The newest Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, generated record levels of excitement by promising the old Star Wars: director J.J. Abrams brought back the franchise’s original stars and spoke endlessly of returning the magical “feel” of George Lucas’s first trilogy. A lot of the chatter, both from filmmaker and fans, centered on the revival of “practical effects,” which was code for more tangible creatures and space crafts in more physical environments. It would be a throwback, a link to the charming original films and nothing like the CGI-heavy prequels, the bastard stepchildren of Star Wars movies.

The truth is that while the plot of the new film adhered to the journey — in many places beat-for-beat — depicted in A New Hope, Abrams and his team were not exactly working with the now-ancient tools that Lucas and his team engineered in the ’70s. Of the nearly 2,500 shots in The Force Awakens, approximately 2,100 of them boasted visual effects of some kind — very many of them digital. The goal, according to Patrick Tubach, a VFX supervisor at Lucasfilm’s ILM, was to use enough real elements to trick the audience into thinking that the many digital add-ons were also physical matter.

“If we’ve done our job right, no one really thinks about the fact that we’ve done our job,” Tubach, whose VFX team was nominated for an Oscar on Thursday, told Yahoo Movies. “We take it as a compliment that people feel like it was all a practical thing. But whenever people sit down to think about it, there’s no way to make a Star Wars movie without visual effects; there wasn’t back in 1977 and there isn’t now.”

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That’s especially so in an era in which green-screen sets and digital monsters have become the money-saving norm — why travel to an exotic location when you can render one on a computer? But with The Force Awakens, there was an unusual willingness to spend the time and money required to bring the actors (and thus the audience) on a more believable ride.

“It comes down to what is going to be good for the actors on set, and what is going to feel more tangible for the audience,” Tubach said. “I think you think a lot about interaction. If the actors are interacting with something, you absolutely want to try to build it for real if you can. You don’t want to create these odd situations where you’re having characters act to green screen or react to environment and a set that aren’t there. To be able to turn to an actual droid and have a conversation was huge for everyone.”

Related: Mind-Blowing ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Concept Art, From Kira to the Jedi Killer



Generally, digital elements were added in post-production, to extend and populate real locations (like the desert of Jakku) and sets built at Pinewood Studio in the U.K. (the Star Destroyer’s hangar and Starkiller Base in particular). Another strategy: use real, physical versions of props and planes enough (especially in close-ups) that when a scene required them to be created by a computer in post-production — like in action sequences — audiences didn’t think twice about any differences. “I think there are a lot of BB-8 shots that people would be surprised to know are digital,” Tubach admitted. “There are some shots of R2-D2 that people would be surprised to know are digital.”

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Poe and Stormtroopers on the set of ‘The Force Awakens’ (Disney/Lucas)



The same principle applied to the Millennium Falcon, which was being put on film for the first time since it helped bring down the second Death Star in 1983. They rebuilt the famous Corellian freighter, creating a faithful second-generation ship that — as Harrison Ford found out — was just as heavy as the original. The real difficulty came in trying to emulate the way that the original Falcon flew, getting its twists and turns and thrust to light speed just right; whereas the first trilogy used miniature models for these space sequences, ILM would be creating the images entirely with computers.

