Unreal Filmmaking: Sunset in Space
This is the first Studio Diary on pre-production on Project Rogue, and focuses on the concept and early look development. You can read the second one here, and about production here and here.
When getting started with Project Rogue, the biggest question in my mind was this: How do I translate the mood of the opening sequence of Top Gun (one of the most iconic title sequences ever) to a Star Wars context?
I like to start with story and have everything be driven by narrative, and having heard the (now cancelled) Rogue Squadron movie be pitched as “Top Gun in space”, that felt like a natural narrative entry point. Funnily enough, the recent ILM documentary shows that Lucas’ original pitch for Star Wars was pretty much “dogfights in space” — proving that all things come full circle. Top Gun begins with a static text plate that explains the context and meaning of the title, so I wrote up an equivalent to use in the same way.
I briefly considered turning the text into a Star Wars-style opening title crawl, but decided that would feel too hokey. The idea of the short was to shoot it like they shot Top Gun, but with X-Wings, and so the primary aesthetic driver should still feel grounded (in an ’80s action movie sort of way.)
Collecting reference was the next step, so I piled a bunch of frames from the opening sequence into PureRef, and then on the advice of my mentors at CGSpectrum, collected several reference images for spacecraft and space scenes in order to try and connect the two visually. Given the stylized orange, ‘permanent sunset’ look of Top Gun, I also collected images from films that had striking orange-blue palettes to see how they worked.
The first look-development hurdle was that inconveniently, light in space is usually white or bluish-white — and certainly not the dusty orange of Top Gun — so how to achieve the look of sunset in space? The silhouetted shapes of people and aircraft against an orange sky is the defining visual characteristic of the original — how to make that work in space without sacrificing too much realism? The obvious answer was to have a classically Star Wars orange planet, and use that as the backdrop — it would reflect some orange light, and I could crank that up a bit to light the X-Wings and space station.
An interesting learning for me was training my eyes and brain to modulate the level of color and stylization, in order to better replicate the original. When I made the above lighting setup I thought it looked great, but with feedback from my mentors, and a more honest look at the reference images, I could see it is obviously oversaturated and over the top. It looks more like Sunshine (where the spacecraft is literally next to the Sun) vs. the original sequence.
Another consequence of the more grounded approach, was that the pilot models I had originally intended to use (from the Disney Infinity game) were much too stylized and cartoony to fit with the realistic lighting and X-Wings I was using here. So I ended up adapting the human models from BigMediumSmall’s Mech Squad pack, and outfitting them with the helmet from the Disney Infinity Luke Skywalker model.
Helmets became a broader question too — I only had two human models from the Mech Squad pack — which I intended to re-use in all the shots — and needed a way to hide their faces, so that the re-use would be less obvious. I also had a bunch of people running around in open vacuum, given the space station bay doors are open, so helmets made sense. I re-colored their uniforms, along the lines of the various uniforms in Top Gun and developed male and female versions.
I was eventually able to get a couple of early test shots done, which looked pretty good, and felt enough like Top Gun that I started cranking out a few more to develop a standardized workflow.
To my mentors’ more experienced eyes, there were, however, a few glaring (pun not intended) issues that I wasn’t really aware of — I’ll use the shot above as an example. First, way too much lens flare — even JJ Abrams would think this was a bit much. Second, several parts of the shot are overexposed — the hotspot at the top of the bay door opening, the overhead lights etc. Third, the planet has no atmosphere — which, while not strictly necessary, is an easy way to add visual interest and emphasize the sunset look. Fourth, the steam is a key part of the Top Gun look, and it’s not really working at all.
With their advice and help I was able to address all four issues. To fix the first, I just switched off Bloom entirely — you can do lens flares and other similar effects better and with more control in a post-processing program like Da Vinci Resolve. The second issue required more work — I pretty much fully reworked the lighting setup for the whole scene, but the big change was making the light source that represented the Sun much much larger, which is more accurate, and creates less sharp hotspots. I also tweaked the light from a bright orange to a redder hue, that felt more like a marriage of Star Wars and Top Gun. The third was relatively simple — adding a SkyAtmosphere object to the planet blueprint, and making it reactive to the Sun light source. And finally I just pulled some nice steam emitters from one of Epic’s example scenes and reworked them to fit.
As is probably obvious, this is an incredibly iterative process of refinement, with each refinement becoming more and more minor as you get further along— to the point where you start questioning whether anyone will actually notice what you’re changing. For me, I stopped when my brain decided it was tired and time to move to the next shot.
In the next instalment of this series, I’ll go into more pre-production stuff, covering what it’s like to build a virtual set in Unreal, and more on kitbashing, blueprints and animation techniques.
If you want to follow my progress more closely, I’m posting dailies pretty regularly to @locodrome on Instagram.
