'The Mandalorian' was shot largely inside a California soundstage

The Disney+ and Lucasfilm streaming epic "The Mandalorian" wasn't filmed in far-off Tunisia, Jordan, Bolivia or Croatia, like films part of the traditional movie canon.

Rather, the first season for "The Mandalorian," which consisted of eight episodes, mostly at a half-hour each, was filmed almost entirely on a Southern California soundstage.

Not that you would know that by watching the show, as Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy said back in November. The shoots, as she explained, incorporated a particular type of technology that creates realistic but virtual high-definition backgrounds around actors on a soundstage.

"It basically is a projection system on screens, and the real innovation is that when you move the camera inside this space, the parallax changes," she said. "So suddenly you're in an environment that actually begins to behave in the same way it would in an actual 3D environment like this."

Not only does the tech — called "Stagecraft" — make it easier to control conditions, it's also far, far cheaper for production.

"It means that if you want a big establishing shot in Iceland, and you don’t want to take 700 people, spend four months prepping a set because you only want to do the establishing shot and you can bring everything back to shoot interiors on a stage, that becomes very meaningful on big, huge projects and small projects," she continued.

Executive Producer Jon Favreau and Director Deborah Chow worked with a company called Magnopus for the production — the same group Favreau worked with for "Lion King" — and used the tech to do "virtual scouts" of locations to be in the show. Chow explained that during these scouts, she and the project's producers and designers would "all be in headsets together flying around the same set," discussing various scenes and landscapes.

It was a singular acting experience for "Mandalorian" antagonist Giancarlo Esposito (who plays Moff Gideon), as he said in an interview with Collider.

"Finally we have a [Star Wars] piece that for the first time ever is shot outside of a London studio," he said. "Jon Favreau’s brilliant. Technically, this show has a new technology [that’s] never really [been] refined as much as it is right now. We’re in a place called The Volume, where we do most of our acting, where set pieces are brought in, where we can control the physical atmosphere of what is projected on the walls and control how gravity is; you get a feeling that gravity is being played with."

"The Mandalorian" is streaming now on Disney+.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira