May The 4th Be With You

This day is so much fun. On May 4th, Industrial Light and Magic helped us celebrate Star Wars Day. Two people who worked on Star Wars Movies and the Disney+ show, The Mandalorian, virtually joined us on Kaleidoscope, the Child Life Channel. Our TV shows can be interactive where patients can call in. For example, one patient asked an important question, "Why is Baby Yoda green?" Christian Alzmann, the concept artist for Baby Yoda, replied, "Baby Yoda is green because Yoda is green." "I think they went with green because green immediately says that he is an alien ."

Christian Alzmann

Concept Design Supervisor

Christian showed the kids a lot of his artwork from Star Wars. He talked about how characters are developed. "Everything starts from words on a page." Incredible, just words. Christian would ask himself, "What does the Mandalorian look like?" What does Grogu look like?" Before there was a script Christian received a funny description of what the director wanted Grogu to resemble. "Basically, my brief was, it's a toddler baby version of Yoda. That's when the team started referring to Grogu as baby Yoda. He (the director) kinda want it to look like an ugly puppet. Like an ugly little puppet from the 80's" Christian worked on various ideas by drawing little sketches on post-it notes. His goal was to make this character look younger. Christian began to make the cheeks rounder. The concept of what a toddler's teeth look like was added to the design. Other people included their ideas too. Dave Filoni, a director, added drawings that included what Grodu would wear, like the oversized collar we now see on Baby Yoda's outfit. Christian's third concept of Grogu looked amazing; everyone liked it. Dave Filoni would joke that if they could sell the merchandise now, the revenue just from Baby Yoda would pay for the whole Disney+ series.

It was fun to hear Christian talk about how the team designed BB-8. As soon as he found out that BB-8 was supposed to roll, Christian said he tried every shape and size. He liked the pattern of a soccer ball. Some of Christian's designs were pretty intricate, showing off the marvelous engineering that makes it obvious how BB-8 could function.

J Abrams sent his concept to the team. It was a sketch that he did on a post-it note. When Christian saw the sketches, he thought it was a snowman without a belly.

So Christian started to make his designs look like what JJ Abrams provided. He tried various faces for the head. Ultimately, the concept team settled on the orange and white cute rolly character that brings us so much joy.

Landis Fields

Virtual Production Visualization Supervisor

Landis talked about what goes on behind the scenes to make Star Wars Movies and Disney+ so believable. Magic is in the name of Industrial Light and Magic, ILM. Landis said the process of making what we see on screen believable is like a magic trick. It's like we use a lot of "smoke and mirrors" to make the audience think something is real. Landis showed a lot of behind-the-scenes videos about BB-8. We learned that BB-8 is a puppet. They figured out ways to make him roll. Then a CGI (computer-generated imagery) team animated BB-8's head. Sometimes they used a robot contraption with a remote control to move BB-8's body around. So occasionally, BB-8 was kind of a robot.

Inspiration is another type of magic trick the teams at ILM use. Landis talked about how the team found inspiration at Disneyland's Star Tour ride. They liked a piece of machinery that moved the theme park ride around. This machinery was behind the scenes; only the ride's engineers could see this machinery. The way it twisted about and moved was interesting. So the team thought, wouldn't it be cool if they made similar machinery and put it inside of the shoulder of K-2SO. The audience watching the movie would not know that this incredible machinery was K-2SO's shoulder. But the ILM team would know.