Lucasfilm Ltd./Disney
Richard Bluff
Tatooine, a desert planet with two suns, is Luke Skywalker’s home. It has been a central location in Star Wars since 1977. Film teams for seven movies headed to North Africa to film in a desert in Tunisia to make the alien world as real as possible.
The Mandalorian, a TV show streaming on Disney+, is the most recent Star Wars tale to visit Tattoine. It follows a bounty hunter who travels the galaxy tracking his next assignment. The second season debuted on October 30.
But the cast of The Mandalorian didn’t film in a desert. They didn’t even film outside! The film crew built a large hemispherical room called the Volume in a studio in Southern California. Every wall and even the ceiling of the Volume is covered in LED screens.
As the actors move within the space, the images on the screens shift to create the illusion that they are on an alien planet. It’s an entirely new way of doing special effects, which brings out-of-this-world locations to life before the actors’ and film crew’s eyes. “That’s what Star Wars is, it’s these other worlds,” says visual effects expert Richard Bluff, who works for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). ILM is the visual effects company that works on all live-action Star Wars movies and TV shows. “We always have to convince actors and camera crews that what they’re shooting against is real,” he says.