Star Wars: Clone Wars, Volume Two (2005)

Hi, my name is Genndy Tartakovsky. I was the director and producer for Star Wars: Clone Wars. This is Bryan Andrews. I was one of the writers and storyboard artists for this show. I'm Paul Rudish, art director and writer and other stuff. I'm Darrick Bachman. I'm one of the writers and I'm also the production manager of Star Wars: Clone Wars. So one of the first things that we started doing for this new set is George definitely wanted to finish the story that we set up in Chapter 20 from the last season. Mainly the reason for that is because his son was excited about to see how Ki-Adi-Mundi was going to get out of it and how it was going to finish. So we, our first order of business was to settle the score and see, you know, finish the story. Paul, you want to talk about how the face on the gunship came about? Just, you know, thinking about, like, cool World War II P-51s and, you know, Apache helicopters and stuff, and you'd like to put the shark mouth on there and sort of like, let's do a tricked-out paint job for the tricked-out ARC troopers and...

Right on. Let's do the Rancor face. And there it is. One of the things about the pre-production artwork from Lucasfilm was that the clone troopers all had different paint jobs. It was more like a World War II Vietnam where the soldiers would all dress up their helmets and everything like that, and that's one of the inspirations for some of the Clone Wars stuff. Actually, I think the original ARC trooper stuff came from Hasbro, and they did the first idea for that. incorporated that into the first batch of cartoons. And then, isn't there a story from ILM? Yeah, we went up to get a tour of ILM, and Rob Coleman was there, who was the supervising animator for the Star Wars movies. And he was telling us, thanks guys, you guys had created a whole lot of work for us, because now George liked what you guys did in the first batch, that he made us give all the ARC Troopers the skirts.

so then they'd go back and re-render all the scenes they'd already finished with skirts and racing stripes. Thanks, you guys. This was probably one of the most difficult productions we've ever done, just because we started two weeks late, because before all the deal-making was done, and then on top of that, we got some time cut out of our schedule because the show had to air a certain amount of time before Revenge of the Sith was gonna come out. So it was very difficult time-wise, but also we wanted to make sure the quality was the same as the first episodes, So we came up with this kind of faster system of making it better in a way where we basically took, because Bryan didn't have a lot of time to do the storyboards. So instead of doing them kind of full size, Bryan did all the storyboards, kind of like thumbnails. I mean, his thumbnails are great and they're enough for us to go by. And then Paul, myself, Andy Suriano, Andy Bialk, Mike Kim, we ended up drawing all the storyboards as like mini layouts.

And in animation production, it basically goes from storyboard, and then that gets blown up to the actual field. And in layouts, you draw how the characters are going to finally look before it goes to the animator, and then the animator animates it. So we basically took one step away from the production so we could combine two steps. And it sounded like a great idea at the time, but it was a tremendous, tremendous amount of work. I mean, it made the show look really good because it was more of our drawings on the screen. but it was extremely difficult. Everyone out! No! We must pursue! General, we can't. The survivors will die. We have no time.

Shaak Ti. They're stabilized, sir. They just might make it. And the others? Just a quickie, I think that these two characters have a secret love affair. Shaak Ti and Ki-Adi-Mundi, they're very close. It's never talked about. It's very secret. Hush, hush. Before we started this, we took a trip to Lucas and we got a chance to read the script for Revenge of the Sith. And I was trying to think back. I had lunch with George before we started this and he kind of told me what he wanted us to do. First thing was to finish the Ki-Adi-Mundi story from Chapter 20. Second was to feature basically the story that he said we should do. Because in the beginning, I wasn't really interested in doing it because we were so burnt out from doing the first set of 20. And so he told me that the beginning of Revenge of the Sith is the siege of Coruscant. And he goes, why don't you guys do the kidnapping of Palpatine? And to me, that sounded really exciting because now all of a sudden we're really...

of bridging the two stories together not just making up our own stories we're doing the story before the story so it seemed really yeah it seemed really exciting and he says that anakin's a jedi knight and i was like okay well you know i'm sure you've got specific instructions for the jedi knighthood because that's such a huge part of you know star wars and he goes no just you know i think we all wanted to do so much more for his knighting right But there's just no time and we didn't have any kind of situation to make it like a journey and stuff. So one of the themes that we put in through the whole thing is actually his Jedi trial. And that was that little scene with young Anakin and Qui-Gon was kind of... It was almost like the Force telling Yoda that it's like a vision, like a dream, like Anakin's trial is going to be different. It's not going to be normal. He's ready.

but it ain't gonna be the way that you guys think it's gonna be so he will be tested he will be tested do it in the classic way or not it's gonna happen and so then throughout the story we have right you know him having his tests throughout his journeys throughout the war as opposed to doing it at jedi school and especially the one that happens at the tail end of the show with you know final the nilvans and all that stuff that's a big test so that was one of our first themes that we wanted to do then after reading the script We realized that Anakin and Obi-Wan were friends at this point, so we really wanted to support that idea that they're friends. Well, he is a cunning warrior and our best pilot. But he is reckless with his gifts. Sometimes in the past, yes. But regardless, Anakin has been through things more difficult than the trials. Surely he passed a trial of skill when he defeated that dark assassin on the fourth moon of Yavin. Here he is sticking up for his pal right here. Yeah.

We also want to tie in stuff like there's a line here where Mace says, you know, politicians have no voice in Jedi matters because there's a lot of that stuff going on with Mace Windu. In the final movie, there's a lot of stuff in the script. Some of the scenes actually got cut out, I think, where it's some of the extra dialogue and stuff of Mace bagging on Palpatine and showing his distrust and that kind of stuff like this. So this was our way of also putting that in as a hint, you know, because who knows how much that stuff's going to end up in the final movie. Just reinforcing their viewpoint. Stuff that you'll see in the movie when the audience goes and sees it, if they watch this first. See, he says it right there. Also, we had ideas on part of the vision thing with showing a hint of Dagobah was also to hint.

that maybe that's where Yoda perhaps got the idea to go to Dagobah. Who knows? Just trying to geek out on the whole Empire thing. Just, yeah, connections. Just connections as deep as we can make it. Because one of the ideas was, like, for the trials, we thought, well, hey, wouldn't it be neat if they had this swamp-like area secret in the bottom of the Jedi Temple? And when they do the final thing, they always take the Jedi down there and they go into this tree. But there was no time to explore all that. So that was our quick version. There's a dew lock. Cylon right there. Cylon. Uh-oh, that's not legal. Isn't that guy from G-Force? There's just a lot of stuff from G-Force. One of the other themes we wanted to explore is we wanted to explore Padmé and Anakin's love relationship and their secret marriage. So we had this kind of mysterious being following Anakin, and of course it turns out to be Padmé. This love story bit right here, Genndy kind of came up with and...

boarded and wrote really fast. He's like, I know what I'm going to do. We need a love scene kind of thing. I thought it was really cute that Genndy grabbed the love scene. I'm doing this. Right. Oh, really? Well, I thought, no, no, I got it. I got it. That's hilarious. It's great, though. I had this vision of you wanted the intimacy. I just wanted them close, like they couldn't move. And actually, one of the first ideas I had was them avoiding people through a labyrinth of alleyways and stuff. But it was way too complicated to do. And the sequence isn't supposed to be about them running and escaping. It's just them kind of having a moment together in the shadows. Right. Also to help reinforce the fact that they actually are in love. Yeah, yeah. Let's see it again. Yeah, and then plus they're married and kind of remind the audience about all the stuff that happened in Attack of the Clones. Also to show his frustration in the relationship. For any other city, and most importantly in my heart, I will always love you.

You do look really good in the dark. That's a funny line. And Anthony Daniels once again did the voice for C-3PO. That's right, yes. And there's Sy Snootles going to work over there with his briefcase. It's always a good idea after you do something serious to do something completely ridiculous. And probably my favorite thing that we've done in the whole series is the C-3PO striptease. Reveal his gold plating. You look different, 3PO. Oh, it must be this disguise. No, 3PO, it's your new gold plating. Gold plating? Oh, yes. I like the fact that Anakin just geeks out over the... It's like modifying a car or a ship or something like that. Yeah, he's all about that. It's so hilarious. New rims. Yeah, totally. This is one of the hardest music things because we talked about it and I was telling Jim Venable, I go...

I want it to be stripper music, but it can't be stripper music because it's Star Wars. So we need to blend something together. And we listened to some of the music. John Williams stripper music. That's right. Some of the music that John Williams used for the comedy bits between R2 and 3PO. And there was actually a lot of really funny, weird things that worked well. When the council requests your presence, it is always of great importance. If I'm late for another scolding, does it really matter? He's working more Qui-Gon magic into the thing. And Paul is our kind of Qui-Gon fanatic any time that he has a chance to bring Qui-Gon in, he does. Qui-Gon-ish. Which is cool, because Qui-Gon is a great Jedi. But also, you know, since it harkens back to a character that was from episode one and, you know, so long ago by the time you're seeing this, it can help add a little bit more depth, the fact, you know.

Maybe also give some more depth to Anakin with the fact that even though he knew Qui-Gon for such a brief amount of time, that he still had an effect on him, you know? Yeah, you know, Anakin's all about hanging on to all those losses in his life, and so I wanted to bring that one up, too. Obviously, we know he lost his mother, and I think that Qui-Gon was his original father figure, not really accepting Obi-Wan as a father figure, more as his older brother, and that's where their rivalry came through.

Now, why was there not a purple lightsaber? Because Mace was supposed to be there, but there was like a... Because it's a boo-boo, and we tried, and then it just somehow didn't... Because, Bryan, because. It was an accident, right? Because Mace is protesting this. He doesn't like the Skywalker punk. He's not into it. That's what people think, but it was just a mistake. So we did that, hearkening back to the classic way that you knight a knight in Middle Ages times and stuff. I figure if you're going to knight a guy, you've got to dub him in the classic way. With a little flourish of the lightsaber, it's kind of cool. Get rid of the rat tail. There's the Japor snippet. When we went up to Lucasfilm and read the script, we noticed the Japor snippet made it back into the movie, so we decided we needed to have it in our...

Our cartoon. Yep. Little keepsakes. And also the start of Revenge of the Sith, R2's with Anakin, so we wanted to explain, you know, okay, well, Padmé hands, you know, R2 over to Anakin and... That's his little keepsake. That's his little keepsake. And also in the Star Wars movies, the end of the movie is always kind of this musical sequence without dialogue, combining visuals, whether it be a parade or celebration or a death scene. And so I always try to follow that idea and finish it kind of musically.

You want to talk a little bit about the idea for this? Well, it was an inspiration from a comic book that I read when I was a kid. And basically it's kind of, to us, Jedis are very, they're almost mythical heroes in a way. So we wanted to play on that fact. So what better way to play on it than to have somebody else kind of talk about how amazing they are. This guy's so amped. He's like, man, I can't wait. Millions of Jedis. How many? 1,000? No. Okay, how about 80? I know. And so it's like a Western, and then you only have the two cowboys riding in into the town. And then the ships descend from on high. And it was kind of a funny idea, and I was real insecure about it for a while, but then we always kind of got a laugh on it. And the performance was so good. I think T. C. Carson did the...

to the voice, and it was very happy. And here we reveal them in their episode three gear. So it's been a big time jump since he got knighted. So time has transpired. He's, you know, Anakin's being amazing. It's a montage of him being totally cool. So this whole montage is about most of the war. Yeah, yeah. These two minutes are probably like two years worth of the Clone Wars. Because we didn't want to repeat... what we've done already and show more Clone Wars, more Clone Wars, we had this whole other story that we wanted to get into. We had to get to the end of it to bridge the gap with the new film. And it was rough, too, because we had a lot of neat, cool stuff to show of them being amazing in the war, like working together as a team and stuff. There was one big, long shot we had of Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting side by side, just one long, gratuitous shot. It was amazing, but there was just no time, so it never got animated.

And actually, I forgot that this montage sequence had a lot of stuff taken out of it. There was this cool battle where Anakin fights one of the Hailfire droids in this bamboo forest. That got taken out. Some crazy snail rider. Snail rider fight. Harpoon guns on their backs. The animation never turned out that great, so it was an easy cut, but there was a lot of cool visuals to it. Right. It would have been nice if we could have kept it. And also we reveal his scar, which we saw in some of the pre-photos when they were making Revenge of the Sith. How did he get it? That's not important. What's more important is that we're together now. And there goes the light. Yeah. You know what that means. Luke and Leia are born. So when we started talking about Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship, we kind of were thinking about, well, how do we show that they're friends without them saying that we're friends?

And one of the things you always do with friends is you share a meal. And I'm very food conscious, a food-oriented person. So to me, the best way to show friendship is to have two guys around a meal. Here's Commander Cody. Commander Cody. Obviously, a reference to the old serial Commando Cody, the rocketeer type of dude that George likes. All right, give him a backpack, and we'll do our old 30s Rocketeer dude. We also wanted to show him and Obi-Wan have that little just something of a moment to, you know, the army that Obi-Wan and Anakin are co-leading. Commander Cody is like the main liaison, and obviously in Revenge of the Sith, he gets Order 66, he turns against the Jedi, so we wanted to have an opportunity once again to show Commander Cody being cool to Obi-Wan, so maybe later on in the Sith movie, you know, you freak out more when they turn out to be bad guys.

Where did you get that stuff? And Genndy wrote all this dialogue pretty much here. And then I bordered this stuff out, and he definitely wanted Anakin eating the crazy bugs and the rest of it. Because we wanted to show, like, you know, Anakin being a cunning warrior. It's like all the stuff that Obi-Wan says in Star Wars. You know, he's strong with the Force, he's the best star pilot in the galaxy, he's a cunning warrior and a good friend. So all those things we wanted to show here and reinforce as much as we could. So this was the aspect of showing the cunning... where he finds his secret way in. It's also good to kind of strengthen their... It's kind of like they're both opinions about the war. Like, Anakin wants to fight, and he almost doesn't mind it, but Obi-Wan knows that, you know, war's not good, and we want to get out of it. It's like Anakin's almost seeking that glory, you know? Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff where it works on a lot of levels. Besides the friendships, you also get the ideas of what they stand for. Right. You know, it's not the wars that make you great, as Yoda says, but Anakin seems to feel that

It does. Kinda. So in moments like this, we get a little chance to harken back to the original movies by playing on some of the old lines and stuff, you know, like there's, you know, alternatives to fighting, etc. , etc. , things like this. It's just, you know, doing the story where you get to this certain point and there's a time for a character to say something. And it's just like, well, it seems like Obi-Wan would, he's been in this situation before, kind of, so. And the line about what an incredible smell you've discovered. All units attack. Let's go. So here goes Cody's rocket troopers. There was the designs for Revenge of the Sith of the guys, and we didn't know if they were going to be shown in the movie or not, but we thought it was cool, so it's like we've got to show them for a little bit.

So are Wookiees. And, of course, George said we could, I don't know if George said it or Howard, they said we can show Wookiees. So, of course, we're never going to turn down an opportunity to. So we've got Tarfful and young Chewbacca learning the ways of the hunt. And also it was a way to show, because in Revenge of the Sith they get word that Kashyyyk has been invaded. So it was our opportunity to show it. And this is the beginning of our montage of showing even though the clone forces are doing really well, that the separatists under Grievous' leadership are also doing really well. And the plan is, or the thought is, that even though the clones are victorious and they seem to liberate these systems, that the bad guys will just run around to yet another system that hasn't been touched yet and take it. So it's this never-ending chase. It's this...

This battle that never seems to improve. I wonder if Palpatine has anything to do with that. Well, I'm sure he has everything to do with it, but Grievous likes to think that it's his genius, but, you know. And on a production note, all this stuff was come up with later. Yeah, there's the Rebo family. There's young Max Rebo there with all the whole family, Maxine, Rebo. So there's a few things here where we first did the montage without kind of the last six scenes, and it always felt short, and actually that's one of my favorite pieces of music is kind of the separatist theme. And so we, at kind of the last minute, we ended up kind of thumbnail it out and Paul drew those extra scenes that we kind of compiled together from existing images. And then this is one of the ideas that we were really excited about that we were hoping would make it in the final picture is that

Dooku actually trains Grievous because we want to kind of give a little history of how does Grievous know to use a lightsaber? Right. You know, somebody's got to. He's not force trained, but he's trained how to just use it like that. How can he kill a Jedi? Yeah. So we had long discussions about the. Yeah. Behind the theology of using a lightsaber and if anybody can do it or if it's just only people with force. Sensitivity and some super cybernetics, you know, right which gives them an edge strength and all kinds of crazy powers And we decided to have dooku teach him and what was great is that in Revenge of the Sith? I think they added the line where you know Grievous says I was trained by count dooku Which would made us really happy because we feel like we really need a contribution and then also the lesson that dooku is training grievous is to plant a seed as to why a

Because I think George hadn't really locked down exactly what he wanted to do with the character for Grievous. Yeah, and the way George pitched Grievous to me was that he's kind of one of those old B-serial villains where he does something bad and then he twirls his mustache and runs off. He always escapes. But before that, we had been told that he's like this ruthless, totally capable Jedi killer. So it's like, well... Yeah, I think he was still kind of working on it. Working it out. So what we did is we just had Dooku explain, you know, this is why... And for us, and to also explain to the audience who may have been concerned or wondering after seeing the first batch, like how he could take on these Jedi, it is a mind game. It's like almost the strategy is he assaults them with so many of his troops that they're worn down, they're weak, they're unfocused. Then he can show up, you know, super cool and confuse the heck out of them with his crazy moves and stuff like that, and that's how he can kind of defeat them. So we have Dooku claim that it's just like if any one of these elements

fear, surprise, or intimidation is missing, you better bail because Jedi who are on the ball and haven't fallen for your tricks, they're not going to fall for it because that's exactly what Anakin and Obi-Wan do when they first run into Grievous in Revenge of the Sith. They're not buying it. They're ready to take the guy. And Grievous knows it, and he runs. So we saw that before we started writing this a little bit. So we wanted to put that in to explain it. Grievous was tricky, though, because when we started, he was not figured out when they wanted us to put him in the first batch of cartoons. And we really just had two illustrations. Exactly.

And an exploration sculpt, a raw sculpt of the figure. And they're just like, try it out. And then that phone conversation with the guys talking to us about the things that he was capable of doing, you know, like how he could possibly move and all that kind of stuff. So that's when we started working out all the details of like, well, maybe he could be just really trippy with the way he moves, you know? Yeah, they were like, oh, he's got ratcheting wrists and flip out arms and all kinds of stuff. So trying to use a little bit of Capoeira and some other martial art ideas to really make him just seem really freaky. Sir, the scan shows no enemy forces in the area. You're sure? Yes, sir. Just strange geothermal readings in Sector 8. We'll check it out. Sir. So here we kind of are finally getting into our story a little bit. Planet Nelvaan. Paul, do you want to... It's a little reference to Nelvana, the Canadian studio that did all those wonderful Star Wars cartoons back in...

back when we were kids. Ewoks stuff. And Rock & Rule, a fantastic film by Nelvana. So we used the dog-headed peoples that they were so fond of using as the natives here. Actually, also, Omar, the main character in Rock & Rule, his hair was very inspirational for Anakin's hair. I was like, let's see, how do we do Rock & Rule hair? cartoon style wasn't it also a little bit Paul Stanley G-Force style definitely yeah so between Omar and Mark from G-Force or Ken the Eagle for the ones who totally love the super original versions of G-Force and it's not us I feel it too a disturbance

I've got a bad feeling about this. Of course, the classic line always has to work its way in at some point. We talked a lot about what... Oh, it's the Horax. What story we wanted to tell. We wanted to have big themes and work in the Jedi trials. We had, I think, a little rough time in the beginning because we kind of knew the themes we were working in, but how are we going to wrap a story around these themes in this limited amount of time? And then we got the invasion of Coruscant. So there was a lot of stuff to work in. These are great layouts by Mike Kim, who drew a lot of the monster. What? Once again, a way of showing how Anakin kind of rushes into things that maybe he shouldn't. It's real hard to do alien language without sounding like, you know, without being fake. So we did kind of a Hungarian...

read by people who don't know Hungarian with a little Russian mixed in. You had your in-laws translate it. Yeah, because my wife is Hungarian, and so I had her mom translate all our dialogue. And here's where really the stuff gets moving with the attack of Coruscant. And this was really... Thank goodness for computer models on the spaceship to see how tight this stuff was. Way to go, Rough Draft. We work with two other companies that are both under the same company, and we work with Rough Draft Korea, which handles all our animation duties and... kind of follows up the blueprint that we send them. And then we work with Rough Draft Glendale, which did all our 3D animation with all the spaceships and modeling of the spaceships and all the computer stuff that we used. It's obviously, you know, a huge city getting attacked and the amount of time that we had was extremely difficult to do. And there was a lot of stuff that got cut that we would have shown, but just tons of ideas that just, you know, you just can't show all of it.

So this begins our cross-cutting, which is also just nonstop crazy time cuts between the battle in Coruscant, which doesn't necessarily last super long, and what seems to take quite a long time with everything that's going on with Anakin's trials. So it's almost like they're on two different timelines almost, and we're just cutting back and forth, but they don't really lock up until the very, very end. Don't tell them the things that don't work. No, that works. It was planned that way, man. There's no other way to tell it. Otherwise they would have called him, hey, why don't you guys come back right now? Bastard. Yes, Anakin, I know. There are only women and children. It's funny, it seems like it's reminiscent of, like, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but it wasn't planned. Completely... Paul did an amazing job on the shaman here. People probably watching in Hungary will...

I appreciate this a little bit more. I think they were. I think somebody did understand everything that they were saying and was like translating online or something. Isn't that Grey DeLisle who's doing the shaman's voice or whatever? She does a great job. Something plagues their land. Champion after champion. Especially in the beginning we wanted to keep the pacing very different than the pacing on Coruscant. where Coruscant's all action, really fast cutting. We wanted to really slow it down here. So you're not going from fast to fast to fast. You have a nice rhythm in the cutting and the pacing of the story. Until, of course, Anakin's story. You gather speed, and then we're just going to full-out climax. Yeah, in the first batch, they were so small, and we wanted to do action, piece, action, piece, action, piece. And so when you watch it all together, it gets a little hectic. And so it was nice to have some time to slow down and do some slower parts in between things.

You can play more with the pacing. More like a solid through movie instead of lots of shorts tacked together. Yeah, that's true. I'd like to have a serious talk with your programmers. Come on, 3PO. Now we start into the, you know, Mace being amazing section. You always have to have a Mace being amazing section. I think we're all kind of fans of Mace because, you know, he's number two most powerful. So we always want to, you know... Yeah, and explore him. So, of course, we featured him a lot in the first batch that we did. And we were talking about, well, who should we feature in here? And we're like, wow, we kind of got to do Mace again because he's just so powerful. So we started talking about the sequence about him flying around because we didn't want to do another of the same thing where Mace fights 100 droids because we did that before.

So what's he going to do? So we talked about it, and we came up with this idea with him flying on top of a vulture droid. And then you start having secondhand thoughts about stuff like this. Will this technologically work? I don't know if this could act. How can he control it just by grabbing wires? And then you just go, yeah, but it looks so cool. Right. Hey, man, he's got the Force. Yeah. But nobody wanted to animate these scenes. So Genndy actually animated all of these scenes with Mace flying on top of the Vulture droid himself. Oh, yeah, you want to talk about the reg issue? Yeah, because basically it was going to be too time-consuming to do the computer animation and then register and animate Mace on top of it. And I was saying, like, oh, it's not going to be that difficult. But they said, okay, well, then you do it. Right, so the Vulture droid is a computer model that they printed out, and then Genndy went through and...

drew Mace on top of it. They just stringed all the printouts. And once I figured out how to do the cape, the rest of it wasn't that hard. But it was definitely annoying to come home and then have dinner and put my kids to sleep and then work for three hours animating cape and slashes. But it turned out great, so it was fun to do. So here comes the crazy big space battle. which we knew we'd see a bit of in the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, but you never really know how much you're going to see and all that kind of stuff like that. We had some of the pre-artwork, I think, was it Ryan Church that was doing? You know, this stuff looks awesome. It's the same type of stuff that we were thinking about, like Battle of Coruscant. Oh, that's got to mean gigantic spaceships.

you know, toe-to-toe, slugging it out. And I think we wanted all this stuff to be longer because we had so many ideas for, you know, big pirate battles between two ships coming together. That was one of the original ideas. Right. And then we finally got a chance to do all boarding parties. Yeah, we got to have two pirate ships with all the guys swinging on ropes across there. But even though we had more time for these episodes, it's still, like... Not enough. It's still not enough. We still want to have so many ideas. Right. So the whole idea of taking someone else's ship just seems very, it's very Captain Blood, it's very Admiral Nelson, it's very swashbuckle, it's all that stuff, you know, which is awesome. And you never see that, you know. Big movies just don't do that, it seems like, even though it's such a cool idea. So here we're doing a little retro type of design here where, how about if there's good guy Vader costumes, kind of. Also the hearkening to, okay, Vader is the Black Knight, here's the White Knight, here's the Brown Knight.

Vader is the Black Knight. There was stuff cut out of this little bit right here. We had enemy fighters flying through the group of skydiving clone troopers and just hitting them. Sending them flying and blowing and stuff like that. But for time, we had to cut that as well, which is a bummer. But oh well. It's also something interesting you don't really see in Star Wars is a boarding party, boarding a ship and attacking it. We did in A New Hope. But that's like the only time. Ship-to-ship combat, you know. Well, that's after they had actually brought it in. Yeah, but there was an explosion. They don't cut into the hull. Yeah, you don't get to see the troopers jumping across to the blockade. Yeah, exactly. What's he saying? They're summoning the spirit of the fire. The mother weeps. Oh, The Dark Crystal. Yeah. Paul's very influenced, of course, by The Dark Crystal and, you know,

And the Star Wars Holiday Special. Yeah, and Native American mythos and stuff like that. So it had a very Native American feel. Very, like, Anasazi and stuff. So he wanted to work a lot of that aspect into the mysticism of, you know, Anakin's trials, you know. You can look at the forces everywhere, even if people don't realize that that's what it is that they're dealing with. But it's everywhere. They're saying... Ghost hand. They think... That was fun. The humor is how into it Obi-Wan got. He's like, oh, yeah, you're going to do this. This totally makes sense to me. Right. It's showing that, like, you know, perhaps, you know, Yoda had explained to Obi-Wan his vision. He was there at that, you know, in the room when Yoda was talking about it. So right before this sequence is where we had... The saving of Padmé. Padmé is ushering people out, her and...

And Typho. And Typho, and there's a little C-3PO comedy bit of him running away from all the droids. Right. And then it all had to go because we were just, even though we had more time, we just, we didn't. Right. We ran out. Yep. They give us an hour and we come up with three hours worth of stuff. Which is always the case. And, of course, we always want to show how really powerful Yoda is. When he's up against the wall, he can really pull out the big stuff. Yeah, like all these Sorcerer's Apprentice-style shots. Plus with these slow-moving ships with a little bit of force adjustment, who knows, but he can possibly do crazy things to them, mess up their anti-gravity, lowering abilities, so they're more easy to push around. I'm a huge fan of dressing up or...

getting ready to go into battle sequences so like we start the episodes with the clone troopers gearing up to go into battle and now kind of Anakin's turn to go into battle so instead of gear he gets mystical tattoos by leeches did you just draw that drawing of him in those tattoos or somewhere along the line we just thought he's gotta be tattooed I totally forget how that came about we were gonna do this planet and do some old tribal type of thing. Right. Somehow on the rhythm. It's like his war paint. Yeah. Which is, once we came up with that, we're like, oh yeah. This was my favorite scene. Just him adjusting the buckle. Seemed just something was real about it and the sound turned out great. Actually, talking about the sound, Erik Foreman, who did all our sound at Lucasfilm, at Skywalker Sound, he's just so great. I got a chance to talk to Ben Burtt a little bit too because he was kind of a fan of this and because we were using a lot more sound from episode three, he was able to kind of

give us stuff, and then Eric would fine-tune it and change it for animation, wherever it needs to be changed. But it was just, first time I met Ben Burtt, he's a super nice guy, very friendly, and he goes, hey, you want to see where we work? And I was like, yeah, of course. So he took me to his office, and it was just like an unassuming office, whatever. And then there was this little cabinet with all these knick-knacks and stuff that he's collected through the years. And I go, you know, it's really funny. I remember the one thing that was like, Certain things burn an image in your mind. And I said, when I was a kid, I watched the Making of Star Wars special. And there was a guy hitting a wire to make the laser sound. And he goes, oh, you mean this? And it was like the original picture of him doing it. And it was him doing it. And I go, yeah, it's great. And there was this little broken up keyboard. And he goes, oh, this is what I used to make the R2 sounds.

Man, when we saw that, we got on our bikes and we drove around town with wrenches just looking for wires to bang on. And so he turns on this little Casio player, what it looked like, and there's a... He's got a little hump to it, and he took the mic to his mouth and he goes... And totally did R2, and that's how he actually did it.

Or slam cut to the coffee. Put everything to a fever pitch. Yeah. Shaak Ti runs in with a couple Jedi that were part of the original contest. The tail end of the other series. They were the losers, but we dug their designs and it came to a time where Shaak Ti's got to have a few more Jedi with her. Let's just use those guys because they were totally cool. So, in essence, the loser's got a lot more screen time than the winner of the previous contest, which is pretty funny. We have to go! Now! And to introduce Grievous exactly the same way that we introduced him in Chapter 20, with kind of his footsteps coming, and then the peek-a-boo. I'm gonna have Shaak Ti freak out a little bit, because she remembers what all that was like the first time. She remembers the beating she got last time. Yeah, totally. One of the frustrating things is that they changed colors on us a lot.

And we initially had drawings and paintings of Grievous being kind of all in white in this kind of silvery cape and outfit, and then he ended up having like a black cape, which would have worked better for us. And then we finally saw a final render and he had that ivory kind of crust on his enameling on his surfaces. And then at one point we found out he had the red interior of the cape, so we made the cape red inside. And then the film came out and then he had a black cape. It just keeps changing all the way through. Take him! This was pretty fun and brutal to board out. It was pretty fun to lay out, too. So punishing. I love that move. It would have been nice to see Grievous do some of the stuff in the movie as well, but at that point, you know, Anakin and Obi-Wan were on the case, and there's nothing he can do against those guys, so there was no more cannon fodder for him to take out.

And there's a chainsaw sound coming up. And when I was talking to Erik Foreman, who does the sound, he's like, so what's going on in here? And I go, he's just totally wrecking those clone troopers up. So it's going to sound super violent, just really intense to get that joke through. And I go, it's going to be buzz saws and all this stuff. And he's like, and I was kind of half kidding. And he goes, really, buzz saws? And I'm like, yeah, it's going to be everything. And then I show up to hear the preview, and sure enough, the buzz saws. But also, part of the reason why you kept it, didn't you keep it also because it was just a little bit of a Sam Raimi moment? It felt just a little bit Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead, just because chainsaws are always funny. Yeah. Just the sound of that thing. But it just worked, and it didn't draw attention to itself as much as I thought it would. And the sound that he did was great with the... With the hee-weezing.

The Force-assisted mega vocal blast. Yeah, reading stuff about their four throats or whatever, and like, okay, they have these very vocal abilities, so if you amplify that with the Force, crazy sonic blast would be fun. Each Jedi can use his own powers in different ways. Actually, his name is Roron Corobb. Which is homage to... Reference to Ron Cobb, the guy who designed him on behalf of the creatures in the cantina. In the original style. And art-directed Conan, even. Yeah, that's right. And then his white friend over here is Foul Moudama, which is named after a Middle Eastern bean dish. When in doubt, use an exotic food name. Another one of my favorite ideas was the four throats, and I was really excited about it. We took so much time to do this debris because it just wouldn't seem right. And whenever we got scenes that didn't quite right, then I put the shaky cam in. Because you just don't have... But it works good. Yeah, you just don't have time a lot to make things perfect. So whenever it's not perfect...

If you watched any of the stuff, whenever I put a shaky cam in, that means it wasn't quite right. We're being jammed. We have no communication. We're on our own. The introduction of the bodyguards. They're little fart sticks. So one of the... By the time we got to this point, we were so far behind schedule. It was very daunting, so I told Bryan, as he was boarding it, Okay, don't spend the time on the fights. Just do all the boarding so we can do all the follow-up. And then later, you thumbnail all the fights and we'll put them in. Because we had so much fighting in the fourth chapter. But we had to get the full story done so everyone could get working on it. Exactly, right. So then after we got through it, Bryan started doing all the fights. And there's like every other scene is 20, 30, 40 pose fight. And it started stacking up and I ended up drawing a lot of it.

it was just like it's never going to end and how and we're getting closer and closer to the time and i don't know how we're going to finish it and so to keep it all organized i created a little box and we called it we had a a bad word box yeah basically and so and this box just hung out in my office for a while and brian kept coming in putting a stack of 40 30 post-its right in it and it was just it was extremely frustrating. And then ended up we had to cut some stuff and then it all came together. And Darrick, maybe you can talk about the evolution of this scene a little bit with Steve. Yes, this is the flashback sequence and Steve Jennings, we hired him to come in and he did this whole sequence in Maya. Paul did all the layouts and the models and everything for it.

We just gave him all the materials, and then we trusted him to animate the whole sequence. But this is basically Anakin's vision of what is going to come in the future. So Steve worked for about 14 weeks, I think, on this sequence. And he would show us the various stages of where it was at. And it actually came down to, I think, the day before we were going to deliver this show, where he would walk in with the final rendering of it. And it was actually the wrong version on the disk. Hard at that. And it's very ironic that the most 2D flattest looking thing in Star Wars in our show, ended up being computer anime. Just because it was one scene that was very complicated and because you can only have kind of one shot at it. And already Korea was so overwhelmed that they weren't even sure if they could finish it. And we hadn't even given them the layouts yet. Right, we weren't finished with it because we were still kind of figuring it out. Yeah, that sequence, there's been discussion. What is it? What does that mean? All that.

It should work on several levels, hopefully. It's an ancient story about something that happened to a Nelvaanian warrior. It's what's happening right now to the people on Nelvaan, and it's also what's going to happen to Anakin. If he doesn't learn from the test. When you embrace the power of evil, it will consume you in the end. Which he totally does. He doesn't learn. Is that what happened? Yeah, I think so. Well, I haven't seen Revenge of the Sith yet, so it's really tough. Yeah, right. Oh, man. So this is where most of the bleep box stuff came in. And also, unfortunately, it's like because of the schedule we had, you know, poor Korea, you know, some stuff they'd be able to handle. Well, and other stuff, they were just so swamped that some stuff just wouldn't be as on the ball as they could because they were just as strapped as we were and we were all suffering. And so as a result, it made it difficult because some fights turned out really, really nice and then some fights turned out a little rough. They had people working around the clock. Around the clock, yeah, they were working so hard.

But it seemed like Bryan every day would come in and add three more scenes to the box. It never seemed to end. And the box just kept getting more and more full. But we all knew what we were getting into because all those scenes were there. And again, he would just pick the box up and go, why? Why? And then the phrase would just be, I hate you, Bryan Andrews. I hate you. Because there's all these poses, but we want the fights to be fast and on the ball like you don't. Yeah, and the thing is, in television, there's no way you can cheat around it. It's not like you can give it to an animator and go... There's a little sign where it says, Yoda endorsing you to brush your teeth. You can't go, you know, okay, you do this, we get about 10 seconds, give me a cool fight. It all has to be figured out. And that's why, I mean, we did that a lot in Samurai Jack also. And here, it's like, you got to draw every pose, every slash, every block, every antic.

And it just gets to be a lot. And now we've got moving fights through trains, and it just gets really intense. In the meantime, the time is shrinking, the time is shrinking, and the time is shrinking. This is another one of those scenes where the soundtrack really ends up selling it. Yeah, the music is incredible. And just the sound of the trains and everything. Yeah. really took it over the top. It's hard to do futuristic trains because iconically trains are like a L train or a normal train and you wanted that sound. I go, I just want to hear the clank, clank, clank. But it's all, there's no clanking. It's all hovering or whatever.

When we were riffing on ideas way in the beginning, I was like, okay, well, what's going to happen on Coruscant? And we know that Shaak Ti and whoever Jedi she's with are running around with Palpatine trying to get to his secret underground train to take him to the secret bunker, whatever. We were just riffing on stuff, and we were trying to think of things that we can do, and then somehow we just stumbled upon, like, this train thing. Because their main avenue of escape gets blocked, so now they're running through the city, so what can they run into? And we just thought, well, a train, you know? Like, there's a massive train yard, and it's just... We just started riffing on the idea and it sounded very, very exciting. So that's how this whole thing got born. It's always fun to fight on top of a moving train. Yeah, that's true. Or around a bunch of them. Play Frogger. Yeah, you play Frogger. Shout for the traffic. And so it ends. A valiant effort, but as you can see, ultimately futile. Now, Jedi, prepare yourself.

For you are about to leave this world. I don't think so. They're great. There's a couple of sounds that are really subtle that are great. When Foul Moudama talks, Moudama talks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hilarious. It was great. And this little... And it's great to have somebody, because we're all into it, of course, making it, but Erik Foreman, who does the sound, was one of our new additions to the team. I mean, he did the sound effects last year. But it was great to have somebody like him who's just as excited and into it as we are. Not even on a Star Wars level, but just on a filmmaking level. Like, oh, this will be great and this works great. And just to create the sound. And he knows his job to add to everything that we're trying to do. And it could have been a lot worse because he had no time either. And he goes, I don't know how I'm going to do this.

But he sure did. And he did, yeah. That was great. Textural stuff. Yeah, and we've been doing television for a long time, so we always know somehow it gets done at the end. But this is the first one. Like, I would keep walking into Darrick's office in the morning and go... there's no light. There's a big, long, dark tunnel, and there's no light. Yeah, it got really crazy towards the last few months. It was just... There's some grievous schematics back there. Even in the last couple weeks, we were staying up until, like, 2 in the morning just over the Internet on instant messaging. That's right, yeah, yeah. Calling retakes and sharing scenes that I would download at my house from Korea, and I'd send them to you, and then we would, you know, talk about them, and then I'd have to send them notes from my house just because they were working around the clock as well. Yep, it was...

It was very intense. I didn't even think we were going to make it there. Because we didn't even get a traditional work print for the fifth show. It was delivered to us in scenes. It was just the random scenes, yeah. So we never put it together until later, and there was still scenes missing. You had to cut together the original layouts into that work print in order to even have sound effects done. To sound as music. So Eric was doing sound effects, and Jim Venable was doing music to not moving pictures. It would just be boards. And you kind of hear about that sometimes in feature world because they do a temp track. and then a rough track and then a final but in television it's just unheard of specimens but they're not ready i said unleash them so these mutated nalvan warriors we talked about their design a little bit and fooled around and paul did these we just wanted this big hulking mass wait and i was always like that foot was never squishy enough as i wanted i wanted the fat to roll over the calf and and just never some things you just

You can't get away with it. So this clone commander dude's got an old Joe Johnston decal on his helmet. Some of the old Mandalorian decals. Is that Captain Fordo? That's Captain Fordo. He used to work for Hasbro. Maybe he'll get a figure one day. Unless he already has. Did they make that figure? No. And there's the Kybuck. He's actually a native of Kashyyyk, although genetically similar to a Tauntaun. But we know that Yoda, one of his favorite vacationing spots is Kashyyyk. And kind of to give credit to somebody who probably doesn't get a lot of credit is our director overseas, Director Jim. And I've worked with Jim since the beginning of Dexter's Laboratory back in 1994. And Jim's great. And one other thing about working with an overseas studio

We don't see him as an overseas studio, we see him as an extension of our studio. And especially when it's something as difficult as this, where you want everybody to give their all, and so they feel like they have an ownership of it. So he did a lot of this stuff at the very end, and his stuff is really great. He's an amazing animator, and basically makes everything better. He just puts in all kinds of nice subtleties that you usually don't see in TV animation. We left a lot of the effects animation to him as well. Yeah, because they already did the whole chapters 1 through 20, so we figured, okay, they've got a good handle on effects. We really don't even have time to draw explosions for them. They'll have to just figure it out. We gave them reference from the previous series, but then it was basically up to him to create the effects and stuff for it.

And you. This selfless sacrifice will be long remembered. And Palpatine's role in this was kind of a tough one because he kind of comes off comical and he's just dragging along on his journey. And we were kind of afraid of his personality. But then in Revenge of the Sith, it kind of worked well together because he does kind of run with them everywhere and it seemed to be fine. Plus seeing that early footage of him on the bridge when, you know, they're fighting Dooku and Palpatine is all pretending to be captured and all that stuff. His antics seemed so goofy, so gleeful that his plan seemed so working that it gave us a lot more confidence to play him the way we were playing him in this, based on what George seemed to be doing in the next one. You must control yourselves. You must stop. I will defend myself. Paul Douglas, who's our editor, did all these flashes on the computer and all these light effects.

different things just to kind of enhance the picture. Yeah. And I wanted more, like I wanted a little flash on each laser and all this stuff, but again, just time. Ron is hilarious. He's a big guy. What? That's a good line. What? What? It's amazing that Anthony can even understand what the heck he's trying to get across. But he does. So I guess the concept was that we wanted to use some of those Techno Union guys again, because, you know, they're hilarious. We wanted to use them first batch, and then they're like, no, we got something going on, why don't you use the Banking Clan? Right, yeah, right. Okay, fine. And then finally, now we get to use them. So the idea is perhaps, well, maybe they're the ones supplying some of the technology that allows Grievous to beat Grievous, which is why we have those schematics on the wall. But also, it's like, well, maybe...

secretly whether it's grievous separate from palpatine who knows getting tired of the droids maybe they're too easily defeated what if we create they're experimenting creating like you know a hybrid you know kind of like how grievous is like cyborg mutated whatever it's like let's mutate these guys make them really buff but then also technology is always trying to come up with new product to get out on the market totally so that was kind of the concept for that And Bryan had a lot more fighting to it, too, but it was just... At a certain point, it's like, enough is enough. I can't draw this anymore. And Andy Bialk came on kind of real late and helped us draw a lot of these scenes here. But it didn't stop Bryan from coming in my office every morning going, oh, where is that? Oh, man. So you see him get lost and you're like, this is great. Cut or whatever, it'd be like, no.

The music here turned out really great because it was really very reminiscent of samurai style. I just like to see staff fighting like this. It's something you never see. That's why we made that choice. It was good that we made that call. It's like, let's just go ahead and have her take one of those things. And I'm like, all right. Plus, it's good the way it intercuts because it's just building and building and building. Right. Then at the end to have her grab her saber back and do it with both, harking back to like, you know, certain Hong Kong flicks, Jet Li style, Wong Fei Hong, where he's got like staff and possibly another weapon at the same time. Andy Suriano did some great layouts in this section. If you ever had the time, you should still frame some of those drawings because they're really amazing. And to do stuff with that kind of detail on television, I know I keep talking about it, but because it is, people don't really appreciate how much work goes into TV or something that looks like this.

It is quite a feat, and it's everybody who really puts the extra effort in. Nobody works 9 to 5 on this production. It's 9 to 5, and then 8 to 12. This is all done with sound, and I'm a huge fan of sound effects, and just to really break down the sequence so it's not sound effects and music and dialogue all going through. I really like to select, like, okay, this action sequence is going to be all sound effects. This sequence is going to be all music with very low sound effects. And especially because in television, you don't get the dynamics that you do in theater. It cleans it up a bit, so the mix sounds a little nicer and crisper. I just got to mention that Matt Lucas, the guy who's doing the Anakin voice, no relation to George, he does such a good job with Anakin. I always liked his Anakin, but especially after seeing Revenge of the Sith, there's a part when Anakin

Hayden gets all jacked up and he's screaming in great pain. And it sounded just like that when he got his arm blown off in this version. I remember thinking in the theater, it's like, that sounds just like Matt Lucas doing Hayden. That must be why they picked Matt. I know, but it doesn't sound alike. But for that angry scream, I mean, there was no precedent for that at the time when Matt was recording this, you know what I mean? He just did it Hayden style. And it totally worked. And to me, this is one of the most disturbing things that we've done Because Paul had this whole idea about doing the choke and stuff with the stump. Force choke. Watch out, kid. You're walking really close to the dark side here. Are we really going to do a force stump choke? Yeah, is he going to crush somebody's throat and have his eyes pop out? It was so odd to do the stump, but it worked great. It's cool because it's like you don't necessarily need, you know, I mean the force is all around you, right? So you don't necessarily need.

Your arm. Yeah. No. To do it. Plus, we also noticed in the episode three pre-art that Anakin had a different robotic arm, you know. Yeah, right. So we had to figure out a way to kind of change that over before the movie started. Right. So he conveniently blew his arm off. Exactly. It's like poor Anakin keeps losing that arm. Those poor ladies. All the dudes come back totally jacked. They might have some herbal treatments and things that might be able to help these guys. To reverse the mutation. Yeah, they have some ancient magic. Maybe. So the first version of this... But it doesn't really matter because, look, it's about acceptance. I know, I know. They're not clinging to those... No matter what, that's his apu, Bryan. Yes. Was the first version of this just, like, a little bit too saccharine? It was a little bit too sweet? We, like, changed a couple shots or we just took a couple things out to make it a little less... Yeah, we kind of edited a little bit and then I just made them...

more intimate with the hugging and all this stuff here. And Apu is actually a term of endearment in Hungarian that I call my wife's grandfather. We call him Apu, so I thought it would be very appropriate to put in. So they get their new tribal rap, which later on we show Anakin with it, but then later on we show that he's... gotten rid of it and given himself a new robot arm and trying to, you know, bring together those themes of, like, you know, he didn't learn his lesson, he's still into the technology, he's, you know, drifting away from what the Force really is, all that stuff, trying to wrap it in with just such simple, um, symbology, whether you pick up on it or not, but... The Nelvaanians were able to let go of all that. Exactly. Find acceptance back home and... Anakin still can't. Nope.

But if only he would have talked about his feelings to the band. It all stems from his own mistrust in himself. So all this lighting and color was all done with me and the editor. Just to give this more drama. Because it's a big climax sequence and we're literally out of time. Maybe we have two weeks to deliver and we want to do all these different lighting things.

the big reveal of his arms, and so we were just, okay, put a blue filter, some lights, and all these flashes. Originally, they were like, don't do the separating arms. We want to save that for the reveal in the film. Right, that was the first time. And then all the scuttlebutt on internet and everything, everyone knew that he had four arms, and then they were like, well, how come he didn't have four arms in the cartoon? What's up? Like, all right, you guys can use it now. We were told not to do it. And... It's good to point out that the delivery of this, I mean, we had two weeks, but it's actually, the delivery was like a day before it aired on television. Right, right. So this is coming up all the way to the point where we're actually working on the fifth episode as the other four had pretty much aired, and we were delivering the fifth one that day. And Serena had to fly it on a plane to London. And so before we kind of get into it, so we're...

We're in this time crunch, and our boss was Howard Roffman from Lucasfilm. I get a call from Howard Roffman, and he says that, you know, George has a grievous, have a cough. And can you guys maybe put it in and explain how he got the cough? Because ours obviously doesn't have a cough. And his voice was not decided upon. And I go, Howard, you know, we have a week left or a month left before we deliver. And so this sequence right here was all after that. So we kind of got together and we talked about it. And I go, okay, you know, we can, let's have Mace crush his chest and then introduce the cough. And that's all we'll do. And then he'll try to stop him and then he can't. And so basically like I thumbnail it out, Paul drew it all. I animated it. Justin Thompson, who does our backgrounds, did all the backgrounds. And that was it. It was done. And it was super fast, but it worked out good. It gave like a little bit more of intensity to it. And they were full layouts too. They were like every, every.

Every frame, we just had them do clean-up overseas. Shaak Ti! I failed. And then there was also a bunch of back and forth as to whether or not we were gonna be allowed to, um... Yeah. Kill Shaak Ti in our thing or not. Lucas was deciding back and forth. He's like, well... I'm not gonna have her in the movie at all, to... I'm going to show this little bit, to I'm going to change that little bit, and so we never... Yeah, and we were real worried, because Shaak Ti is a huge, prominent force in what we did, so if he all of a sudden decided not to use her, or if he killed her in some other thing, it was very, we got very worried about it. So, also, if he was going to decide not to have her in the film at all, then, like, well, let us kill her, because then it's going to give Grievous even more weight, because a known character is being, you know, destroyed, but in the end, he said he was going to keep her in, and...

In the end, it turned out that she wasn't. Darn. Darn. So it's Anakin being a little Vader-like. It's okay. We don't want to kill Shaak Ti. She's too cool to kill. I mean, that's why we thought we should have because it would have made us cry. Yeah. That would have made Grievous terrible. Yeah. It's like, you know. We love her. We don't want to see her die. So it was a good experience. Extremely difficult. Definitely like to do it in different circumstances. But, you know, that's television. You kind of get the hand that's dealt to you and you deal with it. Luckily, we were all experienced working together and we were able to bring it all together. And we had a screening at a movie theater. And there's about probably 600 or more people. And it was kind of the first time we watched it in the audience. And it was great to see the reaction because there's laughter, there's cheers. And that's how you should really watch this stuff is with a lot of people. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks.