ILM VFX Supervisor Roger Guyett on ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

From an interview with Barbara Robertson for Studio Daily:

When you see the little speeder moving across the landscape, it’s a completely digital shot. But because we’d been there, when we recreated that moment, we did it from a physically-based approach. I don’t know if J.J. [Abrams] knows how we constructed the images, but he was at the location and he knew how it looked.

The other thing is that we photographed these events in a way that I think did not cross the line of the impossible with complicated camera moves. We made sure if you had a Millennium Falcon, this is how you’d shoot it. We tried to photograph some kind of version of all these events to give us a point of reference even if we threw it away. One advantage I had in putting shots together in the final movie is that I shot second unit. If a shot involved visual effects, I knew what we’d need to achieve.

Amen. I would argue the single biggest crime in the digital VFX era is absurdly impossible camera movement. (Via Todd Vaziri.)

★ Sunday, 10 January 2016