The Clone Wars sequence: no storyboards?

On the AOTC DVD documentary, it's mentioned that the Clone Wars sequence was such a large undertaking, Lucas and ILM skipped the storyboards and jumped right into the animation.

This entire sequence includes some of my favorite moments of the saga. But I have to wonder...do you think storyboards would've added anything special to the evolution of the scenes and action? Maybe Lucas wouldn't have had to edit out as much if the specifics and detail of the events were known.

Just a thought. I'd keep Reel 6 the way it is. However there's always a means to an end, and the beginning of the Clone Wars leaves so many possibilities out there in terms of scale.

 

Yes and no.

It's not as if they made the full, final, complete animation of the scene without a plan going in -- simply that they went directly to animatics and other such animated material to plan the sequence.

They had the liberty of doing this because Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme do not directly affect what happens below (except that one bit where they blow up the big round Federation ship). The meat of the story was planned and accounted for; the Clone War battles and things on the ground were just extra fun and shenanigans.


Rick McCallum loves you!

 

the animatics are pretty sweet if you ask me.

 

The Clone War is yet more proof that Lucas is not more intersted in effects than he is the story. There were tons of other cool visual battle shots that they could have had in the movie.

 

I always thought the exact opposite. The battle for me is nothing but a bunch of unconnected flashy images with no story being told and no strategy evident at all. We just see a series of random battle shots full of mayhem with flashy vehicles and then the battle just stops and somebody is declared the winner.

 

I'd love to hear some reasoning behind this theory, Tukafo.....

"nothing but a bunch of unconnected flashy images with no story being told and no strategy evident at all"...........

I thought the story was pretty obvious..... and what kind of strategy do you need? Should there have been a General Patton type map room discussion about how the clones are going to deploy their troops? This is just more of people wanting GL to hold their hands through every single aspect of the story... sometimes you have to forego one aspect of the story, draw your own conclusion and move on to the aspect of the story that is more important... i.e. the Ani/Obi wan and Dooku event....

--"battle just stops and somebody is declared the winner........."

When did we see the battle stop? We went from the battle to the Dooku fights..... its obvious the battle is still taking place as the duel is happening........ and I don't remember the battle officially stopping and the Jedi declaring a "victory".... there was a scene where Yoda correted Obi's pronounced victory telling him that it WASN'T victory....

 

I could've swore there were storyboards for this reel. Maybe I'm wrong.

 

It was a sequence that they sort of turned over to the animators. They in turn came up with a ton of animatice, many of which can be seen in the Animatic Documentary on the 2nd AOTC Disc.

Lucas had said something like "and they fight" in the script for the clone war sequences, with very vague description of how the battle unfolded.

It's the same kind of thing that happened in The Two Towers when the Ents attacked Isenguard. They had been so worried about all the other aspects of the middle film that Peter Jackson told Weta to come up with some cool Tree kicking Orc Butt action on their own. Of course Peter picked and chose the shots he wanted to use just as Lucas did for AOTC.

 

Actually, I think it was even funnier than that. I seem to remember all he had in the script for that reel was, "All hell breaks loose".

 

yeah "All hell breaks loose"...

what I miss was the Jedi Starfighters vs Trade Federation Fighters zooming around and blowing **** up.

 

the drawing boards are in the special edition of star wars epII novel.
not hardcover