Extending the Star Wars story

Jonathan Cheetham, visual effects supervisor at Jellyfish Pictures, talks to TVBEurope about working on Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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Jenny PriestleyPublish date:

Dec 14, 2017Social count:

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Jonathan Cheetham, visual effects supervisor at Jellyfish Pictures, talks to TVBEurope about working on Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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Visual effects, animation and motion graphics studio Jellyfish Pictures were among the vendors employed by ILM and LucasFilm to help create Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Jellyfish previously worked on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, working on the post-vis of the film. Having created 150 final shots for the Gareth Edwards directed film, they were delighted when LucasFilm wanted to work with them again.

"We were only supposed to do a portion of the pre- and post-vis and in the end I think we did almost half of the actual film," says visual effects supervisor Jonathan Cheetham. "They then came back to us and send wed like you to do more and trickier stuff for The Last Jedi, so our partnership is growing."

"We did a lot more heavy 2D/3D effects in each shot on this film," explains Cheetham. "The majority of shots were set extensions because they always wanted to build on the scope of the film, build on the scope of the sets that they built. So there were a lot of extensions of ships and environments.

"We also did a lot of work on holograms, so a lot of the time we working in amongst actors and artists on set to coordinate the holograms and how they appeared and how they sat within each shot," he continues.

"The look of those was pretty much directed by ILM so we did a lot of asset sharing on a lot of those ship builds and interiors. There was a lot of work on how the film should fit together with their shots and our shots. But a lot of the time was adding more drama - be it explosions or atmosphere. We did a lot of fluid animations and big sims for Houdini this time round which we dont usually get the chance to do."

Of course, Jellyfish wasnt the only vendor working on The Last Jedi so the team had to make sure the software and kit they were using worked seamlessly with other companies.

"We had to make sure that the kit we used was the same as other studios were using, because we had to be very aware of shared assets and shared pipelines," says Cheetham. "All our versions of Nuke and Maya etc. had to be in line with the other studios. We predominantly used Nuke for compositing, Maya and Houdini for the CG and effects, we grew our team for Matchmove and layout and we did use a little bit of ZBrush.

"At its peak we had about 35-40 people working on the project. We worked on the film for quite a long time, it was spread over six months. That was made up of production, prep and roto and comp, CG Matchmove and effects. A decent amount of the studio was working on it. I think we did about 130-140 shots," says Cheetham.

Star Wars will always be intrinsically linked with London - be it through principal photography at Pinewood Studios or the post house and vfx companies in Soho. "I think everyone feels Star Wars comes home every time its in London," says Cheetham.

"That was very much the feeling when we were working on post-vis in London. With the amount of vendors working on the film, and the fact that ILM now have an office in London, it felt like Jellyfish were part of the bigger Star Wars family."

LINK:	https://www.tvbeurope.com/features/extending-star-wars-story...
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