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Can you talk a little bit about the tone for the third season?

I think we’ve really gotten into a good stride with Star Wars: The Clone Wars. We have had such a broad range of stories, and that continues in Season Three.

There’s a more mythological storyline that involves Ahsoka, and we see her maturing throughout the series. At the end of Season Two when she’s on the mission with Plo Koon, she’s behaving far more responsibly and with much more maturity than we’ve ever seen before. That’s something that continues with her character as we follow her story arc.

We have our dark episodes, and we have our intense episodes, but we still also have some very fun episodes. I think it’s really important for Star Wars when we focus on, for example, just the droids to show the universe from different viewpoints.

Is it tough to pack in those different points of view when you have only 20 minutes an episode?

I think it helps, actually. We can cover things like just bounty hunters, and just Hondo Ohnaka and his interactions with Anakin, and yet we can still have the giant battles on Geonosis. When I started working with George Lucas, I realized that he didn’t really want to just follow the Clone Wars as an episode-by-episode account of how this war unfolds, day-by-day and year-by-year. He wanted to continue exploring other corners of the Star Wars galaxy that he hadn’t just had time to do previously. That was unexpected.

George brings a lot of energy to every story he wants to tell. He’ll come in to a story meeting equally excited about a lot of different things. He always has very strong opinions about what’s happening with Anakin or Obi-Wan Kenobi or Yoda. He doesn’t have as much to say about the characters and development of the incidental Jedi like Kit Fisto and Plo Koon as he would about his main heroes. He’s always excited about the different types of stories and I think he’s been very pleased with the results he’s gotten with the show. The visual results especially.

Why do you think that the darker episodes are so popular?

I think mainly it’s because we have such a broad fan-base. We have fans that are between six and 65-years old! The older fans often want to see things told in a more adult tone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean dark.

The Clone Wars is a period when the good guys—ultimately—lose, so you always have that in the back of your mind when you write these stories. There’s a massive deception going on that our heroes aren’t aware of. Even during the lighter episodes, in which there’s a victory, Palpatine is often winning something. There are many different ways that he pulls the strings, and that’s why I think it’s important to have a balance of light and fun episodes. Then when villains like Cad Bane or Dooku appear, you can make them more potent. Whenever Darth Vader showed up on screen in the movies, people ran away! The one time Han Solo can’t run away, because he’s surrounded on Cloud City, he’s instantly captured. That gave ‘Vader a lot of strength as the villain, and made kids understand, “Wow, we don’t want to be near this guy!” It’s something that I bear in mind with the villains on our show. Not having them always be the person getting into the escape car and shuttling off, but maybe having the heroes retreating. It definitely didn’t take anything away from Luke or Han when I was watching it as a kid. I felt: well, they’re smart! They want to get away from the Empire!

What were the big challenges this time round?

The scale of the show keeps getting bigger! It’s hard to believe when I think back to of problems we had just when we started making The Clone Wars and the types of problems we had just getting characters or vehicles done, to now being able to recreate the entire water planet of Kamino! We’re at a point where I can take a previously difficult element like water and sit down with Joel Aron, my CG supervisor, and say, “Well, how are we going to do this in our style, so it fits in with the look of the show?”

A lot of the things that we do along the way, like when we went to Mustafar, and when we had a big waterfall in the background on Naboo, was slowly feeding the idea that one day we need to do Kamino since the clones are from a big water planet, so we’ve had time and several episodes to figure out how to show that.

You saw in “Landing at Point Rain” that the battles got bigger, so we’ve asked ourselves, “How can we top that battle?” We have some massive-scale battles this season.

We didn’t have many lightsaber fights in Season Two, but you’ll see more in Season Three. I just didn’t want our audience to become bored of lightsabers. We wanted to make sure that when we feature lightsaber fights, they also get better than what we had done before. Fights are always a huge challenge. It takes a long time to choreograph them well, and to come up with scenarios that are interesting for the characters to fight in.

Also, it would be very dull to go to another snow planet and see walkers again. It sounds great, but it was in The Empire Strikes Back, we love it because it was original then, since then we see Hoth all the time in other Star Wars stories. In The Clone Wars movie, the most exciting thing we did was the walkers go up the side of a cliff. That was kind of the standout scene of the whole thing to me, because it was a very good idea, and the kind of thing we look for all the time.

What is your favorite proverb from Season Two?

The one that sticks with me is from the Boba Fett trilogy. I really liked, “Who my father was is not as important as my memory of him.” I thought that was a really good one, because it dealt with perception: who Jango Fett was, who he was to the galaxy, who he was to this boy, and how that can be drastically different depending on that point of view. It ties in with a lot of Star Wars thinking. The one on “Lethal Trackdown” is “Revenge is a confession of pain,” which I thought was rather icy and set up the episode well.

Where do the episode titles come from?

Most of the time it’s George. More recently the writers have been coming up with some of the titles.

Do you worry about overkill with the more popular characters?

I think when you’re dealing with the villains, absolutely. I remember as a kid when I watched superhero shows, you would be lucky if you got one or two episodes a season with Doctor Doom or the Joker. We have to be very careful about how we use our villains. It is difficult because Dooku is in charge of the droid army, so he always has to have a presence. One of the reasons we withheld Dooku from Season Two was that we were figuring out how to play him so that he was more dangerous and more in control.

Dooku has some very interesting stories in Season Three and a lot of things are going to change for the Count that I’m very excited about, but I can’t talk much more about that. The future’s in motion! He’s an interesting guy. Why did he do what he did? Why betray the Jedi? That’s a big question. He’s interesting to look at, from Christopher Lee to our version. Corey [Burton] plays him really welt on the show.

“Grievous Intrigue” brought the General back in a way where he was more powerful, kind of taking some of the pre-Revenge of the Sith ideas of Grievous and his abilities, and blending them with what George did in the movie, where he is more of coward in a lot of ways. He will only fight you if he has the upper hand. It makes him a very interesting villain because he’s not competing with Darth Vader to be the ultimate Jedi destroyer, which is what Anakin eventually becomes.

Could you imagine resting one of the Jedi characters for a season?

Do you mean Anakin or Obi-Wan?

Yes, or even Yoda.

Well, Yoda is interesting because we haven’t really done a lot with him. He’s around, and I can’t foresee ever not having him involved. When big things are going down, Yoda always has an opinion, foreboding or not.

There are so many characters now, with Pio Koon becoming more important as he watches Ahsoka being trained by Anakin, Adi Gallia has shown up, and Luminara’s there. People have become very fond of these characters, and we keep trying to find the screen-time for them, but you have to include I Yoda and Mace Windu. It’s terribly upsetting when we don’t get enough time for them. We put Yoda in the Zillo Beast episodes. He wasn’t actually in the second one, but Steward Lee, the director, and I wanted to see Yoda running around on top of that thing. It was just too good an image for us to let go!

Will we ever visit Yoda's home planet?

I don’t think you’re ever going to see Yoda’s home planet. Would you really want to know? I know a lot of people say, “Oh Dave, why aren’t you revealing certain things?” Once we have an answer for Yoda’s origins, a large part of the fun goes right out the window.

I was a little concerned when we did Boba Fett. There were a lot of people who were worried about how that would impact upon when they see him in Empire. That’s why I tried to use the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” idea for the development of that character as a boy to tine up with what we see later.

With Boba Fett, the mystery of the man under the helmet was a huge deal when we were kids. I thought he was Jaster Mereel when I was a kid. We read that in the comic books, and it was a shock when he was revealed as a clone. There’s always mysteries, and things change, but you have be careful and sensitive about what you reveal when you go into those areas. You wouldn’t want to come up with something and have George Lucas say, “Hey, what’s that? That’s not what I meant!” That’s why at the end of the day I’m glad George is there to watch over the series. It’s his universe; we’re just lucky to be a part of creating it with him now.

The opening episodes of Season Three take reference from “Rookies”, which was a fan- and cast-favorite episode of Season One. Dee Bradley Baker especially loves it!

Yeah, it’s all him, all the time! There’s a direct connection between “Rookies” and those episodes. In fact, everyone, including George, enjoyed that episode. One of the things he wanted to do was explore these guys in particular. The premiere episode is about Echo, Hevy, Fives, Cut Up, and Droid Bait when they’re training on Kamino. You’re going to learn a lot more about those guys you saw in the Rishi Outpost.

Echo and Fives are the only two survivors of the outpost, so we will see them at times, kind of like we saw Waxer and Boil in the Geonosis episode, when they rescued Obi-Wan. Both Echo and Fives will have roles throughout this season.

The ARC troopers make their debut this season. Is George aware of the fan reaction when things like that are brought into the show?

I think he’s aware. He knows when we tell him, “Wow, people love those clone episodes!” He’s aware that way. He knows we all get excited around the table when he’s pitching an idea and he brings up something like ARC troopers. The writers and I are all fans of this stuff, and it was fun to bring them in. I have to go and get all the continuity information out and start going over it with George, like I did with the Mandalorians. That always has varying levels of success [laughs].

Developing different clone armor, clone helmets, and different characters is a lot of fun. I could do so many episodes just about Commander Wolffe. If you start looking at these guys and what’s happened to them, you can ask how their experiences would affect them. They are clones, but they’re all different. When Dee plays them, you think of them as different, you don’t even consider that it’s all Dee.

I always like getting some new helmets out there, new gear, because invariably the 501st guys end up wearing it, and that’s the best part of all.

Do you secretly think, Wow, this is going to be a really cool toy when you devise stuff for the show?

Oh, not secretly whatsoever! I have Hasbro’s AT-AT toy on my desk right now. You can’t grow up when I did and design a clone trooper, without thinking, Boy, the Commander Wolffe action figure would look so cool.

What is the difference between doing the effects for live-action and working on a CG show like The Clone Wars?

I went through a learning curve when I first got onto the show. I worked on feature films at ILM for a little over 17 years before coming here. I knew how to do photo-real graphics, and that was it. Working with live-action, especially working at ILM for that entire time, you strive to make effects so believable, that you don't question that it's an effect. Working at that caliber you get yourself stuck into the groove of “no style”. There's not going to be any graphic enhancement or anything that you can do stylistically to make the effects look better.

Coming onto The Clone Wars, I was sent down to Singapore to work with the effects team there. At the time there were just three guys. Two of them, who were new to effects, said, “We want to make our explosions look better.” So I said, “Okay, let's get to the bottom of this, and well figure it out.” I brought a bunch of tools that ILM no longer used to do effects and started doing these explosions. I sent these explosions back to Skywalker Ranch to see what they thought, and the first comment I got was, "Too photo-real." So I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure it out again.

Almost half a year later, when I'd become a full-on member on the production, Dave Filoni [Clone Wars Supervising Director] came to me and said, “I want to do these rooster tails behind these speeders, but I don't want to do the usual cloud of dust and debris that kicks up behind a speeder when it flies, I want to do something stylistically like anime.”

So Dave dropped a Japanese anime show called Wolf's Rain in front of me, and I watched what the snow looked like and what the rooster tails did behind cars that were speeding down the road, and it looked like a saw tooth pattern. I thought, Okay, I really need to think creatively here and draw on my roots of understanding fine art. I'm a huge impressionist fan, and I thought, Well let's just make this took impressionistic. So I painted what the effects would look like, and made my painting come to life, and it was at that point that I realized I had finally broken through the barrier of live-action into stylized effects that we do on the show. You really need to take everything you earned from live-action and use small parts of it, but don't use the final look.

Is there more freedom with animation compared to the live-action stuff?

When you deal with live-action, it's what would call a “moon shot”, like how NASA get their rockets to the moon. It has to be launched on a certain day and it has to orbit the Earth a certain number of times, and then leave Earth's orbit at a certain point so that it perfectly lines up with the moon when it gets there. That's live-action effects. It needs to be precise, and here's not a lot of cheating that can be done. I've always been known to cheat at ILM and when I did my work, whenever I couldn't get the particle effects to do anything, I'd paint it.

What I've just discovered in the last year is that Dave and I have worked into a really good rhythm. He'll come into my office and the two of us will just brainstorm what something should look like, and by the time he leaves my office I'm thinking, I have no idea how I'm going to do this, and I figure I've gotta cheat to get it to work! Once I get it to a certain point, that's when I'll show Dave. You've got that freedom to work creatively through the process of developing the effects, or even coming up with the lighting scheme of an episode

What's the secret of a good explosion?

It took years for us to nail it, but in the last few episodes, we really got it. An explosion is made up of a pop-flash, then you've got the big boom. The secret is beats; you need to have the beats.

If you just have a big boom, the sound guys go and do a big boom and that's it. So you get this big push with the destruction that's happening. Then you have the fireball flash, the fire comes up and will quickly go to smoke. It's all really quick, but in order to have that beat, stylistically you need a follow-up, what I would call a concussion. You have the big boom and then you rush air or dust at the camera, like in a ring, and that's the second event.

Now, those two events are what make up every single explosion you see in live-action, so we've taken the first initial boom, and we've drawn in anime spikes, too. So when you watch these explosions, for about three or four frames, you'll see what appear to be hand drawn spikes, which is exactly what they are! Those spikes are actually just flat texture, and there's a few of them that are rotated so they don't look flat when combined. After that, we have the spikes just completely disappear, and then there's a shockwave: a rush of air that comes towards the camera.

The final event is what I call “shark bits”, and I refer to this all the time with the explosions, because it is a throwback to my favorite movie, Jaws. One of my all-time favorite elements of Jaws is when they blow up the shark at the end of the movie. There are bits of exploded shark that continue to fall down while Brody is in the water laughing, so I always have shark bits. That's the third beat of the explosion. You have the boom, the rush, and the bits falling down. The nice thing is you can use any one of those elements separately off the screen to give the sound guys even more to work with so you don't need to do the whole effect. Sometimes you can just have shark bits falling down, and the sound guys will go, “Oh, there must have been an explosion off-screen”. Or you'll see a rush of air go by and then shark bits. So those are my three elements, the three beats, and layering up each one of them is the key to making it all work together.

Depicting fire was a huge hurdle that you overcame on the show. What's the next big challenge?

Water. Water is maddening, as is trying to render fire. I would equate trying to get water to do what you want to do in CG as repainting a white room, because you don't know where you started, you don't know where you've ended, you don't know what's dry, you don't know what's wet. It all disappears, and you start to lose your mind a little bit!

When I found out that we go to Kamino in Season Three, and that we were going to be doing water, I knew I had tried it before on “Children of the Force” in Season Two. For that, I painted the water and put it on a flat surface, and made that surface look like waves. Around the same time, United Airlines had this weird hand-drawn commercial, with this water that was a whole bunch of repeated patterns. I took that as my cue to say, “You know what? As long as it acts like water, we can make it took like whatever we want.” I worked with this artist, Sang Lee, who painted the base color of the ocean to just be a bunch of brushstrokes that are dark and green and blue, and that kind of hue, and he painted stylistically what looked like the foam on top of the water, and that' all we did. Then we put a little bit of atmospheric haze blowing by, a little bit of mist rolling on the surface, to complete the effect.

Which episodes would you say have really raised the bar in Season Two?

“Landing at Point Rain” was a huge leap forward in terms of what we were able to do for effects on the show. The Zillo Beast episodes were groundbreaking in that started destroying things. We've never been able to physically destroy anything on the show before.

“Lethal Trackdown” was another epic challenge to pull off creatively, for the lighting and the effects. Dave would constantly come into my office and talk about it, because everything had to be better than just a cardboard-looking set. For that episode and “R2 Come Home” we really tried to push it to the next level. We're halfway through lighting the episodes for Season Three, and we're putting so much depth into the worlds that you're really starting to feel just like you felt when Luke crash-landed on Dagobah. Like, Wow, this is another place.

The biggest leap, however, was the Boba Fett trilogy. We were able to make the environments so rich. We totally changed the whole look of the show, and really made the environments something the characters actually had to wrestle with.

Do you have a favorite episode?

Lethal Trackdown. That and “R2 Come Home” were the episodes when I became the lighting supervisor, so it was my playground for lighting. Everything to me is light: light balance, light ratio, proper composition of shape, color, and balance in every single shot. Dave and I are both huge Caravaggio fans. I'm a photographer and so I love any painting with light.

I also love National Geographic, and for “Lethal Trackdown” I stumbled upon an article about Turkey, with a beautiful picture of this bar that I loved. I showed Dave and he said, “Sure, just try it out to see what it looks like.”

What's the strangest place you've drawn inspiration from?

It's in an upcoming episode of Season Three, and it's the Zeitgeist bar in San Francisco. I was inspired by the back room where they have these fuzzy velvet couches. To flip that question, the most beautiful place I've been inspired by, which is also for an upcoming episode, is 18th Century Paris. I had just seen the movie Chéri and said, “Dave, I want this planet to be like 18th Century Paris.” I also just started watching Mad Men, and am starting to think I need to light the next episode like a 1960s advertising building!

JOEL'S CHALLENGE