The Mandalorian S2

Gor Koresh, this one-eyed Beskar hunter was realised through prosthetic make up and an animatronic face rig that featured eye and mouth motion that would sync with the dialogue it was fed during principal photography. To further refine the facial animation and make it sync with the final dialogue, we built a full CG replica of the face, closely matching its practical counterpart. This meant we could adjust, replace or fine tune the facial performance as needed, shot by shot. A lot of effort went into lookdev, tracking, rigging, animation, lighting and comp to make the CG face blend seamlessly with the rest of the character. When animating these types of characters, our mission is to bring them to life while keeping things anchored to the puppeteered / animatronic aesthetics that we know and love from the Star Wars universe.

We were already familiar with the squid-like Quarren from the bar fight scene in season 1. For the Quarren in season 1, we developed and animated a full CG head with tentacles, which was added on top of a live action actor. For season 2, there were a lot more Quarren to deal with so the approach was a bit different. The actors wore prosthetic makeup but with detachable tentacles. For any shot that required more nuanced tentacle motion, one with dialogue for instance, the physical tentacles were removed from the prosthetics and were instead animated and added in VFX. The tentacles were keyframe animated, but to improve realism we also ran them through dynamic simulations. The simulation passes were treated as a layer on top of the animation, which we could blend in to taste using the tentacle rig.

ILP worked on several shots where digi doubles were required, often in the shape of live action to CG takeovers in action packed shots. In this full CG shot, Stormtrooper digi doubles were animated getting pulled out from the cargo area of a Gozanti cruiser.