My book, ILM Presents: Making Solo A Star Wars Story is out and I got to sit down with the team at StarWars.com to chat a bit about the book.
Excerpts from the interview below…
“The first time we put the cast into hyperspace was really fun,” says Rob Bredow, the VFX supervisor and co-producer on the film who documented his experience on set in the new book, Industrial Light & Magic Presents: Making Solo: A Star Wars Story. “We made this big wraparound screen and we had pre-made the entire Kessel Run in visual effects, but when we were bringing the cast in it just had stars on it. The special effects team was standing by to shake the Falcon, and I had talked to the visual effects team and we were ready to cue hyperspace. We didn’t tell the actors…"
Photograph of the SFX rig surrounding the Falcon Cockpit
They ran the scene like any other, a dry run-through played more for the choreography. But as Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge leaned over to push the hyperspace levers, the cockpit began to shake, and the stars began rapidly streaking by. The reaction was priceless. “They were transported,” Bredow says. “After everybody quieted down, Donald Glover, who is probably the coolest guy on set, he says to himself:"
“This is…The coolest thing…I have ever done.”
Impressing Lando himself remains one of Bredow’s favorite memories from making the film.
Background between camera setups on Corelia
Bredow’s book highlights these serendipitous moments as well as learning experiences that come with pushing the envelope and sometimes failing.
“I think it’s easy for us to forget that we learn more from things that don’t work than we learn from our successes,” Bredow says. “Going through here and documenting some of the stuff that we tried visually and we ruled out, I think that’s something that everybody benefits from."
Photographs from the book detailing the Coaxium Explosion
“The coaxium explosion is a real underwater explosion that we shot at high speed at 25,000 frames per second,” Bredow says. “That’s a camera that’s running about 1,000 times faster than your average camera. We set off a tiny little charge underwater. If you just looked at it with your eye, it looked like a white flash. But captured at very, very high speeds, you get this wonderful sphere that grows and then sucks back in and collapses on itself. Then you get the secondary flash and all the smoke that builds out. And we were really interested in capturing that and using that as the foundation for the coaxium explosion at the end of the train heist sequence.”
The complete book, ILM Presents: Making Solo A Star Wars Story is available on Amazon and other booksellers globally.
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