Somewhere deep within the Skywalker Ranch servers, Gen. Grievous' Trade Federation flagship The Malevolence sits, mothballed in eternal 3-D hibernation, alongside Anakin Skywalker's command ship, The Resolute.
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While they wait to be called into battle again in animated hit Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the spaceships could find themselves traveling to Geonosis, Ryloth or Coruscant — entire planets also stored away safely within the massive digital engines of George Lucas' galaxy.
All Lucasfilm Animation workers need to see, touch and manipulate these characters, ships and planets is a flat-screen monitor, a stylus and access to the company's Director's Toolkit and virtual camera pre-visualization technology.
"Our pre-viz tool allows us to create a simple blocking of scenes with characters and sets, and position as many cameras as needed to quickly capture the director's vision," Clone Wars CG supervisor Joel Aron told Wired.com.
Lucasfilm's virtual camera is yet another weapon in the filmmaking arsenal ready and waiting at 21-century directors' fingertips. These powerful digital tools are rapidly changing the way movies and television shows are assembled — and what fans see on-screen, in animated attractions as well as CGI-enhanced live-action films.
Each episode of Clone Wars is assembled in real-time on a computer screen — not on a traditional 2-D storyboard. In old-school animation, those storyboards would capture the director's vision of every shot. Then animators would create frames to match the storyboards, and only those images would come alive.
But Clone Wars utilizes a virtual camera to shoot any character at angle in any Star Wars environment. The 3-D imagery of Obi-Wan Kenobi or Gen. Grievous exists in the Lucasfilm Animation servers along with the planets they visit and the ships that take them there. All of those elements can be manipulated to create the action you see on-screen during an episode.
That action can then loop on the computer monitor forever, while the director uses his or her stylus to move the virtual camera's perspective in and around the action, recording as many takes as necessary. The virtual camera perspective can move almost endlessly around the 3-D environments and characters. The director can move the "lens" from inside a ship to its exterior or from a close-up on a single Clonetrooper to an overhead shot of an army with one drag of the stylus.
"Not only does our pre-viz tool allow for a smoother expression in the director's vision for each episode," Aron said, "but we are able draw from an extensive library of effects, objects and extras from the Star Wars universe to fill up each scene."
Once the episode is directed and recorded, the Clone Wars team lays in the rich CG rendering seen in the final broadcasts. All most fans know is that the most-action packed show on TV looks cool week after week (or now on DVD).
Photo: John Scott Lewinski/Wired.com
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