Digital innovations in cinematographic practice at the early 21st century: the case of The Mandalorian

Abstract

During the history of filmmaking, film industry has been innovating to overcome the challenges demanded by the stories wanted to be told. These technical innovations always came from the hand of new discoveries, technological developments and above all, from the craftsmanship and creative work of the pioneers of cinema, who with their hands created new procedures to achieve the right cinematic image to convey the sensations and feelings that the film diegesis required. From the evolution of silent to sound films, going through the use of chroma key backgrounds and their historical development to the application of background systems with big scale circular screens that reproduce synthetic moving image rendered in real time, built and reproduced by video game engines such as Unreal Engine, this paper proposes a historical journey through these technical evolutions, as well as delving into the new procedures and innovations with which film industry starts working currently, through the case study of The Mandalorian (Favreau, 2019-2020), the latest production of the Star Wars transmedia franchise (Lucas, 1977-present).