Luke McDonald

## External Links

**Luke McDonald** is a visual effects supervisor on *The Orville*.

## Background

McDonald worked on *Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey* with producer Seth MacFarlane.

## The Orville

Luke McDonald joined the set of The Orville when he was personally recruited by its creator, Seth MacFarlane. MacFarlane wanted McDonald to create a universe that resembled science fiction television of the 1990s and late 1980s, especially *Star Trek: The Next Generation*.

> *The look we tried to achieve was a new twist on old genres that we all like, with Seth as the driving force to get what he wanted visually. It wasn’t specifically original* Star Trek *or* Star Wars *— and he definitely doesn’t want it to be* Star Trek Discovery*, because this has to be a more uplifting type of universe.*
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### Filming the Orville

Working with the director of photography Marvin V. Rush, effects producer Natasha Francis, and Rob Legato, McDonald's team created a motion-control miniature photography lab capable of shooting a model of the USS *Orville*. The process was largely ignored since the 1990s, but revived by McDonald to film scenes of the Orville flying through space. Jon Favreau, director of the series premiere *Old Wounds*, preferred non-computer graphics effects and loved the idea of an "old school" shoot.

McDonald supervised The Fox VFX Lab as they built a five-foot model of the Orville, then spent six days on a motion-control photo shoot against a blue screen. He insisted on separate, carefully-done passes to capture beauty lighting, matte and fill, and lights emitted from the model's engines and windows. Used to working on movies with laxer time budgets, McDonald was taken aback by the strict scheduling constraints of television:

> *After Seth approached me, I started finding out what the time crunch really is in television. One show needed eight weeks for the effects, but we wound up only having three. That made for long days and was a big part of the challenge of this first season.*
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McDonald's goal was "to shoot a library of ship shops that we could very quickly manipulate by flopping the shot or slowing it down, so the editors had a whole group of shots to pick from that would last through the first season and even through Season Two."

The immense workload behind motion-control miniature photography gradually forced McDonald to transition from shooting the model to computer graphics, which was significantly faster to complete. By mid-season, McDonald did only one physical shoot of the Orville per episode, completing the rest digitally.

### Designing space

After shooting or computer-rendering of the Orville was complete, McDonald needed to create convincing backdrops of space. He worked with science consultant André Bormanis and staff futurist Taylor Faulkinberry to generate depictions of the galaxy that would be both beautiful and realistic.

McDonald's design ethos is to take realistic concepts of space and to add a personalized, unrealistic twist for visual appeal, a philosophy he inherited from director J.J. Abrams when the two worked together on *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*.

### Yaphit

See also: Yaphit § ProductionLieutenant Yaphit was created digitally by Tippett Studios, but as lighting was overseen by Luke McDonald, he coordinated with the studio company so that digital lighting falling on art assets would match the lighting of the physical set.

## Awards

For his work on *Identity, Pt. 2**,* McDonald, visual effects supervisors Tommy Tran, Kevin Lingenfelser, and Nhat Phong Tran; visual effects producers Brooke Noska and Melissa Delong; digital effects supervisor Brandon Fayette; computer graphics supervisor Matt Von Brock; and compositing supervisor Joseph Vincent Pike were collectively nominated for an Emmy Award in Outstanding Visual Effects.

## See also

* *The World of the Orville*, pages 12-13, 17, 22, 84, 123, 135

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Martin, Kevin H. "VFX for a Better, Brighter Future in Fox’s The Orville". *Studio Daily*. Feb. 9, 2018.
2. ↑ Bond, Jeff. *The World of the Orville*. Titan Books. 2018. Pg. 13.
3. ↑ The Orville. Emmys. Last access July 16, 2019.