The archive · Content & Film · Technical decision · 2018–2020
StageCraft: The Mandalorian shoots half its scenes inside a real-time LED world
Lucasfilm and ILM built a 270-degree LED volume rendering worlds live behind actors, replacing green screens — an approach the industry copied.
Lucasfilm · Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) · Disney+
What it had to solve
The Mandalorian had to deliver Star Wars-scale worlds on a television budget; traditional green screen gives actors nothing to react to and pushes the work into expensive post-production. ILM and Epic Games had real-time rendering technology, but it had never been scaled to a full series.
How it works
The Mandalorian (2019) was the first TV series built around ILM StageCraft, a virtual-production system developed by Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic with Epic Games' Unreal Engine. Instead of green screen, actors performed inside a 20-foot-tall, 270-degree semicircular LED wall — a 75-foot-wide volume — that displayed digital environments rendered live from the camera's viewpoint.
The creative bet was that the set itself could be digital. Because the world was projected around the actors and tracked to the camera, light from the 'sunset' on the wall actually fell on Mando's armor, and actors could see and react to their surroundings instead of imagining them. ILM called the result 'in-camera finals': more than half of season one was shot that way.
The approach scaled fast. In September 2020 ILM announced three additional permanent stages (London, Los Angeles, Sydney) and made StageCraft available to the wider industry; by 2024 ILM said the technology had been used on dozens of projects including The Batman and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Why it lands
- Rendering the world live in camera gave actors and cinematographers something real to work with, not an empty green void.
- Because the 'set' is digital, environments can be changed or moved between shots without rebuilding anything.
- In-camera finals moved visual-effects work out of post-production, matching television's tight turnaround.
- Scaling from one stage to a global service turned a single show's experiment into an industry workflow.
What it did
More than half of The Mandalorian's first season was shot in the volume; by September 2020 ILM announced three more permanent stages plus a global rollout, and within a few years the 'Mandalorian-style' LED-volume approach was used on dozens of productions, from The Batman to Percy Jackson.
What you can take
When a constraint (TV budget) meets a mature technology (real-time rendering), don't retrofit the old workflow — redesign production around the tool so creative decisions happen on set.
Since then
StageCraft became the flagship of the LED-volume wave: new studios opened 'Mandalorian-style' stages around the world, and the approach is now a standard option for films and series needing location-scale worlds on a schedule. ILM continues to develop it, with StageCraft 2.0 adding a dedicated real-time cinema render engine, Helios.
Sources
- 3 New ILM StageCraft Stages Coming Soon & Global Trainee Program Announced
- How The Mandalorian teamed up with Fortnite creator Epic Games to create its digital sets
- Filmmakers discuss bringing virtual worlds to life for The Mandalorian (S2)
- StageCraft Volume Makes Public Premiere at D23
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