![]() ![]() The team at Legacy spent the next three months building an extraordinarily sophisticated puppet, handcrafting every hair follicle and inch of its body and putting it together with meticulous care. “That’s when it really became the baby,” Favreau says. So they brought in Legacy Effects, an SFX studio known for their prosthetic and animatronic work, to pull it off. Once they’d determined how Baby Yoda should look, they needed to bring it to life, and the initial attempts at building models lacked the cuteness that had made the concept shine. “The idea of the face not being that expressive, but everything being about the eyes looking at you and the ears moving, was something that I had wanted to try.” Favreau and Mandalorian executive producer Dave Filoni looked at hundreds of concept drawings - all either too cute or too ugly - until they settled on the right look. “I had already been preoccupied with the look of big eyes and ears for motion,” Favreau says in the episode. In settling on how a member of Yoda’s race would be realized for The Mandalorian, Favreau drew inspiration from Gnomes & Goblins, a short virtual-reality film he has been working on for the last four years. The look of Baby Yoda, obviously, was derived from Yoda himself, as he was conceived by George Lucas and Frank Oz in the original Star Wars trilogy. Called “Practical,” the episode delves into the complex practical VFX work that went into The Mandalorian, including comprehensive overviews of how they brought to life the android bounty hunter IG-11, the Ugnaught moisture farmer Kuiil and, of course, the endearing alien superstar himself, Baby Yoda - whom the showrunners, directors, producers, cast members, and everyone on the crew refers to as “the baby” or simply “baby.” In fact, one of the first Baby Yoda revelations is that the original script introduced him as “a baby, the same race as Yoda.” This week, though, Disney+ released the fifth episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, its eight-episode documentary series that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show. When I reached out to Disney in December hoping to learn more about the process and interview people from the special-effects team responsible for the creature, they effectively told me those details were under wraps my contacts in the SFX industry didn’t know anything either, including which effects studio actually did the work. He was Baby Yoda.īut until now, Disney has been diligently secretive about exactly what Baby Yoda was - whether he was some kind of puppet, a cleverly animated CGI creation, an animatronic doll, or some elaborate combination of the above. He drank space tea, rode in a space carriage, wore an oversize space jacket. But when Jon Favreau’s space-Western epic The Mandalorian launched last November as the marquee original series on Disney+, the show’s breakout character immediately captured the Zeitgeist. No one could have predicted that one of the biggest landmark cultural events in recent memory would be a wide-eyed infant Muppet from the Star Wars universe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |