How did The Mandalorian replace green screens with LED walls?
An Australian director built a prototype wall of LED screens in his shed in 2016 and gave up when no one cared. Three years later a Star Wars series made it standard.
▶ Start the storyBy surrounding the actors with giant screens that show the background in real time. On-set virtual production uses LED panels as a backdrop, on which video or computer-generated imagery is displayed as the camera rolls. It replaces green screen compositing: instead of seeing an empty green wall, the actors can see the environment, and it gives them . It became widespread after The Mandalorian in 2019, whose system, StageCraft, was built by Industrial Light & Magic with Epic Games on the Unreal Engine .
The idea had a bumpy path. Cinematographer Greig Fraser met multiple issues on Rogue One in 2016 that inspired the idea of using large screens as part of the set. The same year, the Australian director Clayton Jacobson and his son made a prototype stage with LED screens in their shed, but he could not get anyone interested and gave up.
On The Mandalorian, the set was 21 feet tall and 75 feet across, surrounded by a 360-degree wall and ceiling, and called a . During tests the team realized that Unreal Engine could render fast enough for the background to move with the camera, keeping , so the background changed with the viewing angle just as a real place would. The wall also meant the reflections in the Mandalorian's shiny armour were already correct on set, instead of having to be added later.
Green screen
- Actors imagine the setting
- Background added in post-production
- Green reflections and spill to fix
LED wall
- Actors see the environment
- Background rendered live, moving with the camera
- Light and reflections are correct on set
As director Jon Favreau said of locations such as Iceland and Chile, the actors are not brought to the location; the location is brought to the actors.
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Recap
An LED wall driven by a game engine moves its picture with the camera, so the background looks real, lights the actors and reflects in their costumes.
💡 A trick to remember it · A green screen asks the actors to imagine the world; an LED wall just shows it to them.
Surprising fact · The Mandalorian's armour reflected the right environment on set because the wall around it showed that environment.
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No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.