Star Wars : The Clone Wars - Behind the Scene

After Star Wars: Episode III— Revenge of the Sith completed the tale of Anakin Skywalker’s tragic transformation into Darth Vader, not even George Lucas expected to see the ground-breaking space fantasy return to the big screen.

But good animation can prompt even the famously stubborn Lucas to change his mind, as director Dave Filoni discovered while screening footage from the upcoming animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars for his boss on a big screen. “That’s when, really early on, the idea struck George, and
he said the fans should really get the chance to see this on the big screen,” says Filoni, who quickly found himself directing the first Star Wars animated feature film on top of 22 half-hour episodes of a TV show.



Commentary
Catherine Winder(producer of the feature and executive producer of the series)
"It was a big leap of faith on behalf of the company to take this franchise and move it into the world of animation. It’s exciting, but hugely daunting because we want to do what’s best for the property."

“We really got to show him as a hero and as the good person he was, which I think, as George has always said, makes the downward spiral all that much more important and effective,” Filoni says.

Production and Influenced
Influences and Inspirations On the visual side, Filoni says his initial brief from Lucas was to make “something no one has ever seen before.” Finding that look began with sketches, and Filoni says he was influenced by his previous project, Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as the look devised for the previous Clone Wars animated series by Genndy Tartakovsky.

“In 2D animation, we never have a problem with cloth and human characters. You can stylize the human characters in any way and it’s not much of a question, you just accept the look of it,” he says. “In 3D there are a whole bunch of challenges that I think everyone in that particular field is chasing all the time on how are we going to make something look and feel real.”

Translating the human characters into 3D animation was the most difficult task. “It was less about photorealism as much as let’s try to make a style, let’s try to come up with a visual look to the characters, who even though they’re not realistic, we’ll come to believe in them as characters in this stylized world,” Filoni says. Even before the feature fi lm was added to the schedule, Clone Wars was an ambitious project. Winder says she came to Lucas with the job of setting up the project with a never-before tried pipeline that had to produce animation of the highest quality at an affordable cost.

“It was trying to figure out how to put a team together and create something that no one has ever seen before, because if not, there’s no point in doing it,” she says. Winder, who has been a producer and executive with extensive experience in overseas operations, set up the feature and series with the front-end work including writing, storyboarding art direction and design done at Lucas film Animation’s Marin County studio.

The animation rendering involve Lucasfilm in Singapore and partner studio in Taiwan. The more spending time is hashing out the story in the 3D world with editorial. Marin studio incharge for asset builds, texturing and rigging in house, and the rest of rendering done by Singapore and Taiwan.

The most exciting part
For Filoni, Clone Wars’ most important contribution to Star Wars lore is Ahsoka. “Nobody knows what happens to her, so that’s been a particularly exciting character to work with,” he says.

source: Animation Magazine Aug 2008