CG Television Clone Wars Trailer Released

Ant writes "The official Star Wars site has up the one minute and 50 second trailer for the upcoming computer rendered Clone Wars." I'm still not sold on the CG, but the models seem to be somewhat based on Genndy Tartakovsky's designs from the original Clone Wars series. Wikipedia offers a bevy of details on the series.

Comments

Another Director & CG?

[RomeReactor]

This new series (which looks like a continuation of the previous Clone Wars) will be directed by Dave Filoni http://imdb.com/name/nm1396048/ (Avatar, Dave the Barbarian), and in my opinion is a step down from Tartakowsky. We'll just have to see if the writing staff does as good a job with this as before. Also: Please, George, no more 5 minute episodes! Those were a torture...

Re:Eh, CG...

[Canthros]

A lot of 2-D cel-style animation is done entirely digitally these days, actually. (As noted by another poster, South Park simulates their collage-style using computers.) There's a lot that is done in Flash, actually.

Motion capture helps a lot with 3-D stuff, but it's probably still too expensive to do for a TV show that's got to do a couple dozen episodes a year. Movement in the new Clone Wars series looked acceptable to me, but I'd agree that it's less than perfect--some movements too quick, some too exaggerated, some simply there where they maybe shouldn't be. (Actually, it looks to me like they've done a lot of motion capture; I wonder if it's all new, or if they're leveraging stuff from the Star Wars prequels and various LucasArts games?) I expect we'll get to see a lot more of this sort of thing, though. Cel animation is expensive, even when done digitally, even when farmed out to animation studios in places like Korea and China. One nice thing about 3-D is that you can (I think) offload the rendering (and even a lot of the animation, once motion capture becomes sufficiently ubiquitous) to computers and let people spend most of their time directing. Obviously, that's a trade-off, but for a lot of the projects being done in animation at present, it's probably not a big one.