(Be sure to check out the new Season 3 trailer we just posted here!)
On Saturday and Sunday at Celebration V's Digital Stage, Clone Wars Supervising Director Dave Filoni and CG Supervisor Joel Aron talked up Season 3 of The Clone Wars to a packed house. Host Dave Collins moderated a discussion of what's to come this fall, with new characters, new planets, new stories, and a stepped-up look that keeps getting better with each new season.
Oh, and there were sneak peeks. Lots of them.
Here's a few of the subjects covered in the two panels:
New Look:
Aron: "We knew we were going to Kamino towards the end of Season 2 so we really had to develop water. Coming off of Season 2 we knew there was a benchmark that we hit and going into Season 3 we knew we had to take it up a notch. All you guys will see at the start of Season 3 it's a completely different looking show. It's much more rich, and the demands that came from Dave and George we were able to exceed.
"The first demand was water...we had to make it simple enough so we could craft it. We actually painted the water. A lot of the destruction, also, we decided to take to another level. Instead of things just blowing up, we tried to make it more cinematic, more powerful, because you can't just do a big sound cue and have a little explosion. We really had to up it a bit."
Clones
Filoni: "I think for us and the clones, they've become a really big part of the series besides the Jedi, who can sometimes be hard to relate to because they have such powers that we put them on a different level. When we did the episode "Rookies" in Season 1, we learned that people love the clones -- they love Captain Rex, they love Commander Cody. So we've developed more stories just around those guys.
"The beginning of Season 3 focuses on the clones -- on their training, the training facilities, who trains them... We bring in Shaak Ti, and I think that was really important for everybody. We hadn't done that before because we didn't want kids to get confused between Ahsoka and Shaak Ti. At the end of the day I think what you'll see with the clones is that, you know, Captain Rex is different than Cody -- they think differently, they act differently, even though they're clones, they're very different individuals...We get more personal with these guys, and get into some interesting questions, like are all the clone troopers effective when they're grown in all these vats?
Savage Opress
Filoni: "It's important that when creating a new character that they become iconic. It was important that you don't confuse him with Darth Maul -- we couldn't make him red and black so we made him yellow and black."
Aron: "This whole arc was really a challenge for us. I kind of took liberty with him in anything that he did in trying to get it more cinematic, more active when he fought. Just tricks to get your heartrate up so when you watch, you'll actually have an emotional reaction to him or feel fear. So I think the look was there already, but I always made sure he was lit in a way that was menacing -- there's no nice lighting to him. I always wanted him to be either in shadow or silhouette.
"With Savage Opress, you really needed to keep your eye on him. There's reasons to stay focused on him. Because of that, we've let the animators go the extra mile on facial expressions with him, so that when you do hear him speak, you pay attention. In Season 3, we re-did a lot of our facial rigs, to talk technically, so the animators now have a lot of freedom for getting emotion and expression. You don't see wooden characters anymore and that's a big leap for our show."
Asajj Ventress
Filoni: "We get into her backstory. We get into who she was and what happened to her and why she's the way she is."
"She's had a bad war so far. She's fighting for respectability. I feel bad for her. Dooku keeps stringing her along, and like George said, there can only be two [master and apprentice], she's like the third wheel that Sidious barely recognizes but he's content with her as long as she's out there killing Jedi and serving his war purpose. But if ever she were to become powerful enough to give Sidious the idea that she might be a threat, it could go badly for her. So I don't know what I'm foreshadowing, but...
"Her life at the beginning of the season and her life at the end of the season will be drastically different."
Dathomir and Mother Talzin
Filoni: "We have a saying on Clone Wars that nothing that's ever been developed for Star Wars by George is ever going to go away. I think Iain McCaig [inspired the Mother Talzin] design that's famously from The Phantom Menace when they were developing the Darth Maul character. The idea of these Sith witches has been around in Star Wars folklore, and in a meeting George started to get extensively into these witches one day -- that's always an awesome day."
Aron: "Dathomir was a planet I'd never been to before...and this arc was very important because we really need to feel like we're going someplace, we really wanted to know that witches live there. The planet should look alive or controlled by witches. You'll see when you watch these episodes that the smoke has life. It's very similar to Mother Talzin's cape -- when we first talked about the design I thought it would be really cool to have Mother Talzin just constantly have her robe like silk underwater."
Filoni: "I wanted the surface of the planet to look like all these rib cages and bones coming up out of the ground in a mist layer and when you got down beneath that there was a lot less light and it's foggy. You're not necessarily going to go visit a happy group of people here -- it's stark and it's red and it's very aggressive."
Nightsisters of Dathomir
Filoni: "According to George, they're not necessarily Force-wielders. They're something else. When you think of the universe as a whole, the Force has manifested itself in many different ways in many different cultures and with the witches it's more of a witchcraft thing. They have different powers. They have different things they do that neither a Sith or a Jedi does. And to give you a further bit of foreshadowing, we really get into this whole balance of the Force thing this year in a very big direct way. The whole 'Anakin, you are the chosen one' is going to come up, and that's very exciting too."
Count Dooku
Filoni: "With Dooku, he's Darth Tyrannus and he's Count Dooku. When he's running the Separatist Parliament he's saying, 'Don't worry, everything's fine, the war is going well.' When he's off in battle he's choking people and is being really mean -- and that's Darth Sidious too -- Dooku learns from his master.
"Dooku's an interesting character to have because he's part of a massive deception going on. And we get into explaining that deception in Season 3 on multiple levels. Levels you need to understand how the Jedi fall -- they fall politically, they fall emotionally, they lose their ethics in fighting this war. You need to understand all those things. It's all in Revenge of the Sith -- it's just that now George is taking the time through his series to explain it in a lot more detail so that you'll see all the elements of the fall spread out over a greater period of time."
And a few more things:
- Aquadroids will be introduced in Season 3 -- "Jules Verne-like" crafts with tentacles used for underwater attack on Kamino.
- The Trident Drill ships seen in the attack on Kamino clips appear to be based on the Trident ships from Episode III.
- Lucas' daughter Katie extensively researched the Expanded Universe when writing the set of scripts for the Ventress story arc.
- Bounty hunter Embo, who was introduced in the Season 2 episode "Bounty Hunters", appears briefly in a shot in the Season 3 "mega-trailer" shown at the end of the panel.
- ...and did we spot Delta Squad from Republic Commando in that trailer as well?
Also make sure to check out a short video of this panel posted here.
