‘Star Wars: The Bad Batch’ Looked to ‘Elizabeth’ for Season 3 Inspiration
Halfway through the run of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” Joel Aron, the show’s CG and lighting supervisor, found himself alone in the dailies theater with colorist Sean Wells as they mixed a scene when in walked creator George Lucas.
“He sat with us for about a half an hour, and all he kept saying was, ‘Push it, push it, just keep pushing until we just blow out the light and let the shape exist,'” recalled Aron, now cinematography lighting & VFX director on “Star Wars: The Bad Batch” and “Tales of the Empire.” That meeting helped inform the visual language on the show, which has carried over nearly 20 years later to every “Star Wars” animated project since, from “Rebels” to the recently finished “The Bad Batch” and “Tales of the Empire.”
A big part of that visual language is the lighting. At a time when many TV shows are so dark you can barely see what’s going on, “The Bad Batch” stands out because of its use of light and dark. Due to the nature of the story and its main characters being a special ops team, most of the three-season show took place at night with limited light sources. Despite this, the action is quite clear, and the characters are never obfuscated. Many scenes, especially in relation to the more mystery-heavy plotlines, had noir-inspired lighting that added to the intrigue while offering a look no other animated TV show has.
Aron’s biggest influence for “The Bad Batch” was the 1998 movie “Elizabeth,” particularly the way that movie “reduces the amount of shapes that you need to see and only lets you see what you need to see.” It doesn’t matter how dark a scene is; what matters is that the audience doesn’t feel like they’re missing out on what is happening. This is part of what makes the “Star Wars” animated shows unique, in that their visual language takes inspiration not from other animated titles but from live-action. “At no time do I use animation as reference, never,” Aron explained. Instead, he takes the time to write entire documents explaining to the animation team at studio CGCG in Taiwan how to employ certain cinematic techniques, like a multiple-page document breaking down Kodachrome so it could be used in a single scene. In a way, Aron is still following the tenets imparted by Lucas years ago, specifically to throw continuity out the window. “Continuity is for wimps, that’s what he would always tell us,” he said. It doesn’t matter what the lighting was in the previous shot as you go into the next one, all that matters is that you make sure the story is being told in the most visually interesting way.
Part of this comes from Aron’s own background as a visual effects artist at ILM during its most experimental era with computer graphics, having worked on “Jurassic Park” and “Jumanji,” among other titles. “I never try and limit myself,” he explained. “I get myself in so much trouble, it’s ridiculous. The amount of hours that I have to work to make up for the shit that I said we could do, it’s crazy. But we love it.”
Case in point: Introducing an anamorphic lens in the last season of “The Bad Batch,” something Aron has been trying to do for years. The change came in episode 10 of this last season when Omega gets captured by the Empire again, influenced by cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s work on “Black Narcissus.” Although the anamorphic lens gives the show a more refined depth of field and big screen look, it also means rethinking the team’s entire approach to depth of field and their use of background. Still, once that problem was overcome, now the team at ILM and studio CGCG are using anamorphic lens on other titles, including the recently released “Tales of the Empire.”
“I’m trying to keep that energy that George had when he was making ‘A New Hope’ alive,” Aron said. Part of that intent is using actual miniatures and bringing back some practical effects even to animation, particularly CG animation. In “The Bad Batch,” we see Tarkin’s personal Star Destroyer show up for a few seconds, a last-minute idea from executive producer Dave Filoni that was going to take too long to do digitally — but Aron had another idea. “I raided the ILM model library and grabbed the Star Destroyer from ‘Rogue One.'” That model was then rendered in an orthographic top-down view, which matte painter Kyra Kabler then painted over to make it look like it had brushstrokes over it. The whole thing took three days, faster than audiences and even the show’s executives would think.
For “Tales of the Empire,” the team took things even further. One of the episodes features a practical mountain range location in front of an oil matte-painted background — on top of which the animators rendered their CG set. “It was a hell of a lot faster than doing it in CG,” Aron explained, which, after years of CG being used for cost-cutting and time-reducing purposes, is not only a surprise but an encouraging sign of things to come. “So there’s a shot where the camera opens up and you see the mountains and the background sky, and then you see our little CG set integrated into the practical Dathomir mountain, giving you a taste of classic filmmaking.”
This approach keeps George Lucas and ILM’s original spirit of innovation and excitement alive over a decade since the creator departed Lucasfilm and nearly 20 years since the start of Lucasfilm Animation, and there is no going back. “We’re gonna do a lot more of that,” Aron said. “It’s a lot more fun to take it in and build on what we know, to look at how it was done in the past and make it new again in the show. We’re not going to stop.”
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