The highly anticipated Star Wars: The Clone Wars was created using Zviz, the proprietary previs tool that George Lucas predicted would revolutionize the industry. All images © & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd.

And now the TV series...

Tonight, the highly anticipated Star Wars: The Clone Wars from Lucasfilm Animation premieres on Cartoon Network, with back-to-back episodes at 9:00 and 9:30 pm ET/PT.

In "Ambush," Jedi Master Yoda and three clone troopers face off against Count Dooku's dreaded assassin Asajj Ventress and her massive droid army to prove that the Jedi are strong enough to protect a strategic planet and forge a treaty for the Republic. Episode director David Bullock (Justice League: The New Frontier) and writer Steve Melching (The Batman) recall the impish fun of Yoda of The Empire Strikes Back.

Meanwhile, in "Rising Malevolence," the second episode, an attack by a destructive weapon aboard a mysterious warship leaves Jedi Master Plo Koon and his clone troopers struggling to survive until Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano can find them. They discover that the ship is piloted by Grievous himself. Series Supervising Director Dave Filoni helms the episode from a script by Melching. George Lucas is the series' creator and serves as exec producer, and Catherine Winder is producer.

"Rising Malevolence" features several prominent series debuts, most notably those of Jedi Master Plo Koon (first seen in Episodes I, II and III), General Grievous and his menacing warship, the Malevolence. Also appearing for the first time in the series are Anakin Skywalker and his padawan, Ahsoka.

According to Lucas, who refers to the series as a "marionette-painted reality," they did not make this in the normal way. "I took my padawan [Filoni] and told him that...you're entering the world of live-action features and...we're going to rely on editing rather than storyboarding, and there's a lot of techniques we used that completely shifted the paradigm."

Indeed, the primary technique Lucas refers to is the company's proprietary interactive previs tool called Zviz, which he proclaimed was going to revolutionize the industry during his keynote address at SIGGRAPH 2005.

"Art is a technological medium, and so a lot of it has to do with engineering, trying to figure out what you imagine," Lucas continues in his assessment of the Clone Wars experience. "It's also a medium dictated by the amount of resources that you have available to you. If you're a pharaoh, you can build pyramids, if you're a shaman, you really only have a few pieces of chalk and a wall in a cave. And you have to work within that. Probably the most daunting thing we were trying to do is really push the limits of a TV show that is really beyond anything you've ever seen on television. To take feature animation, which costs 20 or 30 times what TV animation costs, and do that for television, was a challenge. Given enough time and money you can create anything. Given a very, very restricted budget and very, very restricted resources, [was daunting]."

In "Ambush," Yoda and three clone troopers face off against assassin Asajj Ventress and her army. The filmmakers relied on editing rather than storyboarding, and approached the project like a live-action feature.

Producer Catherine Winder (Aeon Flux, the MTV series) explains that they simultaneously set up brand new studios in Marin and Singapore, in addition to working with CGCG in Taipei. "We had to work with them to reconfigure how they did their productions. So, of course, you've got multiple challenges in that you have two different pipelines [Lucasfilm Animation/Singapore and CGCG] shipping assets and two ways of doing things. As you can imagine, there are different time zones, different cultures, different languages, different deliveries and skill sets, and a crew in Marin and [in] Singapore that have never worked together before. And many of the people in Marin had never worked in CG where it was all under one roof. It's completely different when you're working with an offshore crew. So we did a lot of work in figuring out where the holes were.

"It was a little chaotic because we're literally putting down the tracks and trying to build a pipeline for the production process as we're trying to get the show produced. And then you have the fact that George refines and changes. This is not a typical TV show. We're nonlinear, we're improving, [we're] trying to make sure that communication is up to speed." They have scripted more than 50 out of 100 stories, have completed more than 22 episodes and are in production on the first dozen or so of the second season. And it takes 12 weeks to complete an episode. "George believes in producing the story in 3D in the computer, putting the script pages directly into previsualization," Winder continues. "He really believes that the only way we can get the camera moves, the cinematography and the real feel of Star Wars is to do the work this way. We have developed and alpha-tested this [Zviz] tool while trying to set up the studio.