Lightsabers & Magic: Visual Effects Supervisor Julian Foddy on The Acolyte's Creatures and Weapons of the Jedi 

Working with California-based vendor Luma Pictures, Foddy supervised the depictions of the flying umbramoths. With many shots that are entirely CG creations, they worked closely with series picture editors Miikka Leskinen and Cheryl Potter. “We did a lot of experimenting with timing and cuts to help build the tension, but also not reveal the creature too early,” Foddy notes. “It was very much a narrative desire for Leslye [Headland, the series creator] that you don’t really get a good glimpse of it until it comes and dives for Osha.”

“If you look at periods of extended peace in history,” Foddy continues, “you have things like the Renaissance, where art, design, architecture, and clothing are allowed to flourish because the money, resources, and creativity are available to make beautiful things. So, that was part of the design ethos that Kevin took onboard, as well as the costume design. The costumes, the lightsabers, even to some extent the ships, feel less brutal and more designed and finessed. The Jedi’s robes have more gold and are more regal. There are more curves and flowing lines in the ships.”

Sea Angels Take Flight

The Acolyte included not only heaps of new costumes, locations, and vehicles, but organic lifeforms as well, ranging from the monstrous to the elegant. Among the latter were the butterfly-like creatures that float through the air on the planet Brendok. Young Osha (Lauren Brady) and Mae (Leah Brady) encounter a number of them beneath a vividly yellow bunta tree, and their respective ways of interacting with the delicate creatures reveal important insights into their characters.

“There’s a storytelling purpose for those creatures,” Foddy points out. “They’re supposed to plant in the audience’s mind the idea that perhaps Osha is more benevolent and Mae has a slightly more evil streak. She’s the one who wants to constrain the creatures when they’re trying to fly away, and Osha is more playful with them.”

The production team referenced real-world sea angels to design the creatures. “They’re effectively a mollusk, a little blob of translucent colored jelly,” Foddy notes. The resulting work by the Montreal-based effects vendor Hybride are gentle, ethereal beings with an iridescent glow. And to lay the best groundwork for the digital creatures while onset, Foddy resorted to old school techniques.

“I worked with props to use a lightweight fishing rod and a cardboard cut-out of concept art of the butterfly on the end of a bit of string,” he explains. “They didn’t remain in shot while we were shooting. They posed that up just to give the girls an eyeline guide before we rolled on any given take. Both girls were really great after we’d done the rehearsal and shown them where the butterflies would be and where they needed to look. In post, we were able to match to their eyelines very well. It was a really interesting sequence to shoot.”

Lots of Lightsabers

Perhaps more than any other aspect that audiences have become accustomed to in Star Wars, The Acolyte has been a showcase in lightsaber combat. With multiple Jedi engaging with a Sith warrior on more than one occasion, the use of lightsabers hadn’t been seen at this scale in live-action since the prequel trilogy. It’s something the creative team took very seriously. They studied the various depictions across nearly 50 years of Star Wars storytelling, refining their own desired approach.

For Foddy in particular, the experience was a bit like a lightsaber masterclass. “One thing that I learned from [ILM executive creative director] John Knoll was about how hot the lightsaber core should be, how fuzzy should the edge be, and how much of a taper should the blade have. It’s up for debate, but we settled on about 10% of a taper from the blade to the tip.”

The visual effects process for the sabers began with the tangible props used onset. “Something that I think the fans have picked up on is that lightsaber hilts are slightly wider than they’ve been before,” Foddy explains. “That’s because they actually contain a lot of electronics. The performers onset were using practical lightsabers that have a Perspex tube filled with LEDs, and therefore we do have in effect in-camera lightsabers with interactive light. And in the case of fights, it means they’re able to clash swords and the behavior is correct. Back in the ‘70s, they were using white rods and they were painted over the top. These new ones not only light up, but the props department created electronics that allows us to add flashing and color changes. So when sabers clash during fights, the props department pushes a button and it increases the intensity of the light and you get that flash on the actor’s faces.”

The lengths of the respective blades were important considerations as well. In general, the dimensions are relative to a given character’s height. The Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo) stands some seven feet tall, thus his blade is quite tall as well. But when the Padawan Jecki (Dafne Keen) uses the borrowed weapon, the practicality of such a large prop was too limiting for the actor, who needed to spin and swing it around in close combat. To allow for this, the prop blade was shorter onset, and later extended during post-production.

“One other thing to consider there with the physics is that a real lightsaber would have no weight to the blade because it’s made purely of light,” Foddy says. “But inertia and centrifugal force comes in when you have a prop with an actual weighted blade. So when the blade is whipped around a lot, we’d use a shorter blade with a greater intensity of light. That gave us better results for both the actor’s performance but also the interactive lighting.

“The methodology for creating the CG blades is very much the traditional ILM approach, which involves rendering a 3D volume with a kind of noise pattern running through it and then that’s boosted in the exposure,” Foddy continues. “There are a lot of controls in the composite for how much glow falls off and how quickly it does so, how much motion blur you have, etc. These things are tweaked based on certain tastes, but are also massaged to get the right aesthetic effect.”

One specific technique involved the so-called cortosis effect, when the Stranger (Manny Jacinto) headbutts an opposing lightsaber with his own helmet and armor, something new to the language of Star Wars fights. “The motivation for this effect was the visual storytelling,” as Foddy says. “He uses it without cortosis being explained in the script. That explanation doesn’t come until the next episode, so we needed to make sure the audience instantly understood what was going on. It needed to be visually clear so that the metal contacting the lightsaber blade is cutting it off and taking the energy away. That’s why the energy that dissipates on the helmet and makes sparks is the same color as the lightsaber they came from. As you’re fighting Jedi with different colored sabers, you get different-colored spark events, and it helps the audience mentally connect with what’s going on.

“We wanted them to look almost like magnesium sparks, something really hot and instantaneous, almost effervescent like a big release of energy. We wanted it to feel like it was almost a practical effect. I’ve been on lots of sets with action units over the years, like the Fast and Furious films, with lots of gunshots. Whenever they do gun impacts, they make a special effect with a squib that produces sparks, as well as smoke, which you have to remove in post. But that accidental smoke from that practical effect is what I wanted to create digitally in this instance. There’s something about it that makes it feel tangibly real. It helps trick the audience.”

A Colorful Transformation

In The Acolyte’s final episode, the Jedi Sol (Lee Jung-jae) duels the Stranger, and is ultimately killed by Osha (Amandla Stenberg), who undergoes a significant transformation, both in terms of her character and the lightsaber she takes from Sol. The first consideration for the sequence was its setting in broad daylight. As Foddy points out, a duel of this intensity in the sunlight was new to live-action Star Wars.

“What we were talking about onset is that if you shoot a flashlight at night, it’s very bright, but if you shoot that flashlight during the daytime, you can’t even tell if it’s turned on. So in theory, when you expose for daylight, the blades should be a lot dimmer. But we chose to cheat the intensities up to maintain the visual storytelling and what people expect.”

The color change of Osha’s newly acquired lightsaber from blue to red was first achieved practically with the LED prop onset. But as Foddy emphasizes, the entire process really begins with the kyber crystal inside the weapon. “The idea for the color change in the lightsaber blade is that Osha’s skin touches the exposed crystal that’s slipped out of its housing when Mae throws the saber and it breaks. Without Osha realizing that she’s touching the crystal, it picks up on the hate and anger that’s flowing through her. It was something that we iterated on an awful lot, not so much for trying to get it to look right, but it was the storytelling aspect. We needed to show the audience what was happening.

“We originally experimented with jagged movements to the red as it overtakes the blue of the crystal, a little bit almost like the crystal was fracturing,” Foddy continues. “There’s an effect that I’d done for the opening credits of The Dark Knight Rises where the bat logo forms from shards of cracking glass, so we had an idea of trying something a bit like that to suggest that, as the crystal is changing color, it fractures internally. It’s not suggesting that it would shatter, but just developing more internal facets that create these red streaks inside. We found that was very difficult for an audience to read. This had always been referred to as ‘bleeding the lightsaber red.’ So we made it look like blood leaking into a pool, like an ink tank effect where the blood is flowing into the crystal from her hand. It’s a fully CG crystal.”

Telling a Star Wars Story

As Foddy tells it, working on The Acolyte was truly the full package experience. “Sometimes, even if it wasn’t for a specific visual effect, I was able to make a suggestion for something that you see onscreen," he says. "It’s really creatively satisfying.”

Foddy adds that “it was quite a moment being at the premiere in L.A. seeing my name in the credits. This is the first time I’ve had the overall production supervisor role, so it’s my first ‘big letters’ credit, and I’m really pleased that it’s the blue font on a space background.”

Foddy’s own personal journey has paralleled that of ILM’s London studio, which served as the central visual effects hub for the nearly 3,000-shot production. “ILM London has evolved a lot, not only in terms of the size and the number of people, but the scope and scale of work that we take on,” he explains. “In the early days, London might take on a certain sequence from a movie being hubbed in San Francisco, more of an assisting role. Now, pretty much everything that ILM London works on is hubbed in London, even carried out exclusively here. I was very pleased that London was the hub for Acolyte.”

For more on ILM's work on The Acolyte, read about the world-building of the series now on Lucasfilm.com.