In this uncertain period – this was, probably, 2010 – I found myself directing an episode of animation for Lucasfilm, which at that time was producing a weekly animation... Half an hour animation programme called Clone Wars. And it was an entirely animated show, featuring this army of the white suited clone warriors. And it was an unusual thing for me to do, but I like those kind of challenges. And it was just a... I think it was a ten-week... 12-week engagement. Maybe 16 weeks. Four months, let's say. To take a script and – that was slightly less than half an hour – and design the staging, and animate characters in that space, and these are warriors who are fighting things, there's a battle... Battles that happen, and all kinds of science fiction type stuff on a distant planet.

And you learn how to use a version of the Maya software, which is what animators use. I had to at least become familiar with this. I had a team of four animators working with me... for me, who obviously knew that software extremely well, and I will assign various scenes in this episode to each of them, multiple scenes, and work with each of them as they develop this, the way any creative process would go. 'This is... that's very good. Can we move quicker from here to there? And let's try this different angle on this.'

There's a tremendous amount of flexibility because nothing is really being shot. It's all just, what they call, 3D animation, which is not optical 3D. But it means that you have characters placed in a space, virtual space, and you can put the camera, in a sense, anywhere in that space, and you can change the lens of that camera during the shot, or at the beginning of the shot, or the end of the shot, or you can... Yes, great flexibility. And the... One of the challenges of this, which was particularly interesting to George Lucas, was to try to imprint the techniques of live action shooting on animation.

And this is different from the normal approach, because the final animation is so expensive on a frame-by-frame basis, the rendering time and all of the details, that, in general, animation is done on a shot-by-shot basis, like animated storyboard. So, here's a shot, we go from A to B, with a little overlap at either end, but we're very careful about excess. And in a dialogue scene, you would animate this shot, and then you would animate this shot, and then animate this shot. And what George said was, 'No, animate it all. So, pretend that there are two cameras on these characters, shooting the way you would shoot live action, then you just... you generate all of this material. And then, editorially, you decide where the best place to edit is. You don't decide the editing beforehand. You treat it as if it's live action.'