Combining digital characters and real actors in the same shot truly put the ILM team's digital artistry to the test. © Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™. All rights reserved. Digital work by Industrial Light & Magic.

The latest Star Wars feature is a remarkable technical tour-de-force. Almost every shot in the film contains some digitally created element, whether it be a background, a vehicle, a prop or a foreground character. Of the approximately 2,000 shots in the film, 928 of them contain characters created by computers. That comes to about 69 minutes of screen time.

It took a team of 60 animators and another 340 artists and technicians at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), San Rafael, California, to create all the post-production elements in this film. Besides animators, the crew included technical directors, modelers, view painters, compositors, miniature artists and lots of other specialists.

When AWN was invited to interview Rob Coleman, the animation director of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, we wanted to learn about his role in the production, along with how a movie of this scale is broken down so that it can be made. Who decides what techniques will be used to achieve the effects for which the script calls? Where did they use models instead of computer-generated backgrounds? What was animated using Macintosh computers? Where did they use motion-capture?

Animation director Rob Coleman describes the first task on Episode II was to define the technical "gotchas." Photo credit: David Owen.

Coleman says George Lucas begins to make major decisions almost from the start in the pre-script phase of the production. Lucas tends to begin his Star Wars projects by giving the art department and production designers at Skywalker Ranch (a magnificent facility in a hidden valley in rural Marin County, California) an idea of the worlds he wants to visit in the movie. "In this movie, we have a world completely covered with water and we have another world that we called 'the rock world' until we were given the name of it. In each of these worlds, we meet creatures that have not been seen before in the Star Wars universe. I'm not in the early meetings where George describes verbally what his vision is, where his imagination is leading him. These meetings are with his production designer Doug Chiang, the design director, and other designers and illustrators working with him." They then create hundreds or thousands of drawings for each idea discussed. It might take one month or several before, "George decides, yes, that is what that character will look like, that's the costume they will wear, that's the building they are going to stand in and that's the vehicle they are going to fly in."

"At that point, I'm invited out to Skywalker Ranch with other key creative people from ILM, to have a presentation of the art work. The first meetings of Episode II involved John Knoll, one of the visual effects supervisors, and myself. We had worked on Episode I: The Phantom Menace together. We attended a series of small, hour long, meetings where they presented some of the characters, some of the creatures and some of the environments. We saw rough pencil drawings and beautiful production paintings. They also showed us small little maquettes (statues) of the characters."