Award-winning VFX supervisor Richard Bluff talks about his work delivering more than 4,000 shots on the Disney+ Star Wars spinoff that has just been nominated for five Emmy Awards.
Since its debut on Disney+ in August of 2023, Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: Ahsoka has been delighting audiences with its saga of the former Jedi Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and her allies, who must fight the remnants of the Galactic Empire and prevent them from reuniting against the fledgling New Republic. The show has won plaudits not only from fans and critics (it boasts an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), but also from the Television Academy, which has nominated Ahsoka for five Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Season Or A Movie.
Leading the visual effects team was Richard Bluff, a veteran ILM VFX supervisor who was no stranger to the Star Wars universe, having worked previously on The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. He shared with us his experiences working with creator Dave Filoni and the many talented crew members who helped make Ahsoka a reality.
Dan Sarto: You have a lot of experience in the Star Wars TV world from working on The Mandalorian and Boba Fett, so you weren’t totally starting cold on Ahsoka. Still, every show has its own look and feel, so it was still a new universe. What specific elements – concept art, designs, assets – did you have to start with, and what were your initial steps?
Richard Bluff: That’s a great question. People who have seen The Mandalorian and Boba Fett are familiar with the beautiful artwork that comes up during the end credits. That's actually the artwork that we start with. It's hundreds and hundreds of pieces, from cross-sections of vehicles to all of the actors and their costumes. It's also the big environments and the big iconic moments in the show. So we start with basically a roadmap of what the director wants to achieve.
But, as [production designer] Doug Chiang told me on Season 1 of Mando, the artwork that he generates is aspirational. He's never going to design within a box. He's going to design within the confines of the script, but he's always going to provide the biggest, the best version of things. And it's up to the heads of department to try to figure out how to execute that within the constraints of the show. So for me, when we go through what's called the designscape, it's basically figuring out where the spikes on the graph are: that's going to be hard; that's going to take a long time to shoot; that's got to be all CG; but that's got to be a real thing. So it's just a continuous process of problem solving, which I really, really like.
DS: What were some of the specific scenes or effects in Ahsoka that were the most challenging or memorable for you?
RB: Episode 5 was a really important one for [creator Dave Filoni] because it introduces young Ahsoka in flashback, as well as Anakin and imagery from Clone Wars. Because we're doing 4,000-plus shots, we often work with 12, 13, 14 different vendors, in addition to ILM, which is the primary vendor and of course is the foundation of the show. But when it came to the flashback sequences, that was definitely something we wanted to do at ILM because they had access to the teams working on Clone Wars, and we wanted to pull all the information out. Dave wanted to make sure that the flashback moments felt almost dreamlike. He didn’t want the visuals in the deep background to be clear. He didn't want them to be blurred out, but he wanted them to be lit a certain way, and covered with atmosphere, and only shown in silhouette with explosions going off because he wanted it to feel like a dream moment for Ahsoka. Because she never went over there, she wouldn't know what was over there. So we were always huddling around Dave and huddling around all the ideas he wanted to bring to the screen to make sure we were all going in the same direction.
DS: Were there other sequences or types of visual effects that come to mind as being notable?
RB: The howler and the Western wagon chase, as we called it, was very difficult. I'd read the script, I'd seen all the artwork, and I thought, “Oh, that’s going to be a challenge,” but until you see the previs and the story reel, you don't really know how many shots are involved. Can we get away with this with a motion base? Is it going to be like 30 challenging shots or 170 really difficult shots? So once we saw the previs, we knew it was going to be super-challenging because of the room and the space we had to operate in.
We were in L.A. at Manhattan Beach Studios. We had a couple of sound stages, we had an LED volume, and we had a very, very small backlot, which was basically just a dirt lot at the side of a train depot. As we started coming up with ideas, we realized we were going to need to have horses moving and have actors on the horses. So we needed to make sure that the design of the howler was slightly modified to make the jointing on the creature a closer match to a horse, in order for the replacement to be believable. And then, of course, it's supposed to be in Scotland, so we needed to silk the whole thing.
So, very quickly, all of these thoughts are coming, and there's a lot I need to communicate to all the heads of departments, and of course to the producers on the show, because there's going to be some big ripples, now that we've really landed on what the previs needs to be. We needed to make sure that it feels big and large, even though we were working in this little space.
DS: From the perspective of an audience member, visual effects work is most successful when it’s not calling attention to itself and not taking you out of the story. When you’re evaluating a VFX shot or a sequence, what do you look for to ensure that it’s going to work the way it should?
RB: For me, personally, the first thing I think about – and I first learned a lot of this working with Scott Farrar and Michael Bay on the Transformers movies – is “how was this photographed?” Because we've gotten to the point now where you can put a CG camera anywhere, and you can render something that looks completely real, but I think audiences don’t find it convincing if they don't believe at some level that it was photographed for real. Spider-Man is a great example. You can do a CG version of Spider-Man swinging through New York, and it can look completely convincing, but it's like, how did they get the camera there? And now you don't believe anything.
It's the same in Star Wars. I remember [director Jon] Favreau saying, “Okay, if this was the original Star Wars movie, how would George [Lucas] have filmed this? Where's our physical camera? Who's flying the camera in?” And so that's kind of what I go to. A lot of the things that we are trying to do on the day is to mess things up, to make it feel familiar to audiences.
If a camera is photographing somebody on a motorcycle, driving on a freeway, the motorcycle is going to get ahead of the camera car or the camera car is going to get ahead of the bike, just by accident. And it's something that audiences are familiar with. So when we're shooting a speeder bike, even though the bike is on a concrete pad or on a pedestal, we're blowing a ton of wind at it. We've basically got the camera on a dolly, and the camera department's moving the camera and we're all looking at it, thinking, is that real? Does it feel as though that's on a camera car? Do we have a judder? Do we bang the camera at a certain point, as if we just hit a pothole?
So, from a visual effects standpoint, we're always trying to provide the real reference of chasing a bike, and trying to introduce that into the shots. And then we do one take right at the very end, where it's just the most extreme version – so we have something to use if what we did just wasn't quite feeling enough, once we get the CG environment in there.
DS: Has the evolution of production to include virtual production made your life more difficult, or any easier? Or is it just a different way of doing what you do?
RB: For me, it's made the visual effects supervisor's job far more complex, but also far more interesting and far more beneficial to the end product. In the past, as you know, visual effects happened in post for the most part. And, at that point, the vast majority of other departments were off the show. So you had visual effects artists making all the decisions until the filmmaker or the supervisor decided to give a note. For example, if you're building a hanger with spaceships that was never going to be there on the day, because it was a bluescreen with an LED, it might already be there on the screen.
In the past, you had the visual effects artist doing all the set dressing on the ground, with hoses and crates and pipes and stuff – whereas now that's actually the responsibility of the art department. So now the VFX supervisor needs to provide access to all the heads of departments – the lighting department, the modeling department, the set dressing departments – and provide them with tools to allow them to do their job in a virtual space. The virtual production pipeline allows everybody to engage with the CG aspect of what’s going to be on the screen to ensure that they’re making the same decisions that they would make if it was practical on the day – which is very different from before, when they wouldn’t see the visual effect until the movie or TV show actually releases.
