The ad­vent of the per­sonal com­puter was­n’t just about mak­ing these pow­er­ful ma­chines avail­able to every­one, it was also about mak­ing them ac­ces­si­ble and us­able, even for those lack­ing a com­puter sci­ence de­gree. Larry Tesler, who passed away on Monday, might not be a house­hold name like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but his con­tri­bu­tions to mak­ing com­put­ers and mo­bile de­vices eas­ier to use are the high­light of a long ca­reer in­flu­enc­ing mod­ern com­put­ing.

Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study com­puter sci­ence at Stanford University, and af­ter grad­u­a­tion he dab­bled in ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence re­search (long be­fore it be­came a deeply con­cern­ing tool) and be­came in­volved in the anti-war and anti-cor­po­rate mo­nop­oly move­ments, with com­pa­nies like IBM as one of his de­serv­ing tar­gets. In 1973 Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked un­til 1980. Xerox PARC is fa­mously known for de­vel­op­ing the mouse-dri­ven graph­i­cal user in­ter­face we now all take for granted, and dur­ing his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to cre­ate a word proces­sor called Gypsy that is best known for coin­ing the terms “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” when it comes to com­mands for re­mov­ing, du­pli­cat­ing, or repo­si­tion­ing chunks of text.

Xerox PARC is also well known for not cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the ground­break­ing re­search it did in terms of per­sonal com­put­ing, so in 1980 Tesler tran­si­tioned to Apple Computer where he worked un­til 1997. Over the years he held count­less po­si­tions at the com­pany in­clud­ing Vice President of AppleNet (Apple’s in-house lo­cal area net­work­ing sys­tem that was even­tu­ally can­celed), and even served as Apple’s Chief Scientist, a po­si­tion that at one time was held by Steve Wozniak, be­fore even­tu­ally leav­ing the com­pany.

In ad­di­tion to his con­tri­bu­tions to some of Apple’s most fa­mous hard­ware, Tesler was also known for his ef­forts to make soft­ware and user in­ter­faces more ac­ces­si­ble. In ad­di­tion to the now ubiq­ui­tous “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” ter­mi­nolo­gies, Tesler was also an ad­vo­cate for an ap­proach to UI de­sign known as mod­e­less com­put­ing, which is re­flected in his per­sonal web­site. In essence, it en­sures that user ac­tions re­main con­sis­tent through­out an op­er­at­ing sys­tem’s var­i­ous func­tions and apps. When they’ve opened a word proces­sor, for in­stance, users now just au­to­mat­i­cally as­sume that hit­ting any of the al­phanu­meric keys on their key­board will re­sult in that char­ac­ter show­ing up on-screen at the cur­sor’s in­ser­tion point. But there was a time when word proces­sors could be switched be­tween mul­ti­ple modes where typ­ing on the key­board would ei­ther add char­ac­ters to a doc­u­ment or al­ter­nately al­low func­tional com­mands to be en­tered.

There are still plenty of soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tions where tools and func­tion­al­ity change de­pend­ing on the mode they’re in (complex apps like Photoshop, for ex­am­ple, where var­i­ous tools be­have dif­fer­ently and per­form very dis­tinct func­tions) but for the most part mod­ern op­er­at­ing sys­tems like Apple’s ma­cOS and Microsoft’s Windows have em­braced user-friend­li­ness through a less com­pli­cated mod­e­less ap­proach.

After leav­ing Apple in 1997, Tesler co-founded a com­pany called Stagecast Software which de­vel­oped ap­pli­ca­tions that made it eas­ier and more ac­ces­si­ble for chil­dren to learn pro­gram­ming con­cepts. In 2001 he joined Amazon and even­tu­ally be­came the VP of Shopping Experience there, in 2005 he switched to Yahoo where he headed up that com­pa­ny’s user ex­pe­ri­ence and de­sign group, and then in 2008 he be­came a prod­uct fel­low at 23andMe. According to his CV, Tesler left 23andMe in 2009 and from then on mostly fo­cused on con­sult­ing work.

While there are un­doubt­edly count­less other con­tri­bu­tions Tesler made to mod­ern com­put­ing as part of his work on teams at Xerox and Apple that may never come to light, his known con­tri­bu­tions are im­mense. Tesler is one of the ma­jor rea­sons com­puter moved out of re­search cen­ters and into homes.

Kickstarter em­ploy­ees voted to form a union with the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which rep­re­sents more than 100,000 white col­lar work­ers. The fi­nal vote was 46 for the union, 37 against, a his­toric win for union­iza­tion ef­forts at tech com­pa­nies.

Kickstarter work­ers are now the first white col­lar work­ers at a ma­jor tech com­pany to suc­cess­fully union­ize in the United States, send­ing a mes­sage to other tech work­ers.

“Everyone was cry­ing [when the re­sults were an­nounced],” Clarissa Redwine, a Kickstarter United or­ga­niz­ers who was fired in September, told Motherboard. “I thought it would be close, but I also knew we were go­ing to win. I hope other tech work­ers feel em­bold­ened and know that it’s pos­si­ble to fight for your work­place and your val­ues. I know my for­mer cowork­ers will use a seat at the table re­ally well.”

“Today we learned that in a 46 to 37 vote, our staff has de­cided to union­ize,” Kickstarter’s CEO Aziz Hasan said in a state­ment. “We sup­port and re­spect this de­ci­sion, and we are proud of the fair and de­mo­c­ra­tic process that got us here. We’ve worked hard over the last decade to build a dif­fer­ent kind of com­pany, one that mea­sures its suc­cess by how well it achieves its mis­sion: help­ing to bring cre­ative pro­jects to life. Our mis­sion has been com­mon ground for every­one here dur­ing this process, and it will con­tinue to guide us as we en­ter this new phase to­gether.”

The union at the Brooklyn-based crowd-fund­ing plat­form ar­rives dur­ing a pe­riod of un­prece­dented la­bor or­ga­niz­ing among en­gi­neers and other white col­lar tech work­ers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other promi­nent tech com­pa­nies—around is­sues like sex­ual ha­rass­ment, ICE con­tracts, and car­bon emis­sions. Between 2017 and 2019, the num­ber of protest ac­tions led by tech work­ers nearly tripled. In 2019 alone, tech work­ers led more than 100 ac­tions, ac­cord­ing to the on­line data­base “Collective Actions in Tech.”

“I feel like the most im­por­tant is­sues [for us] are around cre­at­ing clearer poli­cies and sup­port for re­port­ing work­place is­sues and cre­at­ing clearer mech­a­nisms for hir­ing and fir­ing em­ploy­ees,” said RV Dougherty, a for­mer trust and safety an­a­lyst and core or­ga­nizer for Kickstarter United who quit in early February. “Right now so much de­pends on what team you’re on and if you have a good re­la­tion­ship with your man­ager… We also have a lot of pay dis­par­ity and folks who are do­ing in­cred­i­ble jobs but have been kept from get­ting pro­moted be­cause they spoke their mind, which is not how Kickstarter should work.”

In the days lead­ing up to Kickstarter vote count, Motherboard re­vealed that Kickstarter hired Duane Morris, a Philadelphia law firm that spe­cial­izes in la­bor man­age­ment re­la­tions and “maintaining a union-free work­place.” Kickstarter con­firmed to Motherboard that it first re­tained the ser­vices of Duane Morris in 2018 be­fore it knew about union or­ga­niz­ing at the com­pany, but would not go into de­tail about whether the firm had ad­vised the com­pany on how to de­feat the union and de­nied any union-bust­ing ac­tiv­ity.

Dating back to its 2009 found­ing, Kickstarter has tried to dis­tin­guish it­self as a pro­gres­sive ex­cep­tion to Silicon Valley tech com­pa­nies. In 2015, the com­pa­ny’s lead­er­ship an­nounced it had be­come a “public ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion.” “Benefit Corporations are for-profit com­pa­nies that are ob­lig­ated to con­sider the im­pact of their de­ci­sions on so­ci­ety, not only share­hold­ers,” the se­nior lead­er­ship wrote at the time. The com­pany has been hailed as one of the most eth­i­cal places to work in tech.

Indeed, rather than ded­i­cate its re­sources to max­i­miz­ing profit, Kickstarter has fought for pro­gres­sive causes, like net neu­tral­ity, and against the anti-trans bath­room law in North Carolina.

But in 2018, a heated dis­agree­ment broke out be­tween em­ploy­ees and man­age­ment about whether to leave a pro­ject called “Always Punch Nazis” on the plat­form, ac­cord­ing to re­port­ing in Slate. When Breitbart said the pro­ject vi­o­lated Kickstarter’s terms of ser­vice by in­cit­ing vi­o­lence, man­age­ment ini­tially planned to re­move the pro­ject, but then re­versed its de­ci­sion af­ter protest from em­ploy­ees.

Following the con­tro­versy, em­ploy­ees an­nounced their in­ten­tions to union­ize with OPEIU Local 153 in March 2019. And the com­pany made it clear that it did not be­lieve a union was right for Kickstarter.

In a let­ter to cre­ators, Kickstarter’s CEO Aziz Hasan wrote in September that “The union frame­work is in­her­ently ad­ver­sar­ial.”

“That dy­namic does­n’t re­flect who we are as a com­pany, how we in­ter­act, how we make de­ci­sions, or where we need to go,” the com­pa­ny’s CEO Aziz Hasan wrote to cre­ators in September. “We be­lieve that in many ways it would set us back.”

In September, Kickstarter fired two em­ploy­ees on its union or­ga­niz­ing com­mit­tee within 8 days, in­form­ing a third that his role was no longer needed at the com­pany. Following out­cry from promi­nent cre­ators, the com­pany in­sisted that the two fir­ings were re­lated to job per­for­mance, not union ac­tiv­ity.

The two fired work­ers filed fed­eral un­fair la­bor prac­tice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), claim­ing the com­pany re­tal­i­ated against them for union or­ga­niz­ing in vi­o­la­tion of the National Labor Relations Act. (Those charges have yet to be re­solved.) Days later, the com­pany de­nied a re­quest from the union, Kickstarter United, for vol­un­tary recog­ni­tion.

The de­ci­sion to union­ize at Kickstarter fol­lows a se­ries of vic­to­ries for union cam­paigns led by blue col­lar tech work­ers. Last year, 80 Google con­trac­tors in Pittsburgh, 2,300 cafe­te­ria work­ers at Google in Silicon Valley, and roughly 40 Spin e-scooter work­ers in San Francisco voted to form the first unions in the tech in­dus­try. In early February, 15 em­ploy­ees at the de­liv­ery app Instacart in Chicago suc­cess­fully union­ized, fol­low­ing a fierce anti-union cam­paign run by man­age­ment.

By some ac­counts, the cur­rent wave of white col­lar tech or­ga­niz­ing be­gan in early 2018 when the San Francisco tech com­pany Lanetix fired its en­tire 14-software en­gi­neer staff af­ter they filed to union­ize with Communications Workers of America (CWA). Later, the com­pany was forced to cough up $775,000 to set­tle un­fair la­bor prac­tice charges.

Update: This story has been up­dated with com­ment from Kickstarter.

Companies around the world are em­brac­ing what might seem like a rad­i­cal idea: a four-day work­week.

The con­cept is gain­ing ground in places as var­ied as New Zealand and Russia, and it’s mak­ing in­roads among some American com­pa­nies. Employers are see­ing sur­pris­ing ben­e­fits, in­clud­ing higher sales and prof­its.

The idea of a four-day work­week might sound crazy, es­pe­cially in America, where the num­ber of hours worked has been climb­ing and where cell­phones and email re­mind us of our jobs 24/7.

But in some places, the four-day con­cept is tak­ing off like a vi­ral meme. Many em­ploy­ers aren’t just mov­ing to 10-hour shifts, four days a week, as com­pa­nies like Shake Shack are do­ing; they’re go­ing to a 32-hour week — with­out cut­ting pay. In ex­change, em­ploy­ers are ask­ing their work­ers to get their jobs done in a com­pressed amount of time.

Last month, a Washington state sen­a­tor in­tro­duced a bill to re­duce the stan­dard work­week to 32 hours. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is back­ing a par­lia­men­tary pro­posal to shift to a four-day week. Politicians in Britain and Finland are con­sid­er­ing some­thing sim­i­lar.

In the U. S., Shake Shack started test­ing the idea a year and a half ago. The burger chain short­ened man­agers’ work­weeks to four days at some stores and found that re­cruit­ment spiked, es­pe­cially among women.

Shake Shack’s pres­i­dent, Tara Comonte, says the staff loved the perk: “Being able to take their kids to school a day a week, or one day less of hav­ing to pay for day care, for ex­am­ple.”

So the com­pany re­cently ex­panded its trial to a third of its 164 U. S. stores. Offering that ben­e­fit re­quired Shake Shack to find time sav­ings else­where, so it switched to com­puter soft­ware to track sup­plies of ground beef, for ex­am­ple.

“It was a way to in­crease flex­i­bil­ity,” Comonte says of the shorter week. “Corporate en­vi­ron­ments have had flex­i­ble work poli­cies for a while now. That’s not so easy to do in the restau­rant busi­ness.”

Hundreds — if not thou­sands — of other com­pa­nies are also adopt­ing or test­ing the four-day week. Last sum­mer, Microsoft’s trial in Japan led to a 40% im­prove­ment in pro­duc­tiv­ity, mea­sured as sales per em­ployee.

Much of this is thanks to Andrew Barnes, an ar­chae­ol­o­gist by train­ing, who never in­tended to be­come a global evan­ge­list. “This was not a jour­ney I ex­pected to be on,” he says.

Barnes is CEO of Perpetual Guardian, New Zealand’s largest es­tate plan­ning com­pany. He spent much of his ca­reer be­liev­ing long hours were bet­ter for busi­ness. But he was also dis­turbed by the toll it took on em­ploy­ees and their fam­i­lies, par­tic­u­larly when it came to men­tal health.

So two years ago, he used Perpetual Guardian and its 240 work­ers as guinea pigs, part­ner­ing with aca­d­e­mic re­searchers in Auckland to mon­i­tor and track the ef­fects of work­ing only four days a week.

“Core to this is that peo­ple are not pro­duc­tive for every hour, every minute of the day that they’re in the of­fice,” Barnes says, which means there was lots of dis­trac­tion and wasted time that could be cut.

Simply slash­ing the num­ber and du­ra­tion of meet­ings saved huge amounts of time. Also, he did away with open-floor of­fice plans and saw work­ers spend­ing far less time on so­cial me­dia. All this, he says, made it eas­ier to fo­cus more deeply on the work.

Remarkably, work­ers got more work done while work­ing fewer hours. Sales and prof­its grew. Employees spent less time com­mut­ing, and they were hap­pier.

Barnes says there were other, un­ex­pected ben­e­fits: It nar­rowed work­place gen­der gaps. Women — who typ­i­cally took more time off for care­giv­ing — sud­denly had greater flex­i­bil­ity built into their sched­ule. Men also had more time to help with their fam­i­lies, Barnes says.

The com­pany did­n’t po­lice how work­ers spent their time. But if per­for­mance slipped, the firm could re­vert back to the full-week sched­ule. Barnes says that alone mo­ti­vated work­ers.

The Perpetual Guardian study went vi­ral, and things went hay­wire for Barnes.

Employers — in­clud­ing big multi­na­tion­als — started call­ing, seek­ing ad­vice. “Frankly, I could­n’t drink enough cof­fee to deal with the num­ber of com­pa­nies that ap­proached us,” Barnes says.

Demand was so great that he set up a foun­da­tion to pro­mote the four-day work­week. Ironically, in the process, he’s work­ing a lot of over­time.

“You only get one chance to change the world. And, it’s my re­spon­si­bil­ity at least, on this one, to see if I can in­flu­ence the world for the bet­ter,” he says.

To date, most of that in­ter­est has not come from American em­ploy­ers.

Peter Cappelli, a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says that’s be­cause the con­cept runs counter to American no­tions of work and cap­i­tal­ism. Unions are less pow­er­ful, and work­ers have less po­lit­i­cal sway than in other coun­tries, he says.

So American com­pa­nies an­swer to share­hold­ers, who tend to pri­or­i­tize profit over worker ben­e­fits.

“I just don’t see con­tem­po­rary U. S. em­ploy­ers say­ing, ‘You know what, if we cre­ate more value here, we’re gonna give it to the em­ploy­ees.’ I just don’t see that hap­pen­ing,” Cappelli says.

Natalie Nagele, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, has heard from other lead­ers who say it did­n’t work for them. She says it fails when em­ploy­ees aren’t mo­ti­vated and where man­agers don’t trust em­ploy­ees.

But Nagele says mov­ing her Philadelphia soft­ware com­pany to a four-day week three years ago has been a suc­cess.

“We had shipped more fea­tures than we had in re­cent years, we felt more pro­duc­tive, the qual­ity of our work in­creased. So then we just kept go­ing with it,” Nagele says. Personally, she says, it gives her time to rest her brain, which helps solve com­plex prob­lems: “You can ask my team, there’s mul­ti­ple times where some­body is like, ‘On Sunday morn­ing, I woke up and … I fig­ured it out.’ ”

Mikeal Parlow started work­ing a four-day week about a month ago. It was a perk of his new job as a bud­get an­a­lyst in Westminster, Colo.

He works 10 hours a day, Monday through Thursday. Or, as he puts it, un­til the job is done. Parlow says he much prefers the new way “because it is about get­ting your work done, more so than feed­ing the clock.”

That frees Fridays up for life’s many de­light­ful chores — like vis­its to the DMV. “For in­stance, to­day we’re go­ing to go and get our li­cense plates,” Parlow says.

But that also leaves time on the week­ends … for the week­end.

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A new email-based ex­tor­tion scheme ap­par­ently is mak­ing the rounds, tar­get­ing Web site own­ers serv­ing ban­ner ads through Google’s AdSense pro­gram. In this scam, the fraud­sters de­mand bit­coin in ex­change for a promise not to flood the pub­lish­er’s ads with so much bot and junk traf­fic that Google’s au­to­mated anti-fraud sys­tems sus­pend the user’s AdSense ac­count for sus­pi­cious traf­fic.

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who main­tains sev­eral sites that re­ceive a fair amount of traf­fic. The mes­sage this reader shared be­gan by quot­ing from an au­to­mated email Google’s sys­tems might send if they de­tect your site is seek­ing to ben­e­fit from au­to­mated clicks. The mes­sage con­tin­ues:

“Very soon the warn­ing no­tice from above will ap­pear at the dash­board of your AdSense ac­count un­doubt­edly! This will hap­pen due to the fact that we’re about to flood your site with huge amount of di­rect bot gen­er­ated web traf­fic with 100% bounce ra­tio and thou­sands of IP’s in ro­ta­tion — a night­mare for every AdSense pub­lisher. More also we’ll ad­just our so­phis­ti­cated bots to open, in end­less cy­cle with dif­fer­ent time du­ra­tion, every AdSense ban­ner which runs on your site.”

The mes­sage goes on to warn that while the tar­geted site’s ad rev­enue will be briefly in­creased, “AdSense traf­fic as­sess­ment al­go­rithms will de­tect very fast such a web traf­fic pat­tern as fraud­u­lent.”

“Next an ad serv­ing limit will be placed on your pub­lisher ac­count and all the rev­enue will be re­funded to ad­ver­tis­ers. This means that the main source of profit for your site will be tem­porar­ily sus­pended. It will take some time, usu­ally a month, for the AdSense to lift your ad ban, but if this hap­pens we will have all the re­sources needed to flood your site again with bad qual­ity web traf­fic which will lead to sec­ond AdSense ban that could be per­ma­nent!”

The mes­sage de­mands $5,000 worth of bit­coin to fore­stall the at­tack. In this scam, the ex­tor­tion­ists are likely bet­ting that some pub­lish­ers may see pay­ing up as a cheaper al­ter­na­tive to hav­ing their main source of ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue evap­o­rate.

The reader who shared this email said while he con­sid­ered the mes­sage likely to be a base­less threat, a re­view of his re­cent AdSense traf­fic sta­tis­tics showed that de­tec­tions in his “AdSense in­valid traf­fic re­port” from the past month had in­creased sub­stan­tially.

The reader, who asked not to be iden­ti­fied in this story, also pointed to ar­ti­cles about a re­cent AdSense crack­down in which Google an­nounced it was en­hanc­ing its de­fenses by im­prov­ing the sys­tems that iden­tify po­ten­tially in­valid traf­fic or high risk ac­tiv­i­ties be­fore ads are served.

Google de­fines in­valid traf­fic as “clicks or im­pres­sions gen­er­ated by pub­lish­ers click­ing their own live ads,” as well as “automated click­ing tools or traf­fic sources.”

“Pretty con­cern­ing, thought it seems this group is only say­ing they’re plan­ning their at­tack,” the reader wrote.

Google de­clined to dis­cuss this read­er’s ac­count, say­ing its con­tracts pre­vent the com­pany from com­ment­ing pub­licly on a spe­cific part­ner’s sta­tus or en­force­ment ac­tions. But in a state­ment shared with KrebsOnSecurity, the com­pany said the mes­sage ap­pears to be a clas­sic threat of sab­o­tage, wherein an ac­tor at­tempts to trig­ger an en­force­ment ac­tion against a pub­lisher by send­ing in­valid traf­fic to their in­ven­tory.

“We hear a lot about the po­ten­tial for sab­o­tage, it’s ex­tremely rare in prac­tice, and we have built some safe­guards in place to pre­vent sab­o­tage from suc­ceed­ing,” the state­ment ex­plained. “For ex­am­ple, we have de­tec­tion mech­a­nisms in place to proac­tively de­tect po­ten­tial sab­o­tage and take it into ac­count in our en­force­ment sys­tems.”

Google said it has ex­ten­sive tools and processes to pro­tect against in­valid traf­fic across its prod­ucts, and that most in­valid traf­fic is fil­tered from its sys­tems be­fore ad­ver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers are ever im­pacted.

“We have a help cen­ter on our web­site with tips for AdSense pub­lish­ers on sab­o­tage,” the state­ment con­tin­ues. “There’s also a form we pro­vide for pub­lish­ers to con­tact us if they be­lieve they are the vic­tims of sab­o­tage. We en­cour­age pub­lish­ers to dis­en­gage from any com­mu­ni­ca­tion or fur­ther ac­tion with par­ties that sig­nal that they will drive in­valid traf­fic to their web prop­er­ties. If there are con­cerns about in­valid traf­fic, they should com­mu­ni­cate that to us, and our Ad Traffic Quality team will mon­i­tor and eval­u­ate their ac­counts as needed.”

This en­try was posted on Monday, February 17th, 2020 at 9:13 am and is filed un­der A Little Sunshine, The Coming Storm, Web Fraud 2.0.

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The Mandalorian: This Is the Way

Cinematographers Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS and Barry “Baz” Idoine and showrun­ner Jon Favreau em­ploy new tech­nolo­gies to frame the Disney Plus Star Wars se­ries.

Unit pho­tog­ra­phy by François Duhamel, SMPSP, and Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP, cour­tesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.

At top, the Mandalorian Bounty Hunter (played by played by Pedro Pascal) rescues the Child — pop­u­larly de­scribed as “baby Yoda.”

This ar­ti­cle is an ex­panded ver­sion of the story that ap­pears in our February, 2020 print mag­a­zine.

A live-ac­tion Star Wars tele­vi­sion se­ries was George Lucas’ dream for many years, but the lo­gis­tics of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion made achiev­ing the nec­es­sary scope and scale seem in­con­ceiv­able. Star Wars fans would ex­pect ex­otic, pic­turesque lo­ca­tions, but it sim­ply was­n’t plau­si­ble to take a crew to the deserts of Tunisia or the salt flats of Bolivia on a short sched­ule and lim­ited bud­get. The cre­ative team be­hind The Mandalorian has solved that prob­lem.

For decades, green- and blue­screen com­posit­ing was the go-to so­lu­tion for bring­ing fan­tas­tic en­vi­ron­ments and ac­tors to­gether on the screen. (Industrial Light & Magic did pi­o­neer­ing work with the tech­nol­ogy for the orig­i­nal Star Wars movie.) However, when char­ac­ters are wear­ing highly re­flec­tive cos­tumes, as is the case with Mando (Pedro Pascal), the ti­tle char­ac­ter of The Mandalorian, the re­flec­tion of green- and blue­screen in the wardrobe causes costly prob­lems in post-pro­duc­tion. In ad­di­tion, it’s chal­leng­ing for ac­tors to per­form in a “sea of blue,” and for key cre­atives to have in­put on shot de­signs and com­po­si­tion.

This story was orig­i­nally pub­lished in the Feb. 2020 is­sue of AC. Some im­ages are ad­di­tional or al­ter­nate.

In or­der for The Mandalorian to work, tech­nol­ogy had to ad­vance enough that the epic worlds of Star Wars could be ren­dered on an af­ford­able scale by a team whose ac­tual pro­duc­tion foot­print would com­prise a few sound­stages and a small back­lot. An ad­di­tional con­sid­er­a­tion was that the typ­i­cal vi­sual-ef­fects work­flow runs con­cur­rent with pro­duc­tion, and then ex­tends for a lengthy post pe­riod. Even with all the power of con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal vi­sual-ef­fects tech­niques and bil­lions of com­pu­ta­tions per sec­ond, the process can take up to 12 hours or more per frame. With thou­sands of shots and mul­ti­ple it­er­a­tions, this be­comes a time-con­sum­ing en­deavor. The Holy Grail of vi­sual ef­fects — and a ne­ces­sity for The Mandalorian, ac­cord­ing to co-cin­e­matog­ra­pher and co-pro­ducer Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS — was the abil­ity to do real-time, in-cam­era com­posit­ing on set.

“That was our goal,” says Fraser, who had pre­vi­ously ex­plored the Star Wars galaxy while shoot­ing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (AC Feb. ’17).  “We wanted to cre­ate an en­vi­ron­ment that was con­ducive not just to giv­ing a com­po­si­tion line-up to the ef­fects, but to ac­tu­ally cap­tur­ing them in real time, photo-real and in-cam­era, so that the ac­tors were in that en­vi­ron­ment in the right light­ing — all at the mo­ment of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

The so­lu­tion was what might be de­scribed as the heir to rear pro­jec­tion — a dy­namic, real-time, photo-real back­ground played back on a mas­sive LED video wall and ceil­ing, which not only pro­vided the pixel-ac­cu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of ex­otic back­ground con­tent, but was also ren­dered with cor­rect cam­era po­si­tional data.

Mando with the Child on his ship.

If the con­tent was cre­ated in ad­vance of the shoot, then pho­tograph­ing ac­tors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could cre­ate fi­nal in-cam­era vi­sual ef­fects — or “near” fi­nals, with only tech­ni­cal fixes re­quired, and with com­plete cre­ative con­fi­dence in the com­po­si­tion and look of the shots. On The Mandalorian, this space was dubbed “the Volume.” (Technically, a “volume” is any space de­fined by mo­tion-cap­ture tech­nol­ogy.)

This con­cept was ini­tially pro­posed by Kim Libreri of Epic Games while he was at Lucasfilm and it has be­come the ba­sis of the tech­nol­ogy that “Holy Grail” that makes a live-ac­tion Star Wars tele­vi­sion se­ries pos­si­ble.

In 2014, as Rogue One was ramp­ing up, the con­cept of real-time com­posit­ing was once again dis­cussed. Technology had ma­tured to a new level. Visual ef­fects su­per­vi­sor John Knoll had an early dis­cus­sion with Fraser about this con­cept and the cin­e­matog­ra­pher brought up the no­tion of uti­liz­ing a large LED screen as a light­ing in­stru­ment to in­cor­po­rate in­ter­ac­tive an­i­mated light­ing on the ac­tors and sets dur­ing com­pos­ite pho­tog­ra­phy uti­liz­ing play­back of rough pre­vi­su­al­ized ef­fects on the LED screens. The fi­nal an­i­mated VFX would be added in later; the screens were merely to pro­vide in­ter­ac­tive light­ing to match the an­i­ma­tions.

“One of the big prob­lems of shoot­ing blue- and green­screen com­pos­ite pho­tog­ra­phy is the in­ter­ac­tive light­ing,” of­fers Fraser. “Often, you’re shoot­ing real pho­tog­ra­phy el­e­ments be­fore the back­grounds are cre­ated and you’re imag­in­ing what the in­ter­ac­tive light­ing will do — and then you have to hope that what you’ve done on set will match what hap­pens in post much later on. If the di­rec­tor changes the back­grounds in post, then the light­ing is­n’t go­ing to match and the fi­nal shot will feel false.”

Director and ex­ec­u­tive pro­ducer Dave Filoni and cin­e­matog­ra­phers Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS (center) and Barry “Baz” Idoine (operating cam­era) on the set.

For Rogue One, they built a large cylin­dri­cal LED screen and cre­ated all of the back­grounds in ad­vance for the space bat­tle land­ings on Scarif, Jedha and Eadu and all the cock­pit se­quences in X-Wing and U-Wing space­craft were done in front of that LED wall as the pri­mary source of il­lu­mi­na­tion on the char­ac­ters and sets. Those LED pan­els had a pixel pitch of 9mm (the dis­tance be­tween the cen­ters of the RGB pixel clus­ters on the screen). Unfortunately, with the size of the pixel pitch, they could rarely get it far enough away from the cam­era to avoid moiré and make the im­age ap­pear photo-real, so it was used purely for light­ing pur­poses. However, be­cause the re­place­ment back­grounds were al­ready built and uti­lized on set — the comps were ex­tremely suc­cess­ful and per­fectly matched the dy­namic light­ing.

A fish­eye view look­ing through the gap be­tween the two back walls of the show’s LED-wall sys­tem, known as “the Volume.” The dark spot on the Volume ceil­ing is due to a dif­fer­ent model of LED screens used there. The ceil­ing is mostly used for light­ing pur­poses, and if seen on cam­era is re­placed in post.

“I went to see Jon and ask him if we would like to do some­thing for Disney’s new stream­ing ser­vice,” Kennedy says. “I’ve known that Jon has wanted to do a Star Wars pro­ject for a long time, so we started talk­ing right away about what he could do that would push tech­nol­ogy and that led to a whole con­ver­sa­tion around what could change the pro­duc­tion path; what could ac­tu­ally cre­ate a way in which we could make things dif­fer­ently?”

Favreau had just com­pleted The Jungle Book and was em­bark­ing on The Lion King for Disney — both vi­sual-ef­fects heavy films.

Visual ef­fects su­per­vi­sor Richard Bluff and ex­ec­u­tive cre­ative di­rec­tor and head of ILM Rob Bredow showed Favreau a num­ber of tests that ILM had con­ducted in­clud­ing the tech­nol­ogy of the LED wall from Rogue One. Fraser sug­gested with the ad­vance­ments in LED tech­nol­ogy since Rogue One that this pro­ject could lever­age new pan­els and push the en­ve­lope on real-time, in-cam­era vi­sual ef­fects. Favreau loved the con­cept and de­cided that was the pro­duc­tion path to take.

In the back­ground, ap­pear­ing to float in space, are the mo­tion-track­ing cam­eras peek­ing be­tween the Volume’s wall and ceil­ing.

The pro­duc­tion was look­ing to min­i­mize the amount of green- and blue­screen pho­tog­ra­phy and re­quire­ments of post com­posit­ing to im­prove the qual­ity of the en­vi­ron­ment for the ac­tors. The LED screen pro­vides a con­vinc­ing fac­sim­ile of a real set/​lo­ca­tion and avoids the green void that can be chal­leng­ing for per­form­ers.

“I was very en­cour­aged by my ex­pe­ri­ences us­ing sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy on Jungle Book [AC, May ’16], and us­ing vir­tual cam­eras on The Lion King [AC, Aug. ’19],” ex­plains Favreau, se­ries cre­ator and ex­ec­u­tive pro­ducer. “I had also ex­per­i­mented with a par­tial video wall for the pi­lot episode of The Orville. With the team we had as­sem­bled be­tween our crew, ILM, Magnopus, Epic Games, Profile Studios and Lux Machina, I felt that we had a very good chance at a pos­i­tive out­come.”

“The Volume is a dif­fi­cult tech­nol­ogy to un­der­stand un­til you stand there in front of the ‘projection’ on the LED screen, put an ac­tor in front of it, and move the cam­era around,” Fraser says. “It’s hard to grasp. It’s not re­ally rear pro­jec­tion; it’s not a TransLite be­cause [it is a real-time, in­ter­ac­tive im­age with 3D ob­jects] and has the proper par­al­lax; and it’s photo-real, not an­i­mated, but it is gen­er­ated through a gam­ing en­gine.”

Idoine (left) shoot­ing on the Volume’s dis­play of the ice-planet Maldo Kreis — one of many of the pro­duc­tion’s en­vi­ron­ment “loads” — with di­rec­tor Filoni watch­ing and Karina Silva op­er­at­ing B cam­era. The fix­tures with white, half-dome, ping-pong-style balls on each cam­era are the “Sputniks” — in­frared-marker con­fig­u­ra­tions that are seen by the mo­tion-track­ing cam­eras to record the pro­duc­tion cam­er­a’s po­si­tion in 3D space, and to ren­der proper 3D par­al­lax on the Volume wall.

“The tech­nol­ogy that we were able to in­no­vate on The Mandalorian would not have been pos­si­ble had we not de­vel­oped tech­nolo­gies around the chal­lenges of Jungle Book and Lion King,” of­fers Favreau. “We had used game-en­gine and mo­tion-cap­ture [technology] and real-time set ex­ten­sion that had to be ren­dered af­ter the fact, so real-time ren­der was a nat­ural ex­ten­sion of this ap­proach.”

Barry “Baz” Idoine, who worked with Fraser for sev­eral years as a cam­era op­er­a­tor and sec­ond-unit cin­e­matog­ra­pher on fea­tures in­clud­ing Rogue One and Vice (AC Jan. ’19), as­sumed cin­e­matog­ra­phy du­ties on The Mandalorian when Fraser stepped away to shoot Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Idoine ob­serves, “The strong ini­tial value is that you’re not shoot­ing in a green-screen world and try­ing to em­u­late the light that will be comped in later — you’re ac­tu­ally shoot­ing fin­ished prod­uct shots. It gives the con­trol of cin­e­matog­ra­phy back to the cin­e­matog­ra­pher.”

The Volume was a curved, 20′-high-by-180′-circumference LED video wall, com­pris­ing 1,326 in­di­vid­ual LED screens of a 2.84mm pixel pitch that cre­ated a 270-degree semi­cir­cu­lar back­ground with a 75′-diameter per­for­mance space topped with an LED video ceil­ing, which was set di­rectly onto the main curve of the LED wall.

At the rear of the Volume, in the 90 re­main­ing de­grees of open area, es­sen­tially “behind cam­era,” were two 18′-high-by-20′-wide flat pan­els of 132 more LED screens. These two pan­els were rigged to trav­eler track and chain mo­tors in the stage’s perms, so the walls could be moved into place or flown out of the way to al­low bet­ter ac­cess to the Volume area.

“The Volume al­lows us to bring many dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ments un­der one roof,” says vi­sual-ef­fects su­per­vi­sor Richard Bluff of ILM. “We could be shoot­ing on the lava flats of Nevarro in the morn­ing and in the deserts of Tatooine in the af­ter­noon. Of course, there are prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions to switch­ing over en­vi­ron­ments, but we [typically did] two en­vi­ron­ments in one day.”

The crew sur­rounds the Mandalorian’s space­craft Razor Crest. Only the fuse­lage and cock­pit are prac­ti­cal set pieces. From this still-cam­era po­si­tion, the com­po­si­tion ap­pears “broken,” but from the pro­duc­tion cam­er­a’s per­spec­tive, the en­gines ap­pear in per­fect re­la­tion­ship to the fuse­lage, and track in par­al­lax with the cam­er­a’s move­ment.

“A ma­jor­ity of the shots were done com­pletely in cam­era,” Favreau adds. “And in cases where we did­n’t get to fi­nal pixel, the post­pro­duc­tion process was short­ened sig­nif­i­cantly be­cause we had al­ready made cre­ative choices based on what we had seen in front of us. Postproduction was mostly re­fin­ing cre­ative choices that we were not able to fi­nal­ize on the set in a way that we deemed photo-real.”

With tra­di­tional rear pro­jec­tion (and front pro­jec­tion), in or­der for the re­sult to look be­liev­able, the cam­era must ei­ther re­main sta­tion­ary or move along a pre­pro­grammed path to match the per­spec­tive of the pro­jected im­age. In ei­ther case, the cam­er­a’s cen­ter of per­spec­tive (the en­trance pupil of the lens, some­times re­ferred to — though in­cor­rectly — as the nodal point) must be pre­cisely aligned with the pro­jec­tion sys­tem to achieve proper per­spec­tive and the ef­fects of par­al­lax. The Mandalorian is hardly the first pro­duc­tion to in­cor­po­rate an im­age-pro­jec­tion sys­tem for in-cam­era com­posit­ing, but what sets its tech­nique apart is its abil­ity to fa­cil­i­tate a mov­ing cam­era.

In the pi­lot episode, the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) brings his prey (Horatio Sanz) into cus­tody.

Indeed, us­ing a sta­tion­ary cam­era or one locked into a pre-set move for all of the work in the Volume was sim­ply not ac­cept­able for the needs of this par­tic­u­lar pro­duc­tion. The team there­fore had to find a way to track the cam­er­a’s po­si­tion and move­ment in real-world space, and ex­trap­o­late proper per­spec­tive and par­al­lax on the screen as the cam­era moved. This re­quired in­cor­po­rat­ing mo­tion-cap­ture tech­nol­ogy and a videogame en­gine — Epic Games’ Unreal Engine — that would gen­er­ate proper 3D par­al­lax per­spec­tive in real time.

The lo­ca­tions de­picted on the LED wall were ini­tially mod­eled in rough form by vi­sual-ef­fects artists cre­at­ing 3D mod­els in Maya, to the specs de­ter­mined by pro­duc­tion de­signer Andrew Jones and vi­sual con­sul­tant Doug Chiang. Then, wher­ever pos­si­ble, a pho­togram­me­try team would head to an ac­tual lo­ca­tion and cre­ate a 3D pho­to­graphic scan.

“We re­al­ized pretty early on that the best way to get photo-real con­tent on the screen was to pho­to­graph some­thing,” at­tests Visual Effects Supervisor Richard Bluff.

As amaz­ing and ad­vanced as the Unreal Engine’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties were, ren­der­ing fully vir­tual poly­gons on-the-fly did­n’t pro­duce the photo-real re­sult that the film­mak­ers de­manded. In short, 3-D com­puter-ren­dered sets and en­vi­ron­ments were not photo-re­al­is­tic enough to be uti­lized as in-cam­era fi­nal im­ages. The best tech­nique was to cre­ate the sets vir­tu­ally, but then in­cor­po­rate pho­tographs of real-world ob­jects, tex­tures and lo­ca­tions and map those im­ages onto the 3-D vir­tual ob­jects. This tech­nique is com­monly known as tiling or pho­togram­me­try. This is not nec­es­sar­ily a unique or new tech­nique, but the in­cor­po­ra­tion of pho­togram­me­try el­e­ments achieved the goal of cre­at­ing in-cam­era fi­nals.

The Mandolorian makes re­pairs with a rich land­scape dis­played be­hind him.

Additionally, pho­to­graphic “scanning” of a lo­ca­tion, which in­cor­po­rates tak­ing thou­sands of pho­tographs from many dif­fer­ent view­points to gen­er­ate a 3-D pho­to­graphic model, is a key com­po­nent in cre­at­ing the vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments.

Enrico Damm be­came the Environment Supervisor for the pro­duc­tion and led the scan­ning and pho­togram­me­try team that would travel to lo­ca­tions such as Iceland and Utah to shoot el­e­ments for the Star Wars plan­ets.

The per­fect weather con­di­tion for these pho­to­graphic cap­tures is a heav­ily over­cast day, as there are lit­tle to no shad­ows on the land­scape. A sit­u­a­tion with harsh sun­light and hard shad­ows means that it can­not eas­ily be re-lit in the vir­tual world. In those cases, soft­ware such as Agisoft De-Lighter was used to an­a­lyze the pho­tographs for light­ing and re­move shad­ows to re­sult in a more neu­tral can­vas for vir­tual light­ing.

Scanning is a faster, looser process than pho­togram­me­try and it is done from mul­ti­ple po­si­tions and view­points. For scan­ning, the more par­al­lax in­tro­duced, the bet­ter the soft­ware can re­solve the 3-D geom­e­try. Damm cre­ated a cus­tom rig where the scan­ner straps six cam­eras to their body which all fire si­mul­ta­ne­ously as the scan­ner moves about the lo­ca­tion. This al­lows them to gather six times the im­ages in the same amount of time — about 1,800 on av­er­age.

Photogrammetry is used to cre­ate vir­tual back­drops and im­ages must be shot on a nodal rig to elim­i­nate par­al­lax be­tween the pho­tos. For Mandalorian, about 30-40% of the Volume’s back­drops were cre­ated via vir­tual back­drops — pho­togram­me­try im­ages.

Each phase of pho­tog­ra­phy — pho­togram­me­try and scan­ning — needs to be done at var­i­ous times dur­ing the day to cap­ture dif­fer­ent looks to the land­scape.

Lidar scan­ning sys­tems are some­times also em­ployed.

The cam­eras used for scan­ning were Canon EOS 5D MKIV and EOS 5DS with prime lenses. Zooms are some­times in­cor­po­rated as mod­ern stitch­ing soft­ware has got­ten bet­ter about solv­ing mul­ti­ple im­ages from dif­fer­ent fo­cal lengths.

The Mandalorian (aka “Mando,” played by Pedro Pascal) treks through the desert alone.

This in­for­ma­tion was mapped onto 3D vir­tual sets and then mod­i­fied or em­bell­ished as nec­es­sary to ad­here to the Star Wars de­sign aes­thetic. If there was­n’t a real-world lo­ca­tion to pho­to­graph, the en­vi­ron­ments were cre­ated en­tirely by ILM’s “environments” vi­sual-ef­fects team. The el­e­ments of the lo­ca­tions were loaded into the Unreal Engine video game plat­form, which pro­vided a live, real-time, 3D en­vi­ron­ment that could re­act to the cam­er­a’s po­si­tion.

The third shot of Season 1’s first episode demon­strates this tech­nol­ogy with ex­treme ef­fec­tive­ness. The shot starts with a low an­gle of Mando read­ing a sen­sor on the icy planet of Maldo Kreis; he stands on a long walk­way that stretches out to a se­ries of struc­tures on the hori­zon. The skies are full of dark clouds, and a light snow swirls around. Mando walks along the trail to­ward the struc­tures, and the cam­era booms up.

All of this was cap­tured in the Volume, in-cam­era and in real time. Part of the walk­way was a real, prac­ti­cal set, but the rest of the world was the vir­tual im­age on the LED screen, and the par­al­lax as the cam­era boomed up matched per­fectly with the real set. The ef­fect of this sys­tem is seam­less.

Because of the enor­mous amount of pro­cess­ing power needed to cre­ate this kind of im­agery, the full 180′ screen and ceil­ing could not be ren­dered high-res­o­lu­tion, photo-real in real time. The com­pro­mise was to en­ter the spe­cific lens used on the cam­era into the sys­tem, so that it ren­dered a photo-real, high-res­o­lu­tion im­age based on the cam­er­a’s spe­cific field of view at that given mo­ment, while the rest of the screen dis­played a lower-res­o­lu­tion im­age that was still ef­fec­tive for in­ter­ac­tive light­ing and re­flec­tions on the tal­ent, props and phys­i­cal sets. (The sim­pler poly­gon count fa­cil­i­tated faster ren­der­ing times.)

Idoine (far left) dis­cusses a shot of “the Child” (aka “Baby Yoda”) with di­rec­tor Rick Famuyiwa (third from left) and se­ries cre­ator/​ex­ec­u­tive pro­ducer Jon Favreau (third from right), while as­sis­tant di­rec­tor Kim Richards (second from right, stand­ing) and crewmem­bers lis­ten. Practical set de­sign was of­ten used in front of the LED screen, and was de­signed to vi­su­ally bridge the gap be­tween the real and vir­tual space. The prac­ti­cal sets were fre­quently placed on ris­ers to lift the floor and bet­ter hide the seam of the LED wall and stage floor.

Each Volume load was put into the Unreal Engine video game plat­form, which pro­vided the live, real-time, 3D en­vi­ron­ment that re­acted to the pro­duc­tion cam­er­a’s po­si­tion — which was tracked by Profile Studios’ mo­tion-cap­ture sys­tem via in­frared (IR) cam­eras sur­round­ing the top of the LED walls that mon­i­tored the IR mark­ers mounted to the pro­duc­tion cam­era. When the sys­tem rec­og­nized the X, Y, Z po­si­tion of the cam­era, it then ren­dered proper 3D par­al­lax for the cam­er­a’s po­si­tion in real time. That was fed from Profile into ILM’s pro­pri­etary StageCraft soft­ware, which man­aged and recorded the in­for­ma­tion and full pro­duc­tion work­flow as it, in turn, fed the im­ages into the Unreal Engine. The im­ages were then out­put to the screens with the as­sis­tance of the Lux Machina team.

It takes 11 in­ter­linked com­put­ers to serve the im­ages to the wall. Three proces­sors are ded­i­cated to real-time ren­der­ing and four servers pro­vide three 4K im­ages seam­lessly side-by-side on the wall and one 4K im­age on the ceil­ing. That de­liv­ers an im­age size of 12,288 pix­els wide by 2,160 high on the wall and 4,096 x 2,160 on the ceil­ing. With that kind of im­agery, how­ever, the full 270 de­grees (plus mov­able back LED walls) and ceil­ing can­not be ren­dered high-res­o­lu­tion photo-real in real time. The com­pro­mise is to en­ter in the spe­cific lens used on the cam­era into the sys­tem so that it ren­ders a photo-real high-res­o­lu­tion im­age only for the cam­er­a’s spe­cific field of view at that given mo­ment while the rest of the screen dis­plays a lower-res­o­lu­tion im­age that is per­fectly ef­fec­tive for in­ter­ac­tive light­ing and re­flec­tions on the tal­ent, props and phys­i­cal sets, but of a sim­pler poly­gon count for faster ren­der­ing times.

Mando stands in a canyon on the planet Arvala. The rocks be­hind him are on the LED wall, while some prac­ti­cal rocks are placed in the mid- and fore­ground to blend the tran­si­tion. The floor of the stage is cov­ered in mud and rocks for this lo­ca­tion. On the jib is an Arri Alexa LF with a Panavision Ultra Vista anamor­phic lens.

Due to the 10-12 frames (roughly half a sec­ond) of la­tency from the time Profile’s sys­tem re­ceived cam­era-po­si­tion in­for­ma­tion to Unreal’s ren­der­ing of the new po­si­tion on the LED wall, if the cam­era moved ahead of the ren­dered frus­tum (a term defin­ing the vir­tual field of view of the cam­era) on the screen, the tran­si­tion line be­tween the high-qual­ity per­spec­tive ren­der win­dow and the lower-qual­ity main ren­der would be vis­i­ble. To avoid this, the frus­tum was pro­jected an av­er­age of 40-percent larger than the ac­tual field of view of the cam­era/​lens com­bi­na­tion, to al­low some safety mar­gin for cam­era moves. In some cases, if the lens’ field of view — and there­fore the frus­tum — was too wide, the sys­tem could not ren­der an im­age high-res enough in real time; the pro­duc­tion would then use the im­age on the LED screen sim­ply as light­ing, and com­pos­ite the im­age in post [with a green­screen added be­hind the ac­tors]. In those in­stances, the back­grounds were al­ready cre­ated, and the match was seam­less be­cause those ac­tual back­grounds had been used at the time of pho­tog­ra­phy [to light the scene].

Fortunately, says Fraser, Favreau wanted The Mandalorian to have a vi­sual aes­thetic that would match that of the orig­i­nal Star Wars. This meant a more “grounded” cam­era, with slow pans and tilts, and non-ag­gres­sive cam­era moves — an aes­thetic that helped to hide the sys­tem la­tency. “In ad­di­tion to us­ing some of the orig­i­nal cam­era lan­guage in Star Wars, Jon is deeply in­spired by old Westerns and samu­rai films, so he also wanted to bor­row a bit from those, es­pe­cially Westerns,” Fraser notes. “The Mandalorian is, in essence, a gun­slinger, and he’s very me­thod­i­cal. This gave us a set of pa­ra­me­ters that helped de­fine the look of the show. At no point will you see an 8mm fish­eye lens in some­one’s face. That just does­n’t work within this lan­guage.

“It was also of para­mount im­por­tance to me that the re­sult of this tech­nol­ogy not just be ‘suitable for TV,’ but match that of ma­jor, high-end mo­tion pic­tures,” Fraser con­tin­ues. “We had to push the bar to the point where no one would re­ally know we were us­ing new tech­nol­ogy; they would just ac­cept it as is. Amazingly, we were able to do just that.”

Steadicam op­er­a­tor Simon Jayes tracks Mando, Mayfeld (Bill Burr) and Ran Malk (Mark Boone Jr.) in front of the LED wall. While the 10- to 12-frame la­tency of ren­der­ing the high-res­o­lu­tion “frustum” on the wall can be prob­lem­atic, Steadicam was em­ployed lib­er­ally in Episode 6 to great suc­cess.

Shot on Arri’s Alexa LF, The Mandalorian was the maiden voy­age for Panavision’s full-frame Ultra Vista 1.65x anamor­phic lenses. The 1.65x anamor­phic squeeze al­lowed for full uti­liza­tion of the 1.44:1 as­pect ra­tio of the LF to cre­ate a 2.37:1 na­tive as­pect ra­tio, which was only slightly cropped to 2.39:1 for ex­hi­bi­tion.

“We chose the LF for a cou­ple rea­sons,” ex­plains Fraser. “Star Wars has a long his­tory of anamor­phic pho­tog­ra­phy, and that as­pect ra­tio is re­ally key. We tested spher­i­cal lenses and crop­ping to 2.40, but it did­n’t feel right. It felt very con­tem­po­rary, not like the Star Wars we grew up with. Additionally, the LF’s larger sen­sor changes the fo­cal length of the lens that we use for any given shot to a longer lens and re­duces the over­all depth of field. The T2.3 of the Ultra Vistas is more like a T0.8 in Super 35, so with less depth of field, it was eas­ier to put the LED screen out of fo­cus faster, which avoided a lot of is­sues with moiré. It al­lows the in­her­ent prob­lems in a 2D screen dis­play­ing 3D im­ages to fall off in fo­cus a lot faster, so the eye can’t tell that those build­ings that ap­pear to be 1,000 feet away are ac­tu­ally be­ing pro­jected on a 2D screen only 20 feet from the ac­tor.

Fraser op­er­ates an Alexa LF, shoot­ing a close-up of the Ugnaught Kuiil (Misty Rosas in the suit, voiced by Nick Nolte). The tran­si­tion be­tween the bot­tom of the LED wall and the stage floor is clearly seen here. That area was of­ten ob­scured by phys­i­cal pro­duc­tion de­sign or re­placed in post.

“The Ultra Vistas were a great choice for us be­cause they have a good amount of char­ac­ter and soft­ness,” Fraser con­tin­ues. “Photographing the chrome hel­met on Mando is a chal­lenge — its su­per-sharp edges can quickly look video-like if the lens is too sharp. Having a softer acu­tance in the lens, which [Panavision se­nior vice pres­i­dent of op­ti­cal en­gi­neer­ing and ASC as­so­ci­ate] Dan Sasaki [modified] for us, re­ally helped. The lens we used for Mando tended to be a lit­tle too soft for hu­man faces, so we usu­ally shot Mando wide open, com­pen­sat­ing for that with ND fil­ters, and shot peo­ple 2⁄3 stop or 1 stop closed.”

According to Idoine, the pro­duc­tion used 50mm, 65mm, 75mm, 100mm, 135mm, 150mm and 180mm Ultra Vistas that range from T2 to T2.8, and he and Fraser tended to ex­pose at T2.5-T3.5. “Dan Sasaki gave us two pro­to­type Ultra Vistas to test in June 2018,” he says, “and from that we worked out what fo­cal-length range to build.

Director Bryce Dallas Howard con­fers with ac­tress Gina Carano — as mer­ce­nary Cara Dune — while shoot­ing the episode “Chapter 4: Sanctuary.”

“Our de­sire for cin­e­matic im­agery drove every choice,” Idoine adds. And that in­cluded the in­cor­po­ra­tion of a LUT em­u­lat­ing Kodak’s short-lived 500T 5230 color neg­a­tive, a fa­vorite of Fraser’s. “I used that stock on Killing Them Softly [AC Oct. ’12] and Foxcatcher [AC Dec. ’14], and I just loved its creamy shad­ows and the slight ma­genta cast in the high­lights,” says Fraser. “For Rogue One, ILM was able to de­velop a LUT that em­u­lated it, and I’ve been us­ing that LUT ever since.”

“Foxcatcher was the last film I shot on the stock, and then Kodak dis­con­tin­ued it,” con­tin­ues Fraser. “At the time, we had some stock left over and I asked the pro­duc­tion if we could do­nate it to an Australian film stu­dent and they said ‘yes,’ so we sent sev­eral boxes to Australia. When I was prep­ping Rogue One, I de­cided that was the look I wanted — this 5230 stock — but it was gone. On a long shot, I wrote an email to the film stu­dent to see if he had any stock left and, un­be­liev­ably, he had 50 feet in the bot­tom of his fridge. I had him send that di­rectly to ILM and they cre­ated a LUT from it that I used on Rogue and now Mandalorian.”

Actor Giancarlo Esposito as Moff Gideon, an Imperial search­ing for the Child.

A sig­nif­i­cant key to the Volume’s suc­cess cre­at­ing in-cam­era fi­nal VFX is color match­ing the wal­l’s LED out­put with the color ma­trix of the Arri Alexa LF cam­era. ILM’s Matthias Scharfenberg, J. Schulte and their team did thor­ough test­ing of the Black Roe LED ca­pa­bil­i­ties and match­ing that with the color sen­si­tiv­ity and re­pro­duc­tion of the LF to make them seam­less part­ners. LEDs are very nar­row band color spec­trum emit­ters, their red, green and blue diodes out­put very nar­row spec­tra of color for each diode which makes reach­ing some col­ors very dif­fi­cult and fur­ther mak­ing them com­pat­i­ble with the color fil­ter ar­ray on the ALEV-III was a bit of a chal­lenge. Utilizing a care­fully de­signed se­ries of color patches, a cal­i­bra­tion se­quence was run on the LED wall to sync with the cam­er­a’s sen­si­tiv­ity. This means any other model of cam­era shoot­ing on the Volume will not re­ceive proper color, but the Alexa LF will. While the color re­pro­duc­tion of the LEDs may not have looked right to the eye, through the cam­era, it ap­peared seam­less. This means that the off-the-shelf LED pan­els won’t quite work with the ac­cu­racy nec­es­sary for a high-end pro­duc­tion, but, with cus­tom tweak­ing, they were suc­cess­ful. There were lim­i­ta­tions, how­ever. With low light back­grounds, the screens would block up and alias in the shad­ows mak­ing them un­suit­able for in-cam­era fi­nals — al­though with fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the color sci­ence this has been solved for sea­son two.

A sig­nif­i­cant as­set to the LED Volume wall and im­ages pro­jected from it is the in­ter­ac­tive light­ing pro­vided on the ac­tors, sets and props within the Volume. The light that is pro­jected from the im­agery on the LED wall pro­vides a re­al­is­tic sense of the ac­tor (or set/​props) be­ing within that en­vi­ron­ment in a way that is rarely achiev­able with green- or blue­screen com­pos­ite pho­tog­ra­phy. If the sun is low on the hori­zon on the LED wall, the po­si­tion of the sun on the wall will be sig­nif­i­cantly brighter than the sur­round­ing sky. This brighter spot will cre­ate a bright high­light on the ac­tors and ob­jects in the Volume just as a real sun would from that po­si­tion. Reflections of el­e­ments of the en­vi­ron­ment from the walls and ceil­ing show up in Mando’s cos­tume as if he were ac­tu­ally in that real-world lo­ca­tion.

“When you’re deal­ing with a re­flec­tive sub­ject like Mando, the world out­side the cam­era frame is of­ten more im­por­tant than the world you see in the cam­er­a’s field of view,” Fraser says. “What’s be­hind the cam­era is re­flected in the ac­tor’s hel­met and cos­tume, and that’s cru­cial to sell­ing the il­lu­sion that he’s in that en­vi­ron­ment. Even if we were only shoot­ing in one di­rec­tion on a par­tic­u­lar lo­ca­tion, the vir­tual art-de­part­ment would have to build a 360-degree set so we could get the in­ter­ac­tive light­ing and re­flec­tions right. This was also true for prac­ti­cal sets that were built on­stage and on the back­lot — we had to build the ar­eas that we would never see on cam­era be­cause they would be re­flected in the suit. In the Volume, it’s this world out­side the cam­era that de­fines the light­ing.

“When you think about it, un­less it’s a prac­ti­cal light in shot, all of our light­ing is out­side the frame — that’s how we make movies,” Fraser con­tin­ues. “But when most of your light­ing comes from the en­vi­ron­ment, you have to shape that en­vi­ron­ment care­fully. We some­times have to add a prac­ti­cal or a win­dow into the de­sign, which pro­vides our key light even though we never see that [element] on cam­era.”

The fight with the mud­horn likely negated any worry about hel­met re­flec­tions for this scene.

The in­ter­ac­tive light­ing of the Volume also sig­nif­i­cantly re­duces the re­quire­ment for tra­di­tional film pro­duc­tion light­ing equip­ment and crew. The light emit­ted from the LED screens be­comes the pri­mary light­ing on the ac­tors, sets and props within the Volume. Since this light comes from a vir­tual im­age of the set or lo­ca­tion, the or­ganic na­ture of the qual­ity of the light on the el­e­ments within the Volume firmly ground those el­e­ments into the re­al­ity pre­sented.

There were, of course, lim­i­ta­tions. Although LEDs are bright and ca­pa­ble of emit­ting a good deal of light, they can­not re-cre­ate the in­ten­sity and qual­ity of di­rect, nat­ural day­light. “The sun on the LED screen looks per­fect be­cause it’s been pho­tographed, but it does­n’t look good on the sub­jects — they look like they’re in a stu­dio,” Fraser at­tests. “It’s work­able for close-ups, but not re­ally for wide shots. For mo­ments with real, di­rect sun­light, we headed out to the back­lot as much as pos­si­ble.” That “backlot” was an open field near the Manhattan Beach Studios stages, where the art de­part­ment built var­i­ous sets. (Several stages were used for cre­at­ing tra­di­tional sets as well.)

Overcast skies, how­ever, proved a great source in the Volume. The skies for each “load” — the term given for each new en­vi­ron­ment loaded onto the LED walls — were based on real, pho­tographed skies. While shoot­ing a lo­ca­tion, the pho­togram­me­try team shot mul­ti­ple stills at dif­fer­ent times of day to cre­ate “sky domes.” This en­abled the di­rec­tor and cin­e­matog­ra­pher to choose the sun po­si­tion and sky qual­ity for each set. “We can cre­ate a per­fect en­vi­ron­ment where you have two min­utes to sun­set frozen in time for an en­tire 10-hour day,” Idoine notes. “If we need to do a turn­around, we merely ro­tate the sky and back­ground, and we’re ready to shoot!”

Idoine (seated at cam­era) in dis­cus­sion with Favreau and Filoni on a prac­ti­cal set.

During prep, Fraser and Idoine spent a lot of time in the vir­tual art de­part­ment, whose crew cre­ated the vir­tual back­grounds for the LED loads. They spent many hours go­ing through each load to set sky-dome choices and pick the per­fect time of day and sun po­si­tion for each mo­ment. They could se­lect the sky con­di­tion they wanted, ad­just the scale and the ori­en­ta­tion, and fi­nesse all of these at­trib­utes to find the best light­ing for the scene. Basic, real-time ray trac­ing helped them see the ef­fects of their choices on the vir­tual ac­tors in the pre­vis scene. These choices would then be saved and sent off to ILM, whose artists would use these rougher as­sets for ref­er­ence and build the high-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal as­sets.

The Virtual Art Department starts their job cre­at­ing 3-D vir­tual sets of each lo­ca­tion to pro­duc­tion de­signer Andrew Jones’ spec­i­fi­ca­tions and then the di­rec­tor and cin­e­matog­ra­pher can go into the vir­tual lo­ca­tion with VR head­sets and do a vir­tual scout. Digital ac­tors, props and sets are added and can be moved about and cov­er­age is cho­sen dur­ing the vir­tual scout. Then the cin­e­matog­ra­pher will fol­low the process as the vir­tual set gets fur­ther tex­tured with pho­togram­me­try el­e­ments and the sky domes are added.

The vir­tual world on the LED screen is fan­tas­tic for many uses, but ob­vi­ously an ac­tor can­not walk through the screen, so an open door­way does­n’t work when it’s vir­tual. Doors are an as­pect of pro­duc­tion de­sign that have to be phys­i­cal. If a char­ac­ter walks through a door, it can’t be vir­tual, it must be real as the ac­tor can’t walk through the LED screen.

Favreau gets his west­ern-style sa­loon en­trance from the first episode of The Mandalorian.

If an ac­tor is close to a set piece, it is more of­ten pre­ferred that piece be phys­i­cal in­stead of vir­tual. If they’re close to a wall, that should be a phys­i­cal wall so that they are ac­tu­ally close to some­thing real.

Many ob­jects that are phys­i­cal are also vir­tual. Even if a prop or set piece is phys­i­cally con­structed, it is scanned and in­cor­po­rated into the vir­tual world so that it be­comes not only a prac­ti­cal as­set, but a dig­i­tal one as well. Once it’s in the vir­tual world, it can be turned on or off on a par­tic­u­lar set or du­pli­cated.

“We take ob­jects that the art de­part­ment have cre­ated and we em­ploy pho­togram­me­try on each item to get them into the game en­gine,” ex­plains Clint Spillers, Virtual Production Supervisor. “We also keep the thing that we scanned and we put it in front of the screen and we’ve had re­mark­able suc­cess get­ting the fore­ground as­set and the dig­i­tal ob­ject to live to­gether very com­fort­ably.”

Another chal­lenge on pro­duc­tion de­sign is the con­cept that every set must be ex­e­cuted in full 360 de­grees. While in tra­di­tional film­mak­ing a pro­duc­tion de­signer may be tempted to short­cut a de­sign know­ing that the cam­era will only see a small por­tion of a par­tic­u­lar set, in this world the set that is off cam­era is just as im­por­tant as the set that is seen on cam­era.

“This was a big rev­e­la­tion for us early on,” at­tests pro­duc­tion de­signer Andrew Jones. “We were, ini­tially, think­ing of this tech­nol­ogy as a back­drop — like an ad­vanced trans­light or painted back­drop — that we would shoot against and hope to get in-cam­era fi­nal ef­fects. We imag­ined that we would de­sign our sets as you would on a nor­mal film: IE, the cam­era sees over here, so this is what we need to build. In early con­ver­sa­tions with DP Greig Fraser he ex­plained that the off-cam­era por­tion of the set — that might never be seen on cam­era — was just as vi­tal to the ef­fect. The whole Volume is a light box and what is be­hind the cam­era is re­flected on the ac­tor’s faces, cos­tumes, props. What’s be­hind the cam­era is ac­tu­ally the key light­ing on the tal­ent.

“This con­cept rad­i­cally changed how we ap­proach the sets,” Jones con­tin­ues. “Anything you put in The Volume is lit by the en­vi­ron­ment, so we have to make sure that we con­cep­tu­al­ize and con­struct the vir­tual set in its en­tirety of every lo­ca­tion in full 360. Since the ac­tor is, in essence, a chrome ball, he’s re­flect­ing what is all around him so every de­tail needs to be re­al­ized.”

They some­times used pho­togram­me­try as the ba­sis, but al­ways re­lied upon the same vi­sual-ef­fects artists who cre­ate en­vi­ron­ments for the Star Wars films to re­al­ize these real-time worlds — “baking in” light­ing choices es­tab­lished ear­lier in the pipeline with high-end, ray-traced ren­der­ing.

“I chose the sky domes that worked best for all the shots we needed for each se­quence on the Volume,” Fraser notes. “After they were cho­sen and ILM had done their work, I could­n’t raise or lower the sun be­cause the light­ing and shad­ows would be baked in, but I could turn the whole world to ad­just where the hot spot was.”

Fraser noted a lim­i­ta­tion of the ad­just­ments that can be made to the sky domes once they’re live on the Volume af­ter ILM’s fi­nal­iza­tion. The world can be ro­tated and the cen­ter po­si­tion can be changed; the in­ten­sity and color can be ad­justed, but the ac­tual po­si­tion of the sun in the sky dome can’t be al­tered be­cause ILM has done the ray trac­ing ahead of time and “baked” in the shad­ows of the ter­rain by the sun po­si­tion. This is done to min­i­mize the com­pu­ta­tions nec­es­sary to do ad­vanced ray trac­ing in real time. If the cho­sen po­si­tion changes, those baked-in shad­ows won’t change, only the el­e­ments that are re­served for real-time ren­der­ing and sim­ple ray trac­ing will be af­fected. This would make the back­grounds look false and fake as the light­ing di­rec­tion would­n’t match the baked-in shad­ows.

From time to time, tra­di­tional light­ing fix­tures were added to aug­ment the out­put of the Volume.

In the fourth episode, the Mandalorian is look­ing to lay low and trav­els to the re­mote farm­ing planet of Sorgan and vis­its the com­mon house, which is a thatched, bas­ket-weave struc­ture. The ac­tual com­mon house was a minia­ture built by the art de­part­ment and then pho­tographed to be in­cluded in the vir­tual world. The minia­ture was lit with a sin­gle, hard light source that em­u­lated nat­ural day­light break­ing through the thatched walls. “You could clearly see that one side of the com­mon house was in hard light and the other side was in shadow,” re­calls Idoine. “There were hot spots in the model that re­ally looked great so we in­cor­po­rated LED “movers” with slash go­bos and Charlie Bars [long flags] to break up the light in a sim­i­lar bas­ket-weave pat­tern. Because of this very open bas­ket-weave con­struc­tion and the fact that the load had a lot of shafts of light, I added in ran­dom slashes of hard light into the prac­ti­cal set and it mixed re­ally well.”

The Volume could in­cor­po­rate vir­tual light­ing, too, via the “Brain Bar,” a NASA Mission Control-like sec­tion of the sound­stage where as many as a dozen artists from ILM, Unreal and Profile sat at work­sta­tions and made the tech­nol­ogy of the Volume func­tion. Their work was able to in­cor­po­rate on-the-fly color-cor­rec­tion ad­just­ments and vir­tual-light­ing tools, among other tweaks.

Matt Madden, pres­i­dent of Profile and a mem­ber of the Brain Bar team, worked closely with Fraser, Idoine and gaffer Jeff Webster to in­cor­po­rate vir­tual-light­ing tools via an iPad that com­mu­ni­cated back to the Bar. He could cre­ate shapes of light on the wall of any size, color and in­ten­sity. If the cin­e­matog­ra­pher wanted a large, soft source off-cam­era, Madden was able to cre­ate a “light card” of white just out­side the frus­tum. The en­tire wall out­side the cam­er­a’s an­gle of view could be a large light source of any in­ten­sity or color that the LEDs could re­pro­duce.

In this case, a LED wall was made up of Roe Black Pearl BP2 screens with a max bright­ness of 1800 nits. 10.674 nits are equal to 1 foot can­dle of light. At peak bright­ness, the wall could cre­ate an in­ten­sity of about 168 foot can­dles. That’s the equiv­a­lent of an f/​8 3/4 at 800 ISO (24fps 180-degree shut­ter). While the Volume was never shot at peak full white, any light­ing “cards” that were added were ca­pa­ble of out­putting this bright­ness.

Idoine dis­cov­ered that a great ad­di­tional source for Mando was a long, nar­row band of white near the top of the LED wall. “This wrap­around source cre­ated a great back­light look on Mando’s hel­met,” Idoine says. Alternatively, he and Fraser could re­quest a tall, nar­row band of light on the wall that would re­flect on Mando’s full suit, sim­i­lar to the way a com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­pher might light a wine bot­tle or a car — us­ing spec­u­lar re­flec­tions to de­fine shape.

Additionally, vir­tual black flags — mean­ing ar­eas where the LED wall were set to black — could be added wher­ever needed, and at what­ever size. The trans­parency of the black could also be ad­justed to any per­cent­age to cre­ate vir­tual nets.

I am an am­a­teur pho­tog­ra­pher, and I’ve sold cam­eras non-pro­fes­sion­ally on Amazon for over eight years as I’ve up­graded. That trend comes to an end with my most re­cent trans­ac­tion. In December, I sold a mint-in-box Sony a7R 4, and the buyer used a com­bi­na­tion of so­cial en­gi­neer­ing and am­bi­gu­ity to not only end up with the cam­era, but also the money he paid me.

Amazon’s A-to-Z Guarantee did not pro­tect me as a seller. Based on my ex­pe­ri­ence with this trans­ac­tion, I can­not in good faith rec­om­mend sell­ing cam­eras on Amazon any­more.

Author’s Note: This is a sum­mary and my per­sonal opin­ion, and not that of my em­ployer or any­one else.

I or­dered a sec­ond Sony a7R 4 as a backup for a pho­to­shoot. My plan was to then re­sell it, as the seller fees were slightly less than the rental fees at the time. I listed it on Amazon, and it was al­most in­stantly pur­chased by a buyer from Florida. I took pho­tos of the cam­era as I pre­pared it for ship­ment, and used con­firmed & in­sured two-day FedEx. The pack­age ar­rived to the buyer on December 17th.

The buyer listed an ini­tial for his last name—that should have been a red flag. It gave him a layer of anonymity that will be rel­e­vant later.

On December 24th, I ap­par­ently ru­ined Christmas, as the buyer now claims that ac­ces­sories were miss­ing. Throughout this whole or­deal, I’ve never heard di­rectly from the buyer, in spite of nu­mer­ous email com­mu­ni­ca­tions. He never told me which “product pur­chased/​pack­ag­ing” was miss­ing.

I started a claim with Amazon, show­ing the pho­to­graphic ev­i­dence of a mint-in-box a7R 4 with all ac­ces­sories. I de­nied the re­turn. The buyer of­fered no pho­to­graphic proof or other ev­i­dence that he re­ceived any­thing but a mint cam­era.

To this day, I have no idea what he claimed was “missing” from the pack­age. I even in­cluded all the orig­i­nal plas­tic wrap!

After about a week of back-and-forth emails, Amazon ini­tially agreed with me.

Somehow, a sec­ond sup­port ticket for the same item got opened up. The is­sue was not yet re­solved. The buyer kept claw­ing back. The next day, I get an email about a “refund re­quest ini­ti­ated.” On this sec­ond ticket, Amazon now turned against me.

Now, we’re in 2020. The buyer ap­par­ently shipped the cam­era back to me; how­ever, he en­tered the wrong ad­dress (forgetting my last name, among other things). The pack­age was re­turned to sender, and I never got to in­spect what’s in­side. Whether that box con­tained the cam­era as sent in like new con­di­tion, a used cam­era, or a box of stones is an eter­nal mys­tery.

Truly, had he shipped it to the right ad­dress, I would have had mul­ti­ple wit­nesses and video footage of the un­box­ing.

Here’s where it gets in­ter­est­ing: as I ap­peal the claim, Amazon notes that the buyer is not re­spon­si­ble for ship­ping the item back to the cor­rect ad­dress, and they can in­deed keep the item if they want to, fol­low­ing the ini­ti­a­tion of an A-to-Z Guarantee.

Indeed, I have a pa­per trail of emails that I in fact sent to Amazon. Somehow, they got their tick­ets con­fused. When I fol­lowed up on this email, they shut off com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

So, as a buyer, you can keep an item with “no oblig­a­tion to re­turn,” even if you can’t sub­stan­ti­ate your claim of “missing items or box.” Now the buyer has the cam­era, and the cash.

The whole ex­pe­ri­ence has been frus­trat­ing, hu­mil­i­at­ing, and sick­en­ing to my pho­tog­ra­phy hobby. I hope that this serves as a cau­tion­ary tale for sell­ing such goods on Amazon, if my ex­pe­ri­ence is any in­di­ca­tion.

As of now, I’ve emailed the buyer again to ship the cam­era back to me, and I have a case open with Amazon, in which I pro­vide the 23 emails they claim I never sent them. That case was closed with no re­sponse from Amazon. I had an ini­tially-sym­pa­thetic ear through their Twitter sup­port, un­til I men­tioned the specifics of my case.

* If you’re go­ing to sell on Amazon or else­where, take an ac­tual video of you pack­ing the cam­era. You need all the de­fense you can get against items mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­pear­ing.

* Investigate more even-handed sell­ing ser­vices, like eBay, Fred Miranda, or other on­line re­tail­ers.

* If you need a backup cam­era, go ahead and rent one. I’m a fre­quent cus­tomer of BorrowLenses, and I in­fi­nitely re­gret not us­ing them this time.

* Update your per­sonal ar­ti­cles in­sur­ance pol­icy for any mo­ment that the cam­era is in your pos­ses­sion, and use some­thing like MyGearVault to keep track of all the se­r­ial num­bers. I only had the cam­era for a cou­ple of days al­to­gether, but that was enough.

I hope that this was a worst-case, every­thing-goes-wrong sce­nario, and I hope that it does­n’t hap­pen to any­one else. There ought to be more even-handed fail­safes for these trans­ac­tions.

About the au­thor: Cliff is an am­a­teur land­scape and travel pho­tog­ra­pher. You can find more of his work on his web­site and Instagram ac­count.

“We are side­step­ping all of the sci­en­tific chal­lenges that have held fu­sion en­ergy back for more than half a cen­tury,” says the di­rec­tor of an Australian com­pany that claims its hy­dro­gen-boron fu­sion tech­nol­ogy is al­ready work­ing a bil­lion times bet­ter than ex­pected.

HB11 Energy is a spin-out com­pany that orig­i­nated at the University of New South Wales, and it an­nounced to­day a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA pro­tect­ing its unique ap­proach to fu­sion en­ergy gen­er­a­tion.

Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe the­o­ret­i­cal so­lu­tion to hu­man­i­ty’s en­ergy needs. It’s how the Sun it­self makes the vast amounts of en­ergy that have pow­ered life on our planet up un­til now. Where nu­clear fis­sion — the split­ting of atoms to re­lease en­ergy — has proven in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful but in­sanely de­struc­tive when things go wrong, fu­sion promises re­li­able, safe, low cost, green en­ergy gen­er­a­tion with no chance of ra­dioac­tive melt­down.

It’s just al­ways been 20 years away from be­ing 20 years away. A num­ber of multi-bil­lion dol­lar pro­jects are push­ing slowly for­ward, from the Max Planck Institute’s in­sanely com­plex Wendelstein 7-X steller­a­tor to the 35-nation ITER Tokamak pro­ject, and most rely on a deu­terium-tri­tium ther­monu­clear fu­sion ap­proach that re­quires the cre­ation of lu­di­crously hot tem­per­a­tures, much hot­ter than the sur­face of the Sun, at up to 15 mil­lion de­grees Celsius (27 mil­lion de­grees Fahrenheit). This is where HB11′s tech takes a sharp left turn.

The re­sults of decades of re­search by Emeritus Professor Heinrich Hora, HB11′s ap­proach to fu­sion does away with rare, ra­dioac­tive and dif­fi­cult fu­els like tri­tium al­to­gether — as well as those in­cred­i­bly high tem­per­a­tures. Instead, it uses plen­ti­ful hy­dro­gen and boron B-11, em­ploy­ing the pre­cise ap­pli­ca­tion of some very spe­cial lasers to start the fu­sion re­ac­tion.

Here’s how HB11 de­scribes its “deceptively sim­ple” ap­proach: the de­sign is “a largely empty metal sphere, where a mod­estly sized HB11 fuel pel­let is held in the cen­ter, with aper­tures on dif­fer­ent sides for the two lasers. One laser es­tab­lishes the mag­netic con­tain­ment field for the plasma and the sec­ond laser trig­gers the ‘avalanche’ fu­sion chain re­ac­tion. The al­pha par­ti­cles gen­er­ated by the re­ac­tion would cre­ate an elec­tri­cal flow that can be chan­neled al­most di­rectly into an ex­ist­ing power grid with no need for a heat ex­changer or steam tur­bine gen­er­a­tor.”

HB11′s Managing Director Dr. Warren McKenzie clar­i­fies over the phone: “A lot of fu­sion ex­per­i­ments are us­ing the lasers to heat things up to crazy tem­per­a­tures — we’re not. We’re us­ing the laser to mas­sively ac­cel­er­ate the hy­dro­gen through the boron sam­ple us­ing non-lin­ear forced. You could say we’re us­ing the hy­dro­gen as a dart, and hop­ing to hit a boron , and if we hit one, we can start a fu­sion re­ac­tion. That’s the essence of it. If you’ve got a sci­en­tific ap­pre­ci­a­tion of tem­per­a­ture, it’s es­sen­tially the speed of atoms mov­ing around. Creating fu­sion us­ing tem­per­a­ture is es­sen­tially ran­domly mov­ing atoms around, and hop­ing they’ll hit one an­other, our ap­proach is much more pre­cise.”

“The hy­dro­gen/​boron fu­sion cre­ates a cou­ple of he­lium atoms,” he con­tin­ues. “They’re naked he­li­ums, they don’t have elec­trons, so they have a pos­i­tive charge. We just have to col­lect that charge. Essentially, the lack of elec­trons is a prod­uct of the re­ac­tion and it di­rectly cre­ates the cur­rent.”

The lasers them­selves rely upon cut­ting-edge “Chirped Pulse Amplification” tech­nol­ogy, the de­vel­op­ment of which won its in­ven­tors the 2018 Nobel prize in Physics. Much smaller and sim­pler than any of the high-tem­per­a­ture fu­sion gen­er­a­tors, HB11 says its gen­er­a­tors would be com­pact, clean and safe enough to build in ur­ban en­vi­ron­ments. There’s no nu­clear waste in­volved, no su­per­heated steam, and no chance of a melt­down.

“This is brand new,” Professor Hora tells us. “10-petawatt power laser pulses. It’s been shown that you can cre­ate fu­sion con­di­tions with­out hun­dreds of mil­lions of de­grees. This is com­pletely new knowl­edge. I’ve been work­ing on how to ac­com­plish this for more than 40 years. It’s a unique re­sult. Now we have to con­vince the fu­sion peo­ple — it works bet­ter than the pre­sent day hun­dred mil­lion de­gree ther­mal equi­lib­rium gen­er­a­tors. We have some­thing new at hand to make a dras­tic change in the whole sit­u­a­tion. A sub­sti­tute for car­bon as our en­ergy source. A rad­i­cal new sit­u­a­tion and a new hope for en­ergy and the cli­mate.”

Indeed, says Hora, ex­per­i­ments and sim­u­la­tions on the laser-trig­gered chain re­ac­tion are re­turn­ing re­ac­tion rates a bil­lion times higher than pre­dicted. This cas­cad­ing avalanche of re­ac­tions is an es­sen­tial step to­ward the ul­ti­mate goal: reap­ing far more en­ergy from the re­ac­tion than you put in. The ex­tra­or­di­nary early re­sults lead HB11 to be­lieve the com­pany “stands a high chance of reach­ing the goal of net en­ergy gain well ahead of other groups.”

“As we aren’t try­ing to heat fu­els to im­pos­si­bly high tem­per­a­tures, we are side­step­ping all of the sci­en­tific chal­lenges that have held fu­sion en­ergy back for more than half a cen­tury,” says Dr McKenzie. “This means our de­vel­op­ment roadmap will be much faster and cheaper than any other fu­sion ap­proach. You know what’s amaz­ing? Heinrich is in his eight­ies. He called this in the 1970s, he said this would be pos­si­ble. It’s only pos­si­ble now be­cause these brand new lasers are ca­pa­ble of do­ing it. That, in my mind, is awe­some.”

Dr McKenzie won’t how­ever, be drawn on how long it’ll be be­fore the hy­dro­gen-boron re­ac­tor is a com­mer­cial re­al­ity. “The time­line ques­tion is a tricky one,” he says. “I don’t want to be a laugh­ing stock by promis­ing we can de­liver some­thing in 10 years, and then not get­ting there. First step is set­ting up camp as a com­pany and get­ting started. First mile­stone is demon­strat­ing the re­ac­tions, which should be easy. Second mile­stone is get­ting enough re­ac­tions to demon­strate an en­ergy gain by count­ing the amount of he­lium that comes out of a fuel pel­let when we have those two lasers work­ing to­gether. That’ll give us all the sci­ence we need to en­gi­neer a re­ac­tor. So the third mile­stone is bring­ing that all to­gether and demon­strat­ing a re­ac­tor con­cept that works.”

This is big-time stuff. Should cheap, clean, safe fu­sion en­ergy re­ally be achieved, it would be an ex­tra­or­di­nary leap for­ward for hu­man­ity and a huge part of the an­swer for our fu­ture en­ergy needs. And should it be achieved with­out in­sanely hot tem­per­a­tures be­ing in­volved, peo­ple would be even more com­fort­able hav­ing it close to their homes. We’ll be keep­ing an eye on these guys.

Lion cubs play-fight to learn so­cial skills. Rats play to learn emo­tional skills. Monkeys play to learn cog­ni­tive skills. And yet, in the last cen­tury, we hu­mans have con­vinced our­selves that play is use­less, and learn­ing is sup­posed to be bor­ing.

Gosh, no won­der we’re all so mis­er­able.

Welcome to Explorable Explanations, a hub for learn­ing through play! We’re a dis­or­ga­nized “movement” of artists, coders & ed­u­ca­tors who want to re­unite play and learn­ing.

Let’s get started! Check out these 3 ran­dom Explorables:

February 2020

What should an es­say be? Many peo­ple would say per­sua­sive. That’s

what a lot of us were taught es­says should be. But I think we can

aim for some­thing more am­bi­tious: that an es­say should be use­ful.

To start with, that means it should be cor­rect. But it’s not enough

merely to be cor­rect. It’s easy to make a state­ment cor­rect by

mak­ing it vague. That’s a com­mon flaw in aca­d­e­mic writ­ing, for

ex­am­ple. If you know noth­ing at all about an is­sue, you can’t go

wrong by say­ing that the is­sue is a com­plex one, that there are

many fac­tors to be con­sid­ered, that it’s a mis­take to take too

sim­plis­tic a view of it, and so on.

Though no doubt cor­rect, such state­ments tell the reader noth­ing.

Useful writ­ing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made

with­out be­com­ing false.

For ex­am­ple, it’s more use­ful to say that Pike’s Peak is near the

mid­dle of Colorado than merely some­where in Colorado. But if I say

it’s in the ex­act mid­dle of Colorado, I’ve now gone too far, be­cause

it’s a bit east of the mid­dle.

Precision and cor­rect­ness are like op­pos­ing forces. It’s easy to

sat­isfy one if you ig­nore the other. The con­verse of va­porous

aca­d­e­mic writ­ing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of dem­a­gogues.

Useful writ­ing is bold, but true.

It’s also two other things: it tells peo­ple some­thing im­por­tant,

and that at least some of them did­n’t al­ready know.

Telling peo­ple some­thing they did­n’t know does­n’t al­ways mean

sur­pris­ing them. Sometimes it means telling them some­thing they

knew un­con­sciously but had never put into words. In fact those may

be the more valu­able in­sights, be­cause they tend to be more

fun­da­men­tal.

Let’s put them all to­gether. Useful writ­ing tells peo­ple some­thing

true and im­por­tant that they did­n’t al­ready know, and tells them

as un­equiv­o­cally as pos­si­ble.

Notice these are all a mat­ter of de­gree. For ex­am­ple, you can’t

ex­pect an idea to be novel to every­one. Any in­sight that you have

will prob­a­bly have al­ready been had by at least one of the world’s

7 bil­lion peo­ple. But it’s suf­fi­cient if an idea is novel to a lot

of read­ers.

Ditto for cor­rect­ness, im­por­tance, and strength. In ef­fect the four

com­po­nents are like num­bers you can mul­ti­ply to­gether to get a score

for use­ful­ness. Which I re­al­ize is al­most awk­wardly re­duc­tive, but

nonethe­less true.

How can you en­sure that the things you say are true and novel and

im­por­tant? Believe it or not, there is a trick for do­ing this. I

learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a hor­ror of say­ing

any­thing dumb. His trick is not to say any­thing un­less he’s sure

it’s worth hear­ing. This makes it hard to get opin­ions out of him,

but when you do, they’re usu­ally right.

Translated into es­say writ­ing, what this means is that if you write

a bad sen­tence, you don’t pub­lish it. You delete it and try again.

Often you aban­don whole branches of four or five para­graphs. Sometimes

a whole es­say.

You can’t en­sure that every idea you have is good, but you can

en­sure that every one you pub­lish is, by sim­ply not pub­lish­ing the

ones that aren’t.

In the sci­ences, this is called pub­li­ca­tion bias, and is con­sid­ered

bad. When some hy­poth­e­sis you’re ex­plor­ing gets in­con­clu­sive re­sults,

you’re sup­posed to tell peo­ple about that too. But with es­say

writ­ing, pub­li­ca­tion bias is the way to go.

My strat­egy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an

es­say fast, try­ing out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewrit­ing

it very care­fully.

I’ve never tried to count how many times I proof­read es­says, but

I’m sure there are sen­tences I’ve read 100 times be­fore pub­lish­ing

them. When I proof­read an es­say, there are usu­ally pas­sages that

stick out in an an­noy­ing way, some­times be­cause they’re clum­sily

writ­ten, and some­times be­cause I’m not sure they’re true. The

an­noy­ance starts out un­con­scious, but af­ter the tenth read­ing or

so I’m say­ing “Ugh, that part” each time I hit it. They be­come like

bri­ars that catch your sleeve as you walk past. Usually I won’t

pub­lish an es­say till they’re all gone � till I can read through

the whole thing with­out the feel­ing of any­thing catch­ing.

I’ll some­times let through a sen­tence that seems clumsy, if I can’t

think of a way to rephrase it, but I will never know­ingly let through

one that does­n’t seem cor­rect. You never have to. If a sen­tence

does­n’t seem right, all you have to do is ask why it does­n’t, and

you’ve usu­ally got the re­place­ment right there in your head.

This is where es­say­ists have an ad­van­tage over jour­nal­ists. You

don’t have a dead­line. You can work for as long on an es­say as you

need to get it right. You don’t have to pub­lish the es­say at all,

if you can’t get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the

face of an en­emy with un­lim­ited re­sources. Or that’s what it feels

like. What’s re­ally go­ing on is that you have dif­fer­ent ex­pec­ta­tions

for your­self. You’re like a par­ent say­ing to a child “we can sit

here all night till you eat your veg­eta­bles.” Except you’re the

child too.

I’m not say­ing no mis­take gets through. For ex­am­ple, I added con­di­tion

(c) in “A Way to Detect Bias”

af­ter read­ers pointed out that I’d

omit­ted it. But in prac­tice you can catch nearly all of them.

There’s a trick for get­ting im­por­tance too. It’s like the trick I

sug­gest to young founders for get­ting startup ideas: to make some­thing

you your­self want. You can use your­self as a proxy for the reader.

The reader is not com­pletely un­like you, so if you write about

top­ics that seem im­por­tant to you, they’ll prob­a­bly seem im­por­tant

to a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of read­ers as well.

Importance has two fac­tors. It’s the num­ber of peo­ple some­thing

mat­ters to, times how much it mat­ters to them. Which means of course

that it’s not a rec­tan­gle, but a sort of ragged comb, like a Riemann

sum.

The way to get nov­elty is to write about top­ics you’ve thought about