An excerpt from issue #33 of befores & afters magazine.
A large part of the Star Wars aesthetic featured in season 2 of Andor, of course, is creatures and droids, as orchestrated by Neal Scanlan’s team. “A vast majority of the creatures and droids were in-camera,” notes production visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo. “There were certainly moments where we have painted out a puppeteer, but with, say, B2EMO, that was once again entirely practical. We did not touch a single shot of him other than painting out some crew reflections. It just was such a great show where it felt like every department was just coming together to contribute what they do best.”
For a Star Wars show, the creatures and droids in Andor season 2 are simultaneously while also not necessarily being front-and-center. “They’re there, if you look, but you’ve got to look for them,” advises Scanlan. “There are sequences where you see a particular creature—we would call them cast creatures—where they have lines, they say something, but they are there in the moment. All the things that we make have a backstory, so they have a much bigger story than maybe what you are seeing, but they are there. They are doing their everyday tasks. They’re doing everyday things in a world where they’re not extraordinary, they’re part of this world.”
An example Scanlan cites as part of that approach are loading droids featured in the Senate. “Look for them, and you’ll find them. They were very demanding because essentially they were two droids that became one, a larger platform serviced by a smaller platform that interlocked. It was just one of those droid concepts that we hadn’t done much of, where we were looking at their real-world use, how they would work, how they interrelate. Building them and performing them, it was quite demanding. But they very much were fun to me, this idea of, what they would do and how they would work?”
A more prominent droid is B2EMO, a groundmech salvage assist unit droid that was also featured in season 1. “B2 is quite complex,” explains Scanlan, noting that the droid was remotely operated by several operators. “He has a whole kind of midsection which is essentially a carousel that can move tools around, up, down, left. His drive base has what we call omnidirectional wheels. In other words, multi- directional wheels; they can go in any pattern, his wheel base can change. He has the moving head, which allows him to emote with his head positions. The same person who’s operating the head is the person who’s vocalizing him.”
In terms of creatures, one of Scanlan’s highlights was Senator #4, a Cingulon seen speaking with Mon Mothma. “This was a make-up effect. I always enjoy it when there’s a make-up that might work. We called him ‘Lettuce Head’. He was played by Nick Kellington. I think for the senators, generally, they gave us a little bit more of an opportunity to show our wares and do a little bit more of a performance, both a performer’s performance and an animatronic performance.”
Some creatures featured in season 2 had actually made brief appearances in season 1, or even earlier Star Wars films. The ageing hospital patient used by Kleya Marki to get access to Luthen was originally only glimpsed in the first season, and then fleshed out for this sequence. It involved animatronics for eye blinks and mouth movement, and a special set-up to enable a particular ‘gurn’ look when the mouth was being closed. Another character like this was the furry Gigoran known as Moroff, who hangs around Saw Gerrera. This character, originally featured in Rogue One, was played by Ian Whyte. “I love the design,” says Scanlan. “Tony loved him, too. He felt that the presence was right, so he was brought forward. The character is made like a Wookie, essentially, in his constructional approach. It’s very much a similar sort of version of Chewie in the fact that it’s a man in a fur suit, with much less animatronics, just that his head is higher than Chewie’s.”
In addition to human performers playing creatures, Scanlan notes he is just as interested in dressing a few animals to play aliens. “In the first season and in Solo, we have Corellian hounds which started as dogs dressed by us. In Ghorman, which is more of a high fashion area, we had several small dogs that we dressed up, too.”
Collaboration between creature effects and digital visual effects was present throughout the series. “For example,” says Scanlan, “there’s several droids that we performed on pole arms, and the pole arms were removed later. It is something we really like doing, and it’s something that’s only possible now in the digital era. I push it as far as I can push it, because being able to operate and perform things without being encumbered by restrictions is a marvelous thing to be able to do, and then have the brilliant digital guys clean us all up is a joy.”
Go behind the scenes of season 2 of ‘Andor’ in a full issue of befores & afters magazine
Similarly, Scanlan was involved early on in decisions about when creatures or droids would be realized as practical creations, or CG, or both. “Let’s take something like K-2SO as a character. Clearly his proportions make it very difficult —you can’t have a person in a suit to play that role. So clearly the beginning of the conversation is that this is definitely going to be digital. But in this series, we’ve also built parts of him; the broken crashed version of him that was smashed, and the point in which they reprogram him as they bring him back. They were practical, so they were there on set. Obviously, the moment he stands up, he’s back into the digital world again. In those first conversations that we have, we’re trying to hold on to a real practical world of Star Wars, but we also want to be able to step out of that, not to be so restricted by it that it is such a mantra that can’t be broken.”
“The great thing is to look at any one entity and go, well, if we built one of those, we could duplicate them,” continues Scanlan. “If you wanted to have a performer there, we could remove it. If we wanted to have an aspect of that to be CG- enhanced, we can. Where we might want a certain effect to take place that is something that special effects can help us do, then we would do the same. So, those conversations are always quite fun conversations. They really help define everything about the way that we are going to shoot something, which obviously then leeches back into the actual shoot day, the set construction and the expectations of what we’ll achieve.”
