Making the Mandalorian

This month, The Mandalorian returns for its third season on Disney+. To bring the world of Star Wars to TV, visual effects artists at the company Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) created a whole new way to make alien worlds. They built a large dome-shaped room and covered its ceiling and walls in more than 2,200 LED screens. The screens display different locations in the show behind the actors. As the actors move within the space, the images on the screens shift. This creates the illusion of a realistic background.

Locations are created using software originally developed to build environments in video games. Because each landscape can be stored in a computer, “we can return to the same environments over and over again,” says Richard Bluff, a visual effects expert at ILM.