‘Andor’ VFX Supervisor Mohen Leo Reveals the Rebel Secrets of Season 2

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***This article was written for the May/June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350)***

 

When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was released in 2016, it proved so popular that a prequel series called Andor was created by Tony Gilroy and premiered on Disney+ in 2022. Whereas Season 1 focused on what led Cassian Andor (portrayed by Diego Luna) to join the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, the second season covers a period of four years in which Andor was a key resistance fighter. The last episode takes viewers to the beginning of Rogue One.

“You can basically imagine that with every three episodes you’re moving one year closer to Rogue One, so by the time you’re in the final ones, you do make those connections directly,” says Mohen Leo, the show’s vfx supervisor. “The reason why we didn’t leverage all that much from Season 1 is that it’s almost all new locations, ships and planets. We were lucky that almost all the people from the first season continued straight on to Season 2, which meant that there was this instant shorthand and trust with Tony Gilroy [and each other] that allowed us to be more ambitious.”

Return of a Popular Droid

Something fans of Rogue One will be enjoy seeing is how Cassian Andor goes about reprogramming an Imperial security droid that will later become his trusted sidekick. “I worked on Rogue One as well,” says Leo. “One of the great things to see was, even with the big gap in real-world time, the moment you saw Alan Tudyk and Diego Luna together, that chemistry we had in Rogue One between Cassian Andor and K-2SO was immediately there again. Then our job was making sure that every nuance of Alan’s performance came through.”

Also returning from Season 1 is a ground-mech salvage assistant unit. “B2EMO is also back,” says Leo. “In Season 1, he was entirely [made using] practical creature effects, and it’s the same thing in Season 2. We did not have to do anything. The creature department did such a wonderful job of that performance.”

Viewers also get to see a mix of this world’s new and familiar creatures. “As usual, there is a good spread of various interesting alien species, and if you watch closely, you’ll see that some are direct callbacks to Rogue One,” he says.

Coruscant, which serves as the capital of the Republic once again, is filled with political intrigue as Mon Mothma secretly seeks funds to finance the rebellion. “One of my favorite parts of working with the show for both seasons was Coruscant, because it allowed you to continue to flesh out that world,” says Leo. “The prequels did a nice job of showing Coruscant of the rich and powerful, Jedi Temples and opera houses. Some of the animated shows and TV shows go into the criminal underbelly. But what Andor allowed us to do is show you the Coruscant of ordinary people, where you can believe that people could ride public transport and go to work and shopping. What worked well is the use of real city locations, both in London and, this time around, we were also shooting in Spain for some beautiful exterior city locations stuff; that was the basis for showing many different facets of Coruscant. I enjoyed that. We managed to make that planet city feel like a bigger place because you see more different aspects of it.”

 

“What Andor allowed us to do is show you the Coruscant of ordinary people where you can believe that people could ride public transport and go to work and shopping … We managed to make that planet city feel like a bigger place.”

— VFX supervisor Mohen Leo

 

 

The grain planet of Mina-Rau is among the new backdrops for one of the big action sequences. “That was a crazy thing for me,” says Leo with a laugh. “I had never done anything like that before. The production specifically had a farm in Oxford plant a giant field of rye six months in advance so that it would grow to the right height. It was several football fields’ worth of grain. Within that we could shoot so much practically and have visual effects extend outwards and put in some bigger structures in. But again, having that basis of being in a massive field of grain and everything around the actors is real makes a huge difference.”

He adds, “Special effects, for example, did do some of the cool dirt explosions, but because it was all rye, they couldn’t do any fire because that would light the hold thing on fire! That was one of the things where from the start we were going, ‘Do what you can with smoke and dirt. We’re going to add the fire to that.’”

Echoing a James Bond cold opening scene of a mission in progress, Andor attempts to steal a prototype TIE fighter, which sets Season 2 in motion. “There is a new ship in Episode 201 that is established as a ‘skunk works’ test pilot prototype,” explains Leo. “That was a fun cooperation with [production designer] Luke Hull and the art department because it hadn’t been seen before. We were able to jam a bunch of different ideas of various weapons and sensor systems in there.”

The art department built a full-size version of the fighter that was on set. “That was fantastic,” says Leo. “I got to sit in it! Whenever you see it static or not moving, it’s the real thing. That was great because people could get in and out, and Cassian had the controls. We shot all of that in camera. But once the TIE fighter takes off, it’s a mix in the wider shots of still shooting in the hangar but with a CG ship flying around and shooting.”

To create over 4,000 visual effects for the season’s 12 episodes, most vendors from Season 1 were brought back. “In order to reduce the co-dependencies between vendors, we try to find chunks of work that often relate to a particular environment,” explains Leo. “In the first three episodes, there is this grain planet. Also in the first three episodes, you see Mon Mothma’s home planet of Chandrila, which has landscapes based on Montserrat in Spain. We went to shoot there as well. We have some beautiful landscape photography. Those were Scanline VFX’s main body of work. There are always little things like when you have a ship that shows up on one planet shows up on the other planet then people share that. Hybride focused more on a planet that plays in later episodes. ILM was all over a lot of the things, but the big focus was on the Coruscant.”

Constructing the Star

Other contributions came from Soho VFX, Midas VFX and Blind. “For the UI graphics we’re working with Blind, which did Rogue One as well. Often, the UI [visuals] are beautiful window dressing, but in some cases, they’re specific storytelling devices.”

Pivotal to the storytelling is the construction of the Death Star. “In Rogue One, you literally see the moment when the laser dish was placed into the Death Star,” recalls Leo. “Here, we are a little bit earlier than that, so it has to be almost there but not quite, so you can work backwards from that. We had the Death Star extensively in Rogue One, and that was the main basis of the work.”

The bigger ambitions of Season 2 had to be realized within the same production schedule as Season 1. “Having known Tony now for so many years, the aesthetics of it was clear, and often he would give us a lot of freedom and go, ‘Come up with something, show it to us, and I’ll comment on it.’” says Leo. “Initially, going into Season 2 we were more nervous about the scope because it is much bigger than Season 1, but the shooting and prep schedules weren’t any longer. We were like, ‘We have to do that much more in the same time.’ But again, having just that trust and familiarity with the key people made that possible and allowed us to work out how to do most of the things that Tony wanted to achieve.”

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The second season of Andor premiered on Disney+ in April. New episodes drop Tuesday nights at  9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.