
The scenes she’s in feel very specific to The Rise of Skywalker, despite coming from outtakes and unused footage. Let’s talk about bringing Leia back in the film. That makes it a very collaborative experience with everyone here and very, very satisfying. That’s part of the DNA of Star Wars and part of the fun of it is trying to bring this practical approach to everything. At the end of the day, though, this is a movie where you want the visual effects to be a supporting and obviously spectacular element of the story, but you’re trying to make the audience believe that everything is happening around them for real. And we had some really complicated animatronics for Maz Kanata. It’s 17,000 ships battling over Exogal and everything that goes along with that. The end of the movie was also a colossal challenge.

For example, the speeder chase or Rey taking down the TIE fighter, we built all that digitally. It’s really all about what I call the invisible work, re-creating environments in a way that’s photorealistic so - hopefully - you don’t know that some of the stuff we’re doing isn’t real.

That really tested the digital technology. And then there was the water scene with Rey and Kylo fighting on the pier.

Roger Guyett: The most obvious one is Leia. What were some of the standout elements of this film from your side of the camera? Image used with permission by copyright holderĭigital Trends: It feels like every Star Wars film has a certain set of creatures, characters, or sequences that really set it apart and the visual effects team is particularly proud of. Abrams, Oscar isaac and Neal Scanlon with Klaud on the set of STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. Digital Trends spoke to the team responsible for the visual effects in The Rise of Skywalker, including Roger Guyett (overall visual effects supervisor), Neal Scanlan (creature effects supervisor), Patrick Tubach ( Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor), and Dominic Tuohy (special effects supervisor), to learn how some of the film’s most memorable scenes were created.
