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Fresh from playing to three halls filled to the brim with ecstatic Star Wars fans, The Clone Wars animated TV series producer Catherine Winder and supervising director Dave Filoni sat down exclusively with Star Wars Insider to reveal some details of the upcoming next on-screen Star Wars adventures. Both have strong animation backgrounds. Winder was Senior VP of Production for Fox Feature Animation and worked on Ice Age and has also worked for Walt Disney, HBO, MTV and and Hanna-Barbera, while Filoni was a director on the acclaimed Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender, and has worked for Film Roman and Disney.

Star Wars Insider: How are you bringing that unique, Star Wars feel to this TV series?

Catherine Winder [CW]: I think that's in the initial writing, in terms of really going for that exciting, fun adventure. We're trying to be true to it, working closely with George [Lucas], and Dave [Filoni] knows the films so well.

Dave Filoni [DF]: I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are working in CG. If we were doing a 2-D cartoon, you could still get it to feel like Star Wars, but you couldn't get the dynamic visuals that Star Wars demands. The movies pushed the envelope of what you can do on screen, so when George moved into animation, he wanted to continue that. It's that attitude of being innovative and finding ways of doing things that you couldn't do before that plays into Star Wars.

CW: It's also partly the way we're making it, using pre-visualization. We take a really cinematic approach to how we're going about this and have a real live-action feel. Dave is George's Padawan. George took him under his wing and he's been training Dave in storytelling and cinematography. It's incredible how they give you that visceral, exciting experience.

DF: The first thing I edited on this show was just in 2-D drawings as animatics. George liked it, but he said "It's not fun." And I thought, "Well, gee, George I don't know what that means." So he's been teaching me. The fact that George is involved, more than any other reason, is why it comes out feeling like Star Wars.

Within a 22-minute per episode running time, how do you bring the epic scope of Star Wars stories to the show? Will there be on-going story arcs?

CW: We are not just doing stand-alone episodes; we are producing these so we can have that big, epic feel to the storyline in two- and three-parts. Actually, there is one four-parter. Some episodes are stand-alone stories, of course.

DF: It's a challenge. For an epic-scale, 22-to-24 minutes isn't long - that's an intro to most movies! We definitely try to pace it so that you feel like you've watched a whole movie. The fact that we're quickly paced reflects what Star Wars always was: When people saw the original Star Wars in 1977, it was one of the fastest-moving things they had ever seen.

CW: They're jam-packed, but they're paced so that you really do have that personal story come through. Then you have these really exciting sequences that are true to the Star Wars universe. In order to make those special, we have to pace them properly when we edit the shows.

What about the unique look of Star Wars? Are you staying true to the films' special look?

DF: It's really just plugging it in: we don't try to reinvent anything. I think that's key. I know what a Republic Cruiser looks like, I know what Plo Koon looks like. Design changes I do based on necessity, because I can't do major cloth sim[ulation] or we can't rig something that elaborate. That's where we choose to make some design changes. For the most part, it's a real thrill that we have so much designed material to work off. You normally don't have that. Establishing its own reality was the thing. There is an anime influence. The vehicles look relatively the same; we didn't mess with their proportions. Anakin looks pretty realistic, in s universe. Yoda was a puppet in the movies, so he's more cartoony in ours. [Japanese animation director] Hayao Miyazaki always did that kind of thing: He'd have very cartoony characters mixed with very real characters. It's that same dynamic going on. We've kept all the style choices within the Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston overall look.

Have you looked back over some of the original production artwork for guidance?

DF: Constantly. The environments people saw at Celebration IV, and the kind of painterly look to the characters are all inspired by Ralph McQuarrie's concept paintings. The idea that I wanted was to have those be like moving pictures, 3-D images of Ralph McQuarrie painting's come to life with these stylized characters from the Cartoon Network Clone Wars on top of it. We're constantly referring to both. Actually, George gives me designs of things. When he has ideas he’ll say "Here, use this," and hands me something Joe Johnston designed for the first trilogy. Then we bring to life on our series. There's something Erik Tiemens designed for the prequels that we use in the series.

CW: George will give us that input at the core story idea stage, so that we can reference it and use it to inspire the writing. In terms of finding the look, it was quite technically challenging to be able to take those paintings and bring them into 3-D. We have a really good Technical Development team, led by Andrew Harris, that works closely with Dave and collaborated with him to make that happen.

Setting up the studios in Marin County and the Lucasfilm Animation facility in Singapore has been quite an adventure for you.

CW: It's still an adventure. We're just starting to hone how we do this. While we've been doing this for a couple of years, we're all new and the chemistry is only now beginning to kick into gear. This time last year we were not only trying to find out what the stories were that we were producing, but how we were technically producing them. It was all really loose until late in 2006, when we felt we had really nailed our process.

How involved is Star Wars writer/director George Lucas?

CW: When I hired Dave, we had no idea how often we'd see George or how heavily he'd be involved. Over time, he's become thoroughly engaged and more and more involved. He's very excited about the series and what he's seeing. He's spent a lot of time with us and we've gotten to know him pretty well. He's great to work with. We're learning, really learning, a lot. I've never worked for somebody who's made me think so out of the box. That's the only way to accomplish the amazing things that need to be done on this show.

Will we be introduced to new characters through the series?

DF: You can't do a whole series without meeting new people - that would be boring! In every Star Wars movie, you're usually meeting a host of new characters. It's always a toss up, as you want to use the characters the fans know and love, like Anakin Skywalker, [but] you also want to use ones they've never heard of before as that makes it interesting. This show will be introducing things to the Star Wars universe, not just repeating things from the established Star Wars universe. There's a blend.

What's surprised you the most so far about the whole process?

CW: For me, it's been how hard this is to do. I had no idea how challenging it would be. If you want to achieve greatness, it's hard. Everybody works really hard, puts everything into it, and has done an amazing job. But starting from scratch is never easy.

DF: I've been surprised at what we can achieve, coming from a 2-D background. I have to admit to being somewhat skeptical of CG, especially for the time frame we have. The crew has produced visuals that just amaze me. With CG you never really know [what you've got] until you render it out. I bet George was surprised the first time he saw the Millennium Falcon fly! You can imagine it and dream it, but you still need people to make that a reality and we're lucky that we have the right people.