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Effects Guru on Creating Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Roger Guyett on Bringing the World of Force Awakens To Life
♦This week over at our friends at cinemablend, Star Wars effects maestro Roger Guyett talked about his approach to bringing Abrams’ vision to life…
ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Roger Guyett recently spoke with CinemaBlend about the creation of Supreme Leader Snoke, the motion-capture uber-villain played Andy Serkis in The Force Awakens. It seems that his massive appearance, created through a particularly menacing use of holographic projection, was actually inspired by an iconic piece of American architecture:
“Imagine when you’re a kid or whatever, you go up and you stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And you see old Lincoln in a huge chair. There’s a certain quality about that. So, that was certainly sort of part of the inspiration for it all. But I think, hologram, you know? The idea really in that opening scene is sort of like, ‘What is going on here. Ok, it’s a hologram. Is he really this big?’ OK, once you figure out that it’s a hologram, of course it’s like, ‘Well how big is he?’”
Guyett also elaborated on the complicated process of finding the right level of menace for the character and his surroundings:
“I think one thing that is interesting, too, is just the nature of how he ended up looking, that kind of came out of a lot of exploration. Just our lighting tests, just starting to light that chamber and figure out, kind of, what did that light do in there. Seeing him so dramatically backlit like that is something that I think was kind of inspirational. Because there is, realizing that, ‘Hey, if you reduce a lot of the color down and you just make this very visceral, black-and-white silhouetted character, he gets that much more menacing.’ His size, you know, already makes him menacing, and then you have this sort of [effect of] you can’t quite see what you’re looking at all the time. I think it really adds to his mystique.”
We shall obviously be finding out more about this major villain as the series progresses as he obviously has plans for Kylo Ren…
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