Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has two major points of conversation amongst fans: Darth Vader's amazing scene and the digital characters of Grand Moff Tarkin as originally played by Peter Cushing, and a 19 year-old Princess Leia, just as they appeared in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. The latter was the topic of discussion in a segment on ABC's Nightline, as ILM opened their doors to the news show for an inside look on how those characters were created and used in the movie.

"I think Tarkin, because he's central to the story of the Death Star, what it is and how it came to be," was essential to Rogue One, said EP and VFX Supervisor (and story writer credti) John Knoll. For the young princess Leia, it was a matter of the timing of the movie, ending "minutes before A New Hope," as he noted.

The difficulty of the task, however, was at the front of the minds of Knoll and his team. "We look at human faces all day every day so people are very attuned to anything that looks off," Knoll said. Paul Giacoppo was the Digital Character Model Supervisor for ILM on the project, which he called "one of the hardest things you can do."