VFX Research - Star Wars: Withing a Minute

Mustafar Duel / Scene 158 / 26 Shots / 1185 Frames / 910 Artists / 70441 Man Hours

"What everyone was waiting for was the light sabre duel. When that's up there on the screen you're caught up in the drama of it, you're not thinking about how it was made. It truly is mind boggling how many people, how many thousands of hours it takes to make just one sequence. A sequence that's virtually over within a minute."

For our first week, we collectively watched a documentary titles 'Within a Minute'. This one hour ten minute documentary doesn't just look at the vfx of a short sequence but literally everything from who gets paid to the post effects. As you can see from the title above, it was an immense task just for this 1 minute sequence to be completed; 70441 man hours. This could be attributed to the massive amount of special effects that actually went into bringing the idea to life, and how the problems are actually solved is unbelievable; but when you have hundreds of millions to budget on a movie anything is possible.

The number of departments that have to be involved electively is staggering, everyone time a new department was explained a 3d mind map was displayed to give an idea.

Now I don't think that it would be every single branch like you see in the image, most of that is probably for emphasis.

Firstly they would have artists to storyboard what George Lucas himself has envisioned. When he was happy with that concept artists with breath colour into them, create environments from different angles so they had a clear idea of the whole space. For further visualisation, a team would then quickly model these concepts into a 3D environment; with simply modelled and animated characters. This was so it was possible for them to decided where they would move through the scene. After all this was completed and accepted by George, the main CG department would be called upon to create every structure, building, rock, lava flow right down to the nuts and bolts.

That essentially is only the fx piece of the puzzle, while all of this is happening they are working in conjunction with numerous other departments. Fashion designers have been creating the costumes from concept ideas, not only that though they make a number a of versions that progress through out the sequence. The actors have to film the shots with each costume on, the filming aspect adds hundreds of people straight away.

After filming is complete, the CG team are still inputting massive amounts of man hours to make the scene look flawless; while all the time getting new footage to include. One part I was mostly impressed by was the how some of the actual lava streams were created, they were built literally...

After all this, final fx will be added in and colour graders will do their part to make sure it looks absolutely perfect. Once again George will then make any amendments he wants (hopefully none), a group of members will sit in a screening area and watch the footage for final analysis.

The amount of information in each frame upped the rendering process to many, many hours of waiting around; this could of been eased though by rendering on multiple machines. Just shy of 1000 members of staff were used for this whole process, and some departments I don't think I even mentioned.

A brilliant documentary, and a real eye opener to what you could be apart of if you take up the mammoth task in film.