There have always been technology trends in filmmaking, but Disney’s current CGI obsession is hurting both the MCU and Star Wars. Whenever one film demonstrates the advantage of a new technology, other movies and shows attempt to imitate it, usually without the same level of success because they’re being made by production teams who aren’t as familiar with the techniques as the people who innovated it.
Take, for example, The Matrix. Released in 1999, the movie was particularly noted for its innovative bullet-time technology. The next few years saw a surge in entertainment deploying the same techniques, and by the time The Matrix Reloaded hit cinemas in 2003, bullet-time was commonplace. In 2009, the release of James Cameron’s Avatar revolutionized 3D, and countless other directors tried to follow in his footsteps. Although 3D was integral to Avatar, its imitators often made the technology feel superfluous, giving 3D a bad name.
Something similar is happening again, but oddly with just a single studio. In 2019, Disney’s first live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian, deployed a new technology called the Volume, and it proved a remarkable success. In this case, the technology is owned by Disney, which means its effect is far more concentrated. Unfortunately, it’s having a hugely detrimental impact on both their Star Wars and Marvel franchises.
What Is The Volume? Disney’s Innovative Tech Explained
The Mandalorian employed the Volume, a new technology developed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Essentially a replacement for greenscreen, it allows actors to perform in front of a massive, curved LED screen showing photorealistic backdrops. The Volume reduces the need for travel because a crew can conceivably film scenes set in a desert on the same day they shoot other scenes in an Arctic wasteland. It’s easy to see why Disney saw the benefit of this approach, a cheap alternative to location filming that was particularly helpful in getting production started again despite restrictions during the pandemic.
Actors have praised the Volume as well, simply because they prefer it to greenscreen. It removes the need to stand in front of a green screen and simply imagine something happening; rather, they can act against a backdrop, allowing it to shape their performance. The technology is particularly helpful for creating alien environments, such as the Volume-created environments in Thor: Love and Thunder, that don’t correspond with any location on Earth and feel too complex for traditional sets.
How The Volume Worked On The Mandalorian
The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau has always loved working with new technology; he came to Lucasfilm fresh from the experience of making The Jungle Book, after all. He swiftly realized the scheduling constraints of producing a TV show would mean he couldn’t conduct the same amount of location filming, and he had to find a substitute that was just as spectacular. That led Favreau to begin meeting with ILM, Epic Games (maker of the Unreal Engine), and production technology partners Golem Creations, Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, NVIDIA, and ARRI.
The Mandalorian visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff explained in an interview (via StarWars.com), “One of the things we wanted to do is move away from green screens and make the scale of a Star Wars TV show work. And we knew that we needed a technological innovation to push the boundaries and provide a solve for the production.” Lucasfilm and ILM began running tests in June 2018, and swiftly learned there were two keys to making the Volume work: choosing the backgrounds with care so they didn’t feel too distinct and remote, and ensuring consistent lighting to match the actors performing against these 3D backdrops. Some actors found the experience challenging; Bill Burr got vertigo because “if the camera moves behind me, the stuff behind you moves. You get like vertigo.” He believed this actually helped his performances, in that he was forced to focus so closely on the other actors.
Marvel & Star Wars Have Both Misused The Volume
The Volume was a success for The Mandalorian, but unfortunately, it’s now being rolled out a little too widely, and to production teams who are unused to it. Sometimes the backgrounds aren’t being chosen correctly, leaving them appearing flat and distant. In terms of structure, the Volume lends itself to scenes with a particular layout, where the main characters are grouped together in the foreground. While those with experience are even improving the technique, as evident in the better visuals of season 2 of The Mandalorian, many other directors don’t seem to have focused sufficiently on lighting, meaning the performers in the foreground feel as though they’ve just been pasted on a backdrop.
Worse still, when the cameras move and the background changes, the actors feel that “vertigo” Burr described and focus so closely on one another that it doesn’t feel natural. The Volume is a good tool in skilled hands, but it’s also new, meaning a lot of the production teams are still only just getting used to it, and there’s a danger of overusing it. Some productions have rightly chosen to avoid it, with Loki‘s production designer Kasra Farahani explaining the Volume “just wasn’t creatively super-relevant” for her show.
In general, though, Disney studios seem to be pushing the Volume, and understandably so, as it’s an alternative to costly location filming — there’s also the savings over set dressings, as a background that’s entirely CGI is created by VFX artists, who aren’t unionized and thus don’t have collective bargaining for better wages and conditions. The Volume’s limitations are beginning to become visible, with Obi-Wan Kenobi criticized for an overdependence on the same scene layouts and flat, muted lighting. Thor: Love and Thunder has been heavily criticized for its CGI, too, with the actors feeling completely divorced from their environments.
Will Disney’s Problems With The Volume Be Fixed?
Looking back at the examples of bullet-time after The Matrix and Avatar‘s impact on 3D, innovations are typically imitated, and at first, the imitations usually aren’t as good as the original. Directors, producers, and cinematographers are new to the technology, meaning they make mistakes the original crew avoided. The problems lessen as more people grow in terms of experience; what’s more, studios gradually begin to realize it isn’t always necessary and encourage its use when it is appropriate rather than pushing it wholesale. The critical response to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Thor: Love and Thunder is probably part of this process, encouraging studios to avoid repeating those mistakes and warning production teams that the Volume is a tool rather than a master.
There is, however, one major difference between the Volume and previous innovations; it’s largely being pushed by a single company, Disney — although it’s worth noting that the Volume was used on The Batman as well. This means the mistakes are simply a lot more concentrated right now, particularly affecting the MCU and Star Wars. But the various teams will gradually figure out when and how they should use the Volume, meaning a balance will be found.
