Lucas Seastrom talks to Andor creator and executive producer Tony Gilroy, production designer and executive producer Luke Hull, and ILM visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo about the worlds of Andor Season 2 including the planet Ghorman, located in the Sern sector.
The horrific massacre at Ghorman forms one of the emotional peaks of this episodic arc. “Why the Ghorman massacre? Why is it gonna happen?” Gilroy comments. “[We’re] ultimately leading to the Death Star…. In the first season you see this sort of destruction of Kenari which is the planet that Cassian comes from…. We watch the Empire steal Aldhani from the Aldhanis…. They don’t know what’s happening to them…. We watch Ferrix get destroyed as it rises up. We’ve seen three different Imperial takedowns…. I want to really explore what that kind of authoritarian power does. And I want to see a real takedown of some place [that’s politically] significant. And so we made Ghorman into this very significant place. It manufactures. It’s a very successful planet.”
Hull explains that the massive backlot set at Pinewood Studios “was conceived quite early on to be where we stage the brutal put-down of Ghorman protest by the Empire. It had to feel both the central, cultural hub of the city, with a sense of their history, and become an arena to trap the local population during the massacre.”
According to Gilroy, the production demands for the Ghorman massacre was “another 100% on top of” the climactic uprising on Ferrix in Season 1. It took more than a month to film on the massive backlot set at Pinewood Studios, often in very cold temperatures. “That started at the beginning with having a lot of people defrosting the floor,” says executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg, “because it was an ice rink when we arrived there at 6:30 in the morning.”
The elaborate shoot involved anywhere from 50 to 300 extras with multiple cameras shooting coverage. “It’s really about splitting them up to utilize every minute of every day to deliver this very complex and very technical spectacle that is emotionally really so important,” Wohlenberg notes. “I can’t tell you how many elements [were involved]. There’s the national anthem that [composer] Nick Britell wrote that he taught all our supporting artists and actors to sing. There are KX units being let loose which are huge challenges for stunts and with the help of special effects, of course…. It’s a clever and amazing team that we are blessed with.”
Ghorman was Andor Season 2’s largest practical set.
In a production dominated by practical construction and location shooting, Ghorman became Season 2’s largest custom-built set, similar to Season 1’s Ferrix in scope and scale. “We decided that we should focus our efforts on building the plaza in Ghorman on the backlot here at Pinewood,” explains production designer Luke Hull, “which then grew into the plaza and many versions of streets and streets off of streets. So that quickly filled the backlot there.”
“Ghorman is a really fun challenge because it’s a type of city that we haven’t really seen very much in Star Wars before,” says visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo. “Star Wars often tends to do either small rural towns, or if they are big cities, then they’re futuristic, big cities. And Ghorman is a big city, but it has history like this…rich tradition and culture that has been there for hundreds of years. It’s influenced by places in Italy like Milan, Turin, this sort of affluent, proud textile culture.”
For Hull, Ghorman is his proudest achievement in Season 2. The central plaza in Palmo had to serve multiple functions with different locations within the same larger set. “It had interiors as part of the plaza like the Ghorman hotel lobby, the café, and the IOC lobby,” Hull explains, “which were all built as one composite so that action could flow freely between these spaces and give everyone a strong sense of geography.”
Leo adds that “Luke and his team did a really nice job of infusing everything in Ghorman with this sort of European, rich, upscale aesthetic and really contrasting that with the sort of brutalist Imperial look. The Empire is building this brutalist new headquarters building right off the main plaza. So, the set that was built on the back lot is this opulent central square, and then digitally what we’re adding in post is this construction site looming over it.”
Other digital artistry was included very early in the process, as the art department and ILM team collaborated using virtual environments to plan shots. “On Season 2 we had more previs and were able to walk through and plan shots in the models of our sets as a whole team, which really helped,” says Hull. “It was really useful for the director and cinematographer to be able to take the computer model of the sets in their correct geography and plan a sequence with Mohen & TJ.”
Read the article in full at StarWars.com. Andor Season 2 is streaming now exclusively on Disney+.
The post Creating the Worlds of Andor Season 2: Ghorman appeared first on Jedi News.
