Disney
The behind-the-scenes trailer for "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" that just premiered at Star Wars Celebration Europe contained a ton of amazing, exciting aliens, storm troopers, explosions, and exotic locales. One thing it didn't contain a lot of? Footage of the crew filming on a green screen.
That's probably very deliberate, because the overreliance on green screen was one of the most-criticized aspects of the much-maligned prequel trilogy.
Most of the celebration reel, as they call it, showed the cast and crew filming real stunts and acting on actual, physical sets or on real beaches and forests. There were tons of aliens that were complex costumes or intricate plots, rather than CGI creations like, oh, Jar Jar Binks.
"It's about the humanity of it, which just makes the whole thing so real" says Warwick Davis, a longtime "Star Wars" actor who played an Ewok in "Return of the Jedi."
"You'll actually compose shots that, if we were on a green screen set, you just wouldn't have known were available," says another crew member. It's hard not to interpreted this as a shot at George Lucas' sterile, stagnantly directed prequels, like "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones."
"Your heart's beating, and you're actually in this situation," the star Felicity Jones says. "You get something very genuine that you couldn't have planned."
All the people involved clearly respect George Lucas and the world he created, even if his work on the prequels wasn't good. But this behind-the-scenes trailer fits in with a lot of the narrative around "The Force Awakens" too.
Green screen and CGI have peaked, and audiences value real, actual stunts and sets. It looks more authentic - more like the original trillogy that we all know and love. When Lucas shot those in the 1970s and '80s, it was hard physical work, and it paid off.
By emphasizing how authentic the filming of "Rogue One" was, the creators are making sure we're thinking of the original films, and not those terrible computer generated prequels.