The second season of “Light & Magic,” About the story of VFX Giant Industrial Light & Magic (helped by the “Jumanji” director and former ILM veterinarian Joe Johnston), starts with a fascinating glimpse in doing Can jars in the first of three sections.
The original fan response to the character was definitely negative, whether it is for Jar Jar’s Slapstick Humorton who collides with the other stories within “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace “or for the swing’s broad characterization that some critics and audiences found reflected racist stereotypes. Jar Jar Hate has softened a little over time, especially regarding the work of performer Ahmed Best, which beat both Robin Williams and Michael Jackson for the role as bin The first to go into a MOCAP suit, and Jar Jar marked the industry’s first major MOCAP/CG character.
That’s right: Jar Jar helped to pave the way for Andy Serkis’ Gollum and Caesar and all other innovative CG characters that have been Mo-covered, performance-killed or key frames during the 2000s.
Jar Jar, who is intended by George Lucas as the synthetic center of “The Phantom Menace”, was modeled after the physical genius of Buster Keaton (“General”) and intended for comic relief. In fact, Best has been cast for the malleable ways and the Babbling Delivery shown in his stand-up comedy and sat with Lucas to study the motivation behind Keaton’s movement.
While ILM had previously introduced groundbreaking CG characters, such as the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” (1993), it was the titular ghost of “Casper” (1995), and Sean Conney’s excellent Draco in “Dragonheart”, (1996), Jar Jar Jar Jar was their first cg-man. Qui-Gon-Jin and the other actions.
“I know it will work for … It’s impossible,” Lucas said in archive films from a staff meeting. One of the early challenges, however, was that Jar Jar needed to be designed from the foundation of the then Newbie designer Doug Chiang (“The Mandalorian”) and the rest of the art department. But it was the concept artist Terry Whitlatch who came up with the first amphibious sketch that excited Lucas. From there they played with an alligator, frog, salamander, elephant, pig and dachshund. In the end, Jar Jar was a combination of a dinosaur and an amphibian with a parrot pattern on the skin. For Lucas, however, it was especially important that his eyes sprinkled and that he had disk ears.
The most difficult task was to animate Jar Jar during the dawn of Mocap and computer graphics. This fell to animation leader Rob Coleman and VFX Supervisor John Knoll. For starters, for budget reasons, it was decided that Best would carry a prosthesis costume, and ILM would only animate his head. The suit would also be worn at Best (with Jar Jar’s Head as a hat) under interaction with the other actors.
But Knoll wanted Jar Jar to be all-cg. He was convinced that ILM could pull it off and that it would be the best solution in the long term. It is because of the trouble of getting the right adjustment to mix all the elements and then have to match the lighting on the set.
So they arranged an animation test side by side and compared the main change with the full-CG version. “It was extremely difficult, it was really, really hard,” Coleman told Johnston. “Although we got the neck, even though it was a pixel, our eye sees it as a malfunction and did not believe it. And the side by side is what we showed to George and made our case about why this will be really difficult to pull off, just to make the neck and head.”
However, the supervisor of visual effects Dennis Wall (“Jurassic Park”) was skeptical that replacement of the head and neck would actually be more expensive than making Jar Jar Full CG. “Rumors I heard later were that it wasn’t true,” the wall told Johnston. “They actually gave the matchmo on their heads to an animator who was not very fast, and they gave the entire animation version to an animator who was super fast.” When asked by Johnston if he thought rumors, the wall replied: “That’s true. George told me about it, and I said,” It’s meaningful. “
While Lucas was impressed with the entire CG test, he was worried that it would detract from Best’s performance. But doing it with the experimental Mocap made it possible to maintain the essence of Bests Wiry performance as Jar Jar. They could catch his entire movement without having to animate it and carry it to different scenes. Then the animators could take over and end the rest with their skilled photo revealism.
“There were times that I thought … Maybe we made the character for slapstick or too silly,” Coleman added. “But on every turn George said: ‘No, no, no. This is his role in the film, this is his position within the story.’ I told him once, “I don’t want this to be silly.” And he said: “Dare to be Dopey, Rob. I’m like “ok”, and so we did. “
“Light & Magic” season 2 currently streams on Disney+.
