Animatics: The Moving Storyboards of Episode I

After directing Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope in 1976, George Lucas stepped away from the director's role for subsequent films. For Episode I, Lucas returns to the director's chair for the first time in 21 years.

Lucas is able to craft his vision of this story and its new characters with greater creative control than ever before, thanks to some of the technological innovations that have broadened his storyteller's toolkit. Animatics are one such tool, and they are being used extensively to fine-tune every shot of Episode I to match the story in Lucas' imagination.

In the editing rooms at Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas and his editing team assemble the footage of Episode I, fine tuning sequences for nuance and dramatic effect. Martin Smith stares at the AVID monitors, re-cutting and revising to achieve exactly the story flow he wants from a dramatic scene. But it can be difficult for Lucas and his editor to judge the effectiveness of some of these scenes, because so many are full of holes.

A scene of two Jedi knights having a dramatic confrontation may be very hard to edit without the cityscape, Tatooine cliffside, or moving spacecraft that are meant to fill the space behind them-the actors may have been filmed standing in front of nothing more than a blue screen. All the missing elements are visual effects to be added later by ILM. But until the scene is cut to best advantage, Lucas cannot be sure which effects must be ordered. This chicken-and-egg problem is being solved for Episode I by the extensive use of animatics, or "sketch" versions of the missing scenes and elements. Animatics are conceptually a kind of storyboard. Traditional storyboards are cartoon-like sketches of movie scenes, meant to guide the creators of a film as a kind of pre-visualization, or blueprint. Changes can be easily made to the sequence and composition of storyboards before expensive filming is undertaken, which makes storyboards a useful tool.

For the editing team at Skywalker Ranch, one way to get around the problem of missing or incomplete scenes is to intercut storyboards which illustrate shots that will later be created as visual effects. These can be helpful, but for a movie filled with motion, storyboards are insufficient place-holders for the editors fine-tuning their scenes. Movement is key: camera movement, spacecraft movement, anything in the scene moving. Storyboards cannot illustrate this vital dimension, but animatics can. Animatics are moving storyboards.