Rob Bredow, head of Lucasfilm’s visual effects division Industrial Light & Magic, came to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy in early 2018 with a bold idea for filming Jon Favreau’s upcoming TV series, “The Mandalorian.”

The filmmakers wanted to use what they’d been calling the “stage of the future”: a set wrapped in LED screens to create the virtual backgrounds for the show.



For the record: An earlier version of this article misidentified producer Frank Marshall as Rob Marshall.

The company had used the technique previously to create the Millennium Falcon’s Kessel Run in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” but never at the scale Bredow was proposing.