The first chapter in a massive four-part story arc, the campaign to retake Geonosian begins with "The Landing at Point Rain," a SPECIAL PRESENTATION of Star Wars: The Clone Wars airing at 8:00pm ET/PT this WEDNESDAY, November 4 on Cartoon Network.
Anakin, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ki-Adi-Mundi lead a landing party to destroy a droid factory that Poggle the Lesser has rebuilt on Geonosis, but things go terribly awry when Separatist gunners shoot down the Republic ships. Despite heavy losses, Anakin and Ki-Adi-Mundi must rendezvous in time to destroy the enemy factory before it can begin production.
Featuring far more intensity than has been seen previously in The Clone Wars series, the action-packed episode pushed the limits of Lucasfilm Animation's production processes, showcasing the depth and breadth of the animated "galaxy far, far away" in ways that hadn't been possible before.
"Internally, we just keep getting better and better," says Dave Filoni, supervising director of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. "There's no way we could have done something like this in the first season. We just didn't have the assets to populate a battle this big, but we've learned so much and we're still learning. It's pretty amazing to be able to do something so theatrical and ambitious."
Previsualization is just one of the tools which has helped Filoni and team realize their wildest cinematic ambitions for the series. Rather than using conventional 2-D storyboards, the show's previsualzation is all done in the computer. This provides an opportunity for directors to work within a three-dimensional environment, blocking the action, the rhythm and the pacing with a fully cinematic depth of field. Originally pioneered by George Lucas during production of the classic live-action trilogy, "previs" is a technique which allows directors to visualize scenes before they are filmed -- or, in the case of The Clone Wars, before they are animated.
"George [Lucas] wanted 'Landing at Point Rain' to be as intense as any live-action movie about the assault on Omaha Beach," says Brian Kalin O'Connell, the episode's director. "In order to give it that sense of frenetic intensity, we needed to be able to have a fully populated background. This episode was a challenge to our studios and is a testament to what we were all capable of doing in Season Two. George challenged us to make something big and didn't let us deliver anything that didn't raise the bar for the whole series. This episode was filled with challenges but I am really happy with how it turned out. It's non-stop, in-your-face action, and I hope the fans like it."
