by hand the first time tomake sure it’s right. We always calculate ev-

where we took everything out for the refitof the Space Yacht’s study, and reconfigured
the screen — about 275 feet, and we used 11
projectors for that setup.
While all of that was going on, about sixcontinuous weeks of shooting, we also setup LED wall on one of the other stages to getinteractive lighting shots on weather days orfor the speeder chase scenes. We used a lotof projectors on this project, at least 40 — 30
Panasonic 30K laser projectors for the main
scenes, and ten or so for the closer quarters
scenes.

What’s coming up for Lux Machina that you
can talk about?
I can’t talk about anything in the film
world without getting into trouble, of course,
but we’ve got lots of projects on the horizon.
In the television world, we have the CountryMusic Television awards coming up, the MTV
Movie Awards, the Fox Upfronts, and longterm, we’re looking to do the American Music Awards again — mostly the award show
circuit and a bunch of corporate client work
towards the end of the year. We’re definitely
keeping busy.

plsn.com •DECEMBER 201769