Ep 157 | ILM’s John Knoll on The Mandalorian and Grogu — motion control, stop motion and gaussian splats

Weirding Way Media Weirding Way Media. Hello and welcome to the Filmumentaries podcast. I'm Jamie Benning, coming to you not from my house, but from a hotel west of London. I'm out doing a job for the next few days, but I wanted to get this out to you. A quick word before we start.

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Okay, so my guest this week is John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer at ILM. And we're talking about The Mandalorian and Grogu. So this is a bit of a different episode. So I was asked by ILM to write an article about the visual effects on Mandalorian and Grogu. And They presented John Knoll.

So I wrote the article some months ago now when it was on the big screen. And they've kindly allowed me to release this as an episode. So it's slightly different. It's a bit more casual in conversation. But John does a lot of the talking as you'd expect.

So the Mandalorian and Grogu movie is the first time they've been seen on the big screen. John describes two forces pulling against each other in terms of getting it to the big screen. It had to feel like it came from the same people who made the show. which meant keeping the handcrafted stuff, you know, puppets, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion. And about 45% of the film is IMAX. And, you know, with that, you compose and you cut differently for a big multi-story screen.

So they made some pretty cool tools to help them do that. There's stop motion from Tippett Studios. And we talk about how long it takes to animate such a complex scene. And then there's a Razorcrest model, twice the size of the one from the series. And John talks about how they shot that in the volume.

There's also Road to the Hut, who turned out to be the hardest thing in the film. And they had to study some animals. There's also talk of latest techniques in VFX. Not AI, as you might imagine, but Gaussian splats. And there's a little Easter egg from 1976 as well, loaned from the Lucas Museum.

So as I'm sat in my crappy hotel room, I'll not keep you any longer. So here's my interview with John Null, and I'll be back at the end for a bit more Jabbering. On. This is one you've been asked many times already, I'm sure, but It's the first time that we've seen Mandalorian and Grogu on the cinema screen. So what changed fundamentally when you went from supervising a streaming series to doing an IMAX theatrical release?

Well, yeah, there's sort of two opposing forces here. One is that For all the people who have watched and loved the show over the years, you don't want to do something that's jarringly different than what they've seen before. So it should feel familiar. And some of the things that we talked about in pre-production were the handcrafted nature of the show as being a feature that we wanted to keep going on. So we wanted to still feel like it's the same thing.

It's coming from the same group. And that extends to the use of puppets throughout the show, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion, all that kind of stuff. But everybody's also aware, hey, we're making a transition to theatrical. And we want to make the case that you should come out and see this in a theater. And we have this bigger canvas to draw on now.

So I think 45% of the movie is IMAX. And we want to compose for that. We want to design for theatrical experience. So those are the two opposing forces. We lean pretty heavily into... trying to make sure this was a good large screen experience.

And you do work differently for the big screen than you do for the small screen. You compose shots differently. You edit shots differently. So there's fewer quick cuts in the action scenes that are meant for big screen because it can be kind of hard to follow if you're you know, looking at this giant image and have to dart your eyes around a lot. So, you know, how do you vet that stuff?

You know, years ago I worked on an IMAX project and we got a document from IMAX about how to compose for the format. And it was a series of guidelines about, you know, composition and headroom and that kind of thing. But it occurred to us that a better way to do it was to simulate it. So we started off by shooting some test footage and then actually going to IMAX and screening it there. But after that, we built an Apple Vision Pro, a VR app that allowed us to take streamed footage from the video taps or from our hyperdrive streams And to look at it as though it were projected in an IMAX theater.

You know, you look around, you see the seats, and you have this 100-foot screen in front of you. And it is a really good simulation of being in a theater. And you can see all of the things that IMAX is talking about with why you want to compose for extra headroom and why you don't want to cut too quickly. You know, leave a little extra room around this for your peripheral vision. We can do that on set.

We could put on the headset and you could see the live feed from the cameras and just make sure that we're happy with how shots are being composed. And then as we got into designing animation and reviewing action scenes for IMAX, we would check them in the Vision Pro and get a good sense of how that was going to play in a big theater. So it was very deliberately being designed for big screens. That's like the modern equivalent of what Walter Murch used to do, which was to cut out a couple of people's heads and stick them on his monitor. So with that kind of 45% of the film shot natively in IMAX, that presumably has a big impact on the VFX pipeline and the resolution and the render loads and the complexity of the compositing.

I mean, how do you sort of account for that? in terms of time and budget? Well, the main things that you do differently are, you know, the frames are bigger, so that the renders take longer and they're, you know, when you're compositing, the frames are slower to work with as they take longer to load. But, you know, apart from that, it's kind of the same workflow that we do for other aspect ratios. Okay. And, you know, in the film you've got so many different methods of effects, you know, from, like you said, the puppetry, motion control.

And, you know, I've heard Jon Favreau talking about his ethos of always having the best tool for the job, whether it's the practical effects, the puppets, the miniatures. How do you go about having those discussions with Jon and dividing up where you think the best tool is? Is that based on, you know, the legacy of the show itself? Or did you find that you had a bit more of an open remit now that you were bringing it to the big screen? You start off with use the best tool for the job and we're pretty comfortable with any technique from the oldest of the old all the way to the newest, latest buzzwords in computer graphics.

But as I said, there's sort of a legacy style book from the series that we don't want to completely ignore. We want it to feel like this is coming from the same group of people. And that, as an example, because we had done miniatures in motion control and extensive use of puppets and the occasional experiments in stop motion, we wanted to lean into that and to do some versions of this that we couldn't really do on the streaming show. We've had stop motion before. I shoot the skeleton crew streaming series and, you know, we had a 20 something shot stop motion sequence in there with this big trash crab.

And, you know, that was, that was complicated and a lot of work. And, and we amped that up. We did a much larger, two very complicated characters and, and a longer, I think it's a two-minute-long fight scene with Amanda with a great deal of interaction between live-action characters and the stop-motion droids. And that took the crew at Tippett's, I think, 10 months to animate. So it was a better part of a year to do that work.

Yeah. And because we had a little bit longer calendar period, time to do this work that we could contemplate some of these more elaborate ways of working. That extended to the motion control miniature work as well that I had wanted to shoot the Razor Crest in a LED volume all the way from season one, but it wasn't something we could really afford to do both in terms of budget and in terms of schedule. Here's time where I've got a year and a half of of post. Um, let's plot this out and, and make this happen.

Yeah. Cause that reintroduction of motion control, I, you know, I, I've seen you on a bunch of interviews and it seems it was a real sort of passion project for you, you know, a garage kind of thing, guerrilla kind of filmmaking, but here you have the chance to maybe have the time, like you said, in the budget to do it. So what did that mean in terms of doing it for the film? How did you, how was it ramped up, um, for, for this movie in particular? Well, yeah, early on started looking at the work that was in the film and kind of making a wish list of, hey, I'd love to do all of these shots with the miniature.

And it meant I need a very high detail miniature. So I need, we built a four foot long one as opposed to our 24 inch model from the streaming series. And then a lot of the shots that were on my wishlist were shots of it in atmosphere where just like Mando's helmet, when you are in a complex lighting environment, you want to reflect all the right things in space. You know, it's mostly black around the razor crest with a bright sunlight. So that's relatively easy to do with conventional lighting instruments on a stage.

But as soon as you're in atmosphere, you're flying around clouds and, um, some other more complex environment. All the same issues with Bando's helmet exist with the Razorcrest. It's about getting good-looking reflections. And the LED volume is the lovely solution to that problem. So we started a conversation with our LED vendor, Fuse, that built the stagecraft volumes that we had in Southern California.

In fact, after we decommissioned one of our volumes, a lot of those LED panels were the ones that we used to build up the mini volume. And so for those shots of the Razor Crest then, are they shot in the volume? Didn't I read somewhere or hear you say somewhere that you built like a gazebo at one point, as you called it? Yeah, that was on season one. Yeah. had this idea of, again, you know, the Razor Crest bare metal finish.

It's all about reflections. And I had this idea of wanting to build a big foam core enclosure around the model and use projectors to project imagery onto that foam core so that we could get nice looking reflections on it. And it sort of worked. You know, it was hard to align things well. and the color was a little marginal on those projectors. And I think we probably could have made it work, but what happened is pretty early in post, we got our first composites together, and John wanted to change the flight path of the razor crest, and at that point, well, you know, it's a photographed element.

Changing the flight path means reshooting the element, and You know, we'd already struck the motion control system. So we switched to computer graphics for those shots, probably for the best, because it was really pushing it to try and do those shots that way. And, you know, that had been in my head since, what was that, 2019. And wanting to do it the right way with properly calibrated LED screens and got a chance to do it here. you know, everything went beautifully. It was, uh, color was great because we've got a nice closed loop calibration system for this.

I could leverage the StageCraft team. We had, uh, a few, few StageCraft veterans there running the, the LED volume. And, um, you know, we had an interface, um, where I could, from the motion control system, send a sync pulse to StageCraft that would, um, advance the content. So as the camera was moving, you know, you'd see the stagecraft content clicking over to the next frame. Right.

Right. I often, cause I work in live television and, you know, we obviously have moved a lot of things into, um, a more digital environment using digital cameras and stuff. One of the things we struggle with sometimes is having good dynamic range on these modern cameras. And I was just thinking, you know, in terms of when you're shooting highly reflective surfaces, is that something that you struggle with too? Yeah, yeah.

The way I dealt with it previously and for the first part of the shoot was to bracket. And that's possible when you're shooting motion control because you can repeat the motion exactly. So when I was doing... passes that represented a pretty broad dynamic range. In particular, the engine passes, you know, you're kind of shooting into a light and you want to make sure you're capturing enough range that nothing feels clipped. I would bracket those.

I do multiple exposures that we could then compound into a high dynamic range image. And I did the same thing for sunlight. I would do multiple exposures where I do one that was kind of, as I wanted to see it in the show, And I would stop down a couple of stops, run another pass, and then another couple to make sure that I was getting the peaks. Yeah. I did some shooting out at the ranch, daytime exterior, in sunlight.

And I got concerned about the sun actually moving while we were shooting and potentially moving past. between passes if I was bracketing. So I switched to a different camera. I used a Sony ILXLR1. And it's this very small camera that's built for embedded applications like drones. But it uses the same sensor as a Sony Alpha 9.

It's 10,000 pixel horizontal resolution. And I was super impressed with the dynamic range on that camera. I found that it was relatively noise-free, like really good signal-to-noise ratio. And if I underexposed a little bit on a daylight exterior shot, and by a little bit, I mean actually kind of a lot, about two stops. If I underexposed about two stops, I could range that back up to a nominal exposure that still looked great.

Usually if you underexpose that much and you range it up, you get all kinds of horrible noise and artifacts down at the bottom end that you don't like. I didn't see any of that in the imagery. It survived that process pretty well. And then it had great dynamic range and I could take this image and further knock it down and like all the range I could want in a single exposure. So I was really impressed with that.

So all the shooting I did out at the ranch, I did single exposure. You know, that's bare metal ship in hard sunlight. Really happy with the results. And otherwise you were shooting on the Arri. Were you?

No, I was, I do still cameras for all of this. So I used a Canon 5D Mark IV for the interior shooting. It's not a new camera. You know, originally this was kind of a budget operation and ILM's equipment stock room, we have a whole closet full of Canon bodies. And that's what we send out to shoot high dynamic range images on set, our texture reference, our photogrammetry reference.

So we have this giant inventory of these old Canon cameras. And they're great cameras. And I get about 11 stops of range out of those bodies, which is not quite as good as what you get out of the Arri cinema cameras. But man, this Sony camera I was super impressed with. I think I was getting about the equivalent of what we caught on the Aries.

Nice. getting into a bit of the kind of uh you know the fandom side of things in terms of the film you've got you got road to the hut being reintroduced from the animated series you've got obviously grogu and you've got embo as well what were some of the challenges involving bringing those characters into the live action environment. Yeah i i'm think actually Rado was probably the single biggest challenge on the show and it's more of a conceptual challenge than it is a tactical challenge you know the idea is amusing that when you read it in the script that you have a hut that we've only known as these giant fat sedentary creatures and you read about Rada and the script and he's, he's young and athletic and fit and he can move fast.

He's cage fighter and he speaks English and, you know, all of that, you know, reads for an amusing thing in the script. But then, uh, trying to turn that into a compelling image is, is difficult. Um, and there was a lot of talk about, uh, um, well, how do we get them to move fast? Like, if he charges somebody, what does that look like? How does he move?

Does he move like a snake? Does he move like an inchworm? Does he move like a snail? And we did all kinds of tests of different styles of movement. And I think in the end, the best reference for us ended up being elephant seals.

See, elephant seals charging, they do this sort of, you know, galumphing movement. with their thing that can be upright. Don't they? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and you know, but even, even that it's hard to surprise somebody.

Um, like, you know, you're, you have two characters that are 12 feet apart and, uh, and a lot of charges forward. You know, how, how do you not see that coming? Um, and step out of the way. Uh, and, The Annam group came up with this sort of barrel roll idea that, which he can do pretty quickly in a believable manner. And, you know, what he's a little over a meter in diameter.

So cover about 3.14 meters in a split second. That was a nice way to have him kind of duck a blow or, or charge somebody quickly. And that was how Hickle sort of overseeing that. Yeah. He's got obviously a lot of experience animating over the years.

Was there a particular sort of glee amongst the team to be having the challenge of bringing a Hutt to life in a different way than it had been before? Well, yeah, yeah. This show is very animation heavy. And that's another thing that was a little different about the feature than the streaming series is to have Radha and Embo and... And the twins and the Imani and the snake and Hugo, these are all synthetic characters.

And, you know, on the streaming show, there would be synthetic characters that were people in rubber masks like Quill and characters like that. But to do all CG characters that have that much screen time is something that you need calendar time to do and you need budget to support. And that fell on the animation team. And I think they delighted in having so much of the runtime of the movie being something where they're in there contributing acting performances. Yeah.

So Embo is entirely computer generated character. There's no reference, there's no motion capture or anything like that. Well, something that Hal and I felt pretty strongly about and would bring this up in pre-production is anytime you've got these characters that are even if you're going to execute them entirely as computer graphics, if at all possible, you want to have someone on set who's cast in that role, playing that role. And that makes life easier for everybody. It makes life easier for the actors because they've got somebody to play their performances against.

Then there's somebody on set for the director to direct. So you're not kind of bifurcating performance to what you do on the set and then what you figure out in post. It can all happen together at once. It's easier for a camera if they've got someone to frame up on and compose the shots. And, you know, the camera language is a little more authentic because all the little micro adjustments that the operator does to improve the composition, you know, you get those when you've got somebody in there for them to react to.

And it's easier for the editors too, that they've got something more meaningful to edit with. Again, even if we slap a CG character over the top. Um, so yeah, all the, everybody, there was somebody playing that character on set. Um, and for Embo, we had, uh, Don, um, a really good martial artist. Uh, so when he does the, the, uh, the fight with Mando, um, we're following his fight choreography very closely.

And what about, um, With Road to the Heart, did you have a stand-in for him? Yeah, that one's a little bit harder, but yeah, we did have stunt people there who were standing in. We did have this head and shoulders, a bust, a fiberglass shell that was 3D printed from the CG model. But that could go on a performer. And partly it was there for blocking reference, so that We could make sure that everybody had a clear picture of how big Rada is and to make sure that other live action people didn't violate his space, you know, because his shoulders are fairly wide.

Make sure that, you know, somebody isn't standing in a place where, okay, well, now he's inside a Rada. So we had this fiberglass shell that would help people understand how to compose a shot or how to avoid... blocking problems. But we shot references with it. And Legacy made this for us, this reference head, and painted it. And it was really quite charming and good.

And we would shoot references of it. And Dave Klein, our DP, he liked having it in frame because it gave him something to light. And anything that we can do to... help, uh, the camera department, um, with making good, meaningful decisions, um, on set to help us out is, you know, only in our own interests. Mm. That, having a stand-in for Radha, who's in so much of the movie, to let, uh, Dave spend some meaningful time trying to light him and, and get a, get his take on how Radha should be lit was, uh, think good and welcome.

Does that mean you there wasn't uh a temptation to scale him up or down because you'd already set the scale in terms of how he was framed. Well if you compare the the reference takes that we did on set to what's in the the movie yeah there's lots of little adjustments that were made sometimes kind of moving them over a little bit or you know put them on a quarter apple to make them a little bit taller here or whatever it was. So we would definitely make adjustments to then kind of work with the frame that we had available. But most of the time where we started with RADA is, well, let's look at the reference and start with that. And then we'll make little tweaks and adjustments to, hey, I want to get a little bit more highlight here or get down a little bit or whatever it is.

I love that you still call it a quarter apple, like the old terms. I often ask people when I interview them for my podcast, you know, supervisors about having a consistency, a visual consistency across the movie or the show or whatever it is. I think the thing that's always been great about Star Wars is there is a cohesiveness to the look. Yet, you know, you might, for instance, like on Empire, there would be Joe designing stuff. There'd be Nilo, there'd be Ralph.

And they all feel slightly different. And that does something to kind of expand the world for the viewer, I think. Whereas I think other sci-fi shows and films over the years have tried to sort of make it look like it was all designed by one person. So it's cohesive, but it has a sort of opposite effect. It sort of shrinks the film down.

But how do you kind of, as a visual effects supervisor, how do you kind of have oversight on all of that with all these different vendors, all these different techniques to make sure that you've got this not a visual consistency, but a visual sort of cohesion. Well, it starts with Doug Chang and Andrew Jones. So Doug will start off working with this fantastic team of concept designers in the Lucasfilm art department. And they'll do a Bible of looks. This big collection of concept paintings that nailed down the design and the look for every major thing in the movie.

So we've got something that represents a coherent vision of the film. And then as we move into execution, it split up among a number of vendors. Fewer on the feature than there was on the streaming series. But I still had five companies doing the work. And, you know, it's myself and Hal and Doug Chang are in many of the reviews.

Doug didn't go to all of them, but he stayed active through post and would chime in if there was something that, oh, hey, I always really wanted the side of the Hutt Castle to have more of an underhang. Here, can we make sure we've got some negative space under there? who's always keeping an eye on design aspects that he wanted to make sure that we weren't compromising. Yeah, that's a good point. I like that. Often you make leaps and bounds in shows and in films.

Were there any in this film where you felt that you'd made a real leap in terms of what you're able to achieve? And also, will any of that, do you think, feed back into future streaming projects potentially rather than This. Was my first go at using an LED volume to shoot miniatures. And it was a first for ILM as well. You know, I started as a model maker and then I was a motion control camera operator.

And so this was a fun thing to do because it kind of went right in the square center of my comfort zone. I spent a lot of my misspent youth doing doing that kind of thing so it was fun to get back into it and it has always felt very familiar to go back on the stage and set up a miniature and start lighting it and shooting it with the the moco but this was kind of different because we never had an LED volume before and the kinds of shots that I could do with it and the level of realism that you could get out of it was something that was it felt like something new and different and and That was great, great fun. I did very much enjoy that. But then, you know, I mentioned we spanned a pretty broad range of technologies on this.

And, you know, one of the latest buzzwords is Gaussian splats. If you've heard people talking about those. Yeah, that's essentially a photogrammetry style point cloud But it's point cloud with view-dependent shading information encoded in the particles. And that rather than solving geometry, you're kind of retaining that as spherical harmonics encoded in the particles. And those are very cool.

And you can get amazing results with them, a very high level of realism in situations where you would normally have... You can only represent view independent shading. And I had a, one of our guys showed us a rig that they just put together for shooting Gaussian splats. I got a demo of this. Hey, check out this rig that we've got.

And right after I got that demo, I was thinking about how am I going to do These shots where we had the beautiful set of the inside of the Razorcrest, the whole interior with the ladder to go upstairs and the whole thing. But it was pretty big and heavy and it was actually bolted to the floor of the stage and it couldn't move. And then we had other scenes where we had the Razorcrest parked various places on a Delphi or. The moon of Shikari or, or wherever it was. And, and that wasn't in the same place.

And, and you'd have these ramps and you have Mando walking down a ramp or up or standing next to it with the background being the, the razor crest. And we should be seeing up into the interior, but the interior was on another stage and we couldn't move it. And, And so I knew that anytime we were shooting those scenes, I was going to owe an interior of the Razor Crest for that. And, you know, one approach in the past was to, um, take all the measurements we had taken when we shot Mando standing at the ramp and, all right, we'll figure out where that camera is relative to the interior set and let's go and we'll shoot a plate of the interior set or we'll shoot photogrammetry or it'll be the CG model.

But, um, here was a chance to shoot something that was view independent that I could shoot once and then use anytime I wanted later. So Dave Klein lit the razor crest interior for me, you know, and we took the Gaussian splat rig through and we shot, you know, it was only 15, 20 minute shoot to, capture, I don't know, 20,000 images of the inside there with this rig. And then we had this lovely interior capture of that thing that I could see from any angle that I wanted to in post. So I didn't have to figure out exactly where the camera needed to be in order to capture it. I had something that could be used any time I wanted to represent the interior.

So that scene where Mando and Ward are in front of the razor crest when he first gets presented, that's the 48-inch miniature, but the view is up into the inside or the Gaussian splat. And we used it any time you saw up into the interior like that. Very cool. So that was nice. First time I'd used Gaussian splats, and it worked great.

So you see a future for it in the next project? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

It's like a more realistic, better and more flexible photogrammetry. Yeah. That flexibility must be super important. I was going to say to you that the X-wings and the Y-wings, was that ILM? Yeah.

I thought that was the best looking X-wing and Y-wing shots I've ever seen. I really felt they looked like real obviously I'm trying to enjoy the movie I've seen it once on the IMAX here in London at the BFI and I'm trying to enjoy it I'm getting involved in the story but occasionally I was just like holy shit that looks incredible like what what what was done do you think to really make those believable as real things whereas before we sort of forgive you know the fantasy of the movie obviously Rogue One was a step up from the the prequels and the originals but yeah I just felt like it was yet another leap and I couldn't quite work out what it was that really sold it to me as realistic. Um it's a good question I don't know if I can put my finger on uh well here's the specific thing it's just yeah that was Jeff Cap Greco and John Alvarado at our Sydney studio doing that work and they're really good artists and I think the pyro was especially nice you know that's their their pyro team there did a fantastic job like every explosion you can you can tell how much they care about really making that beautiful.

I should mention, it's not an important thing, but it was something that meant something to me. There are two shots that have a miniature Y-wing in it. In particular, there's the shot where the Y-wing fires the missile. That is an original 1976 Y-wing model from New Hope. wow very cool and it was borrowed from the lucas museum um and we got it for a day to shoot with and yeah it's in two shots of the movie and and it just made me happy yeah you know there's nothing about the shots where you'd look at them and go hey look that's a miniature but i know it's one of the original models for the show. That's a very cool little easter egg i bet you were very carefully and tentatively handling that thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Because we now know how much these things sell for, right? Oh, exactly, yeah. There were two people from the Lucas Museum who were watching us the whole time we were shooting just to make sure we didn't do anything ill-advised with the models. Well, listen, John, it's a real pleasure to talk to you, and I think the work is fantastic in there, so congratulations on that.

Thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to seeing it again, yeah. All right, thank you. So that was my chat with John Knoll. Thanks to John for his time and thanks to ILM for letting me release this as an episode.

You can read the article. It's also in my link tree. Take a look. There's some cool photos there as well. I love all that problem solving stuff. that John and the team had to go through and those lovely little details like the 1976 Y-Wing being in there I saw it at the BFI IMAX if you follow me you'll have seen me at the kind of press screening and influencer screening hate that word but that was a cool evening I wasn't the biggest fan of the film but I'm a fan of the work put into it if you enjoyed this one add a rating wherever you're listening and that does make a difference and telling one other person makes more of a difference.

I was out at a book launch the other night. My friend Nigel Smith, who has been on the podcast a few times, talking about his walks and tours around London, has written a wonderful new book called Film London, The Opinionated Guide to Film London. And he was able to travel around the capital and look at some of the best film and movie related spots. So there's like cool little cinemas, there's prop houses, there's You know, cinemas that are both independent and big chains. There's loads that I didn't know about.

But at the book launch the other night at the Cinema Museum in South London, which I've never been to before, a very cool place, I had five people come up to me saying that, excuse me, are you Jamie Benning? I love your podcast and I've been following your stuff for years, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it was fantastic. I've never had that happen to that extent before. A hundred people in the room and five people approached me to say thank you.

So thank you and thank you for the support. Coming up on the podcast soon, I have animator Chris Cassidy, who worked on Star Wars back in 76, rotoscoping and adding laser bolts, and went on to have a pretty cool career. I'm also chatting to Jim Clay, production designer, in the next couple of weeks. I've recently spoken to John McClane, who made the films Slow West and Tornado, two films that I really enjoyed, and we had a fantastic chat about his approach to filmmaking. So plenty more to come on the podcast.

Trying to decide whether I'm going to go to LA to go to Celebration. I mean, it is the 50th. It is only going to happen once, but it is going to be blooming expensive. Hopefully I can make the most of it and get some interviews out there. Maybe do some articles for ILM and Skywalker Sound.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. I'm going to rush off now because I've got to have my dinner in this crappy hotel. And I'll be back for the next episode of the Filmumentaries podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon We are getting away.