Post uncovered: Scanline VFX on Star Wars: Andor season 2 (Disney+)

VFX supervisor Sue Rowe at Netflix-owned global visual effects house Scanline VFX explains the work the company created for the second and final season of Disney+’s Star Wars: Andor.

“Working on this project with production VFX supervisor Mohen Leo and VFX producer TJ Falls was an absolute gift. This team has worked together in the past on other Star Wars projects so their in-depth knowledge of the Star Wars Universe was vast. Mohen had a great relationship with the showrunner Tony Gilroy, they understood each other, and this translated to a great time for us in post as the trust was already there. 

Scanline’s body of work was spread across all eight episodes with different delivery dates. So being creative and efficient was my challenge as a VFX supervisor. 

The most technically challenging sequence was the hospital at Coruscant. The actual set was only one floor and Scanline was tasked to digitally extend one floor into 19 floors, making it a high rise building. The concepted design showed a huge glass structure. On set all we had was one level with no glass, or in some cases there was glass but this reflected the camera and the stage lights – real reflections of the set.

For this to be believable we would need to reflect the floors opposite and above, plus the sky with rows of traffic flying above. I knew early on that the traditional computer generated build would be too complex since rendering glass is well known to be tricky. I challenged the lighting and comp team to come up with a smart route so we avoided expensive 3D refraction and reflection passes. We used Nuke to re-project reflections. Our Scanline lighting and comp team in Montreal worked so well on this sequence, no one would realise that the set was small and that much of the glass was missing.

My favourite sequence is the farming scenes in Mina-Rau. The production knew that much of the action would need to take place in vast corn fields. They actually planted a massive field of ancient grain for the shoot. Six months later it was ready to shoot. This was a brilliant starting point for us in VFX as Scanline added set extensions to the horizon to imply that this is farming on a Galactic scale. Mohen showed us concepts of the designs they liked, and Scanline created huge 3D grain silos. We modeled and textured the 100 ft high towers so they looked imposing. 

The artistic skill here was making this fantasy building look like it was really there in a field in the UK.

We used High Dynamic Range photography during the shoot, so we could capture the light at that moment in time, on that particular day, at that precise minute the action was shot. As you can imagine, shooting out in the elements during an English summer meant the sunlight and the clouds changed all the time.

My goal was to recreate the industrial view as if it had really been there. Once we had perfected adding the silos, for the next episode we were asked to destroy them.

At Scanline, we have excellent VFX artists who are highly skilled at mega destruction. We use Houdini and proprietary tools to do this. We build the structures knowing we need to destroy them so it’s a combination of physics and art.

My team animated Cassians U wing attack on the silo which cracked and crumbled right in front of the camera and the silo grain poured out, engulfing the Storm troopers in a Tsunami-like wave. The final touch was adding a super fine particulate dust pass into the grain simulation to finish. It looked fantastic.

A project like this is exactly why I love my job. I love to create crazy creatures and environments to match the showrunners’ creative writing, but my favourite part is to blow it all up.