With how the story of Supreme Leader Snoke has played out in ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ it could be years before we ever find out the truth about this replacement for The Emperor but we can learn how he was brought to life! Well, to life on the big screen that is. Kylo Ren’s master was played by the always talented Andy Serkis in the latest two installments of the Skywalker Saga and now we’re learning a bit of what Industrial Light & Magic did to showcase the villain who was previously only seen as a giant hologram.
VFX supervisor Ben Morris was able to shed some light on the subject, but first, he wanted to praise the actor in the motion capture costume by saying that “Andy Serkis gave an incredibly resonant performance while we were on set.”
As to what went into creating the look of this non-Sith Force user that still was part of the Dark Side:
“We wanted to bring back some realistic human skin texture. We really pushed the look of our old-age skin. We looked at a lot of real-world references because we didn’t want his disfigurations to be so fantastical that people wouldn’t believe them.
However, for as much of the details on the physical aspects of the character, a lot of work went specifically in getting the eyes right as:
“We pushed our eye modeling to be as anatomically accurate is it could be. It’s all in the details — the eyeball, iris, cornea, tear ducts and, also as eyes get older, they have vein structures and other details.”
The attention to detail didn’t go unnoticed as Snoke looks truly terrifying. However, even the full-sized robe which Snoke wore ended up as CG though it was based on one that was actually created for the production:
“A stand-in who was over 7 feet tall wore that, and we’d bring the robe into the studio and we’d photograph, analyze and scan the structure so that we could create an exact replica [in CG]”
The effects for ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ went through “all four ILM locations (San Francisco, London, Singapore and Vancouver) as well as six additional vendors” and even for those who weren’t fans of the film almost everyone can agree that it was visually stunning.
Are you thrilled with how amazing ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ looked on the big screen? Do you feel that the post-production process paid off in the end? Share your thoughts below!
Source: The Hollywood Reporter