Where Was ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3 Filmed?

After three long years, The Mandalorian is finally back with Season 3 on Disney+. And the show is still bringing stunning visuals. 

But The Mandalorian actually uses a rather controversial technology that Star Wars fans have grown to hate. While other sweeping fantasies like Game of Thrones filmed on location in Spain or Ireland, Star Wars productions like The Mandalorian are going in a different direction by bringing the location straight to the actors with a little piece of technology called the Volume. 

So, with all that being said, where was The Mandalorian Season 3 filmed?

According to Mandalorian director Jon Favreau, most of the show was actually shot in California.  

“There is real photography being incorporated, but the actors aren’t brought on location. The location is brought to the actors,” Favreau told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. He later added, “There’s limited location work [on the series], but it’s all within the L.A. area.” 

Most of the production for The Mandalorian Season 3 was done at Manhattan Beach Studios in California. Production was also spotted in Burbank and in El Segundo, where they built a temporary 100,000 square foot production lot.

Rather than shooting on-location, crew members went out to different locations in Iceland and Chile to shoot assets that are then used on the Volume.

Some viewers have tried spotting where certain scenes from The Mandalorian Season 3 were shot, even if they are filmed using the Volume.

According to some fans online, the Mandalore Castle spotted in the Season 3 premiere appeared to be shot in Scotland at the Neist Cliff Viewpoint. They also spotted the Shiprock rock formation, located in the Navajo nation in New Mexico, in Episode 4.

The Volume is a massive LED screen that Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm use to build digital environments for many recent Star Wars productions.

“It’s exactly the same sort of technology as the large LED screens you see in Times Square,” Mandalorian visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff explained in 2020. “What we wanted to do was shoot on a small stage with small physical sets that could be wheeled in and out fairly quickly and then extend those physical sets on the wrap-around LED wall.”

When combined with the Unreal engine from Epic Games, they’re able to achieve some pretty impressive and realistic-looking sets.

So much so, it can be difficult to construe what was actually shot on location and what wasn’t. 

The post Where Was ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3 Filmed? appeared first on Decider.