From the outset, the design brief for Janix, along with every aspect of Maul – Shadow Lord, was to convey a loose, impressionistic style. According to Joel Aron, Lucasfilm Animation’s Director of Lighting, Cinematography, and Visual Effects, “there's a more painterly style in the assets and in the buildings and the ships and in the matte paintings. Even in the smoke and the fire, everything has a hand-painted look. It's still CG, but we wanted to push those bounds.”
Aron worked closely with Senior Lighting and Visual Effects Artist Valerie Perez to develop software tools that allowed them to directly incorporate brushstroke accents into their CG paints and textures. Aron took that one step further by actually applying physical swatches of different paint colors onto clear glass (not unlike a traditional matte painting) and then photographing them as high-resolution elements to be utilized in CG. Soon Aron’s entire team was painting brushstrokes onto glass.
“Senior technical director Alex Shaulis came up with a really cool method of using brush strokes to distort even more of our visual effects. [...] The practicality of it is the soul of everything.”
Building Lucasfilm Animation’s New World for Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord
