How one VFX studio brought The Mandalorian's blurrgs to life

About halfway through the first episode of The Mandalorian, shortly after that titular character lands on the desert-like planet of Arvala-7, our helmeted hero makes an admission to Kuiil, a friendly Ugnaught who’s just come to his rescue.

“I don’t know how to ride blurrg.”

That line, uttered casually by the Mandalorian, sets up what has become one of the more memorable and possibly iconic moments from Disney’s latest entry into the vast Star Wars canon: the taming of the blurrg.

“We call [them] the piranha tadpoles,” says Goran Backman somewhat cheekily, as we discuss his company’s work on those creatures for the popular Disney+ series. Backman is the Toronto-based VFX supervisor for Pixomondo, one of the visual effects studios that Disney, Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic leaned on to help flesh out the fantasy worlds of The Mandalorian. His studio was responsible for the design work behind several of the series' memorable creatures, including the dewbacks, the flying beast and "space goat" from episode 7, as well as the blurrgs.

But the final, terrifying version of the blurrgs you saw streaming on screen wasn’t necessarily what writer/director Jon Favreau had initially imagined for the series. Those intimidating, bipedal creatures originally debuted in the 1985 made-for-TV film, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, an apparent favorite of Favreau’s, and looked very much like puppets. And, as such, Favreau wanted Pixomondo to faithfully recreate those now primitive-seeming practical effects with computer-generated imagery.

“We initially tried to replicate that stop-motion feel to it… making it a little bit sort of like the material you use for mannequins… plasticky. It also went into the animation of how we approached it, so you have a little bit of jittery [movement]. We did try all of that to see if we could get some of that kind of charm that Favreau liked,” says Backman.

Ultimately, the Pixomondo team shifted the design to be more realistic, in keeping with the effects work permeating the rest of The Mandalorian’s world. With guidance from ILM, Backman and his team of globally-based artists looked closely at real-world animals for inspiration. He says ILM was keen, in particular, for Pixomondo “to show the blurrg’s eyes well and have that come alive.” So his team pulled references from elephants and rhinos to deliver that feeling for the viewer.

“We looked at how the skin folds under the eyes. And how we have patches on the skin where they’re wetter... where there’s mud and also where the tears might’ve fallen down from [the blurrg’s] tear ducts,” says Backman.

ILM was keen for Pixomondo “to show the blurrg’s eyes well and have that come alive.”

Perhaps the most fascinating and complicated aspect of bringing the blurrgs to life, was the work Pixomondo did to simulate riding one. For that, the production team relied on what they call a “buck” (think those mechanical bulls you see drunk people flying off of in certain bars or fairs). That buck, or motion base as it’s more commonly known in the industry, is essentially a mount atop computer-driven pistons. It’s what Favreau would use in shots as a stand-in for the blurrg, and what the actors riding the blurrgs would be seated upon. The challenge for Backman’s team was matching those filmed shots of the buck with their CG creation, and ensuring their animation would even be possible within the constraints of the set.

“The first step was to get the scan from them and ensure that our character, our creature matched those dimensions. And then from there, we started to animate,” says Backman. “We got the weight from the blurrg and we tried to get it to move it as much as we could because the motion base is limiting because it’s a practical thing with pistons trying to shove something around really fast. So we also had to be careful with that acceleration and motion… how much we rotated that motion base. We had our rig inside our animation software. We used Maya for that. We had little icons and little controls that showed us: Now you’re moving it too fast. Now you’re moving out of range. ... So we saw in 3D space what it would look like on the day of the shoot. And that made us know ahead of time, we’re doing something now that they won’t be able to do on the set. So now we have to scale it back.”

“Starting from something that is natural, that is what you want,” he says. “You want to make it look like it’s real.”

At the height of Pixomondo’s year-long work on The Mandalorian, Backman says his team had ballooned to encompass about 400 or so artists. That number may seem incredibly outsized until you consider the length of time required to animate a scene. According to Backman, the more complex creature-work would result in roughly six to nine seconds of animation per week. “That’s a ballpark number,” he adds.

Beyond Pixomondo’s creature work, the studio was also responsible for building certain environments ILM hadn’t already fleshed out with its virtual production techniques. For the planet Arvala-7, Backman’s team turned to some very familiar source material: Toronto. In one scene of the show, we see a shot of a rain-soaked Arvala-7 just after a storm (see 00:28 in the video up top). Those muddy puddles aren’t some pure CG creation, however — they’re based on photos taken from a real Toronto park.

“Our CG supervisor, he went out and he shot photos of mud outside in the Toronto area,” Backman explains. “And we got lucky with the weather because we had a bunch of snow and it was thawing right at the time, and a lot of water had just run through the area. … And then we take at least 50 — it can be between 50 and 200 photos — of the same area. And then you feed that into the computer and do a little bit of hacker-y things, and then you get a version of this in the 3D space with the texture and the shape, the form of the model itself. Then we then took that and scaled it up.”

Backman says ILM also did similar location-based work to inform its environmental designs, with images of Iceland, amongst other natural landscapes, helping to build out the world as realistically as possible.

“Starting from something that is natural, that is what you want,” he says. “You want to make it look like it’s real.”

If the blurrg’s tear-stained, elephant-like eyes are any indication, it’s fair to say Pixomondo succeeded.

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