Anna Daniels
What’s your animation background like?
I went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Basically, I was kind of fortunate in that even in high school I knew what I wanted to do. I liked art and I liked technology, and I’d just seen Jurassic Park and Toy Story and was like, “Oh my god, you can combine those two things? That’s a possibility, to be able to do that?” So I kind of knew that I wanted to do that.
At the same time, I was also really big into tennis, so I ended up getting a scholarship for division one tennis at the University of Massachusetts. They also had an up and coming computer arts program, which there weren’t many of at the time. Syracuse had a pretty good one and UMass had a pretty good one, so I decided to go there, because athletics and art don’t usually mix too well. They’re kind of different things. In my freshman year, I tore up my knee and ankle really badly and that ended my tennis, and I started really concentrating on the animation and computer aspect of it.
Out of school, I started work at Centropolis, which was Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich VFX house. There I worked on The Patriot, Eight Legged Freaks, fun VFX movies. So, we did kind of that stuff, and then Centropolis was awarded the Matrix sequels. Our company, at the time, just wasn’t ready for that. We were a smaller VFX company, and that’s kind of what put Centropolis under, unfortunately.
We went out of business, and then I went over to Sony for about six years working on other VFX films and animated films and things. From there, I went on to work at IMD, which was ImageMovers Digital with Robert Zemeckis, for about five years, and then I finally moved down to Lucasfilm. It was 2009, 2010.
How did working on live-action films like the Matrix sequels or Narnia prepare you for Star Wars?
Coming from VFX and features, it was definitely a bit of a transition to come into TV, but I think that VFX and that kind of stuff really allows you to understand how much you have to dial stuff in and connect shots. In VFX, we sometimes have 20-plus takes of shots to go through before something finally gets approved. To transition from that into TV gave me a really good eye for knowing what to push and what not to, really being able to dial the episode down into parts like, “All right, I know we really need to hit this.” These couple of shots tell the story. It’s a droid going by, that’s fine, but we really need to make sure the emotion comes across and meet these needs.
Do you have a favorite Clone Wars scene or sequence?
Man, that’s a tough one. There’s a lot of really good ones. I really liked the lightsaber battle we did with the Emperor, Maul and Savage. First, the Emperor basically killed Savage after they jump down hundreds of feet, and then Maul had to fight the Emperor.
Just the different styles, I think, was what I really loved about that. The Emperor had his own sort of style of fighting, and then you bring Maul with his flamboyant kind of showmanship, and then you had Savage, which was just power, with so much force behind every blow. They’re all fighting with lightsabers, but to be able to bring the different styles and action and bring that all together so that each one was unique, was really, really, really cool.
The Maul, Ahsoka fight in Mandalore…. It’s up there. It’s really great. Hopefully that goes down as one of the best lightsaber fights that we’ve done.
Is there anything about Clone Wars that you’re particularly proud of that you don’t feel like has gotten the attention it should, or anything you want to say about the show that you haven’t gotten a chance to yet?
I think that the main thing I’m super proud of is getting the opportunity to bring Clone Wars back, and really finish it the way that Dave envisioned it to be, and not be forced to kind of wrap it up. It had a rough start with the movie and everything, and then just slowly gained back that fanbase, and now when you hear Clone Wars, people are so stoked and so pumped about it. You see all these people dressing up, and going to that Comic-Con unveil of the trailer that we did, it was just… oh my god, that was so awesome, because nobody knew, and we knew we had this trailer, and nobody knew we were doing it. To hear the reaction was just unbelievable.
On the schedule we have, and with the budget that we have, I think the fact that we’re able to pull off a show that looks the way it does, characters move the way they do, I think is just a testament to… We’ve had a lot of the same leadership in place all through the last eight to 10 years. We’ve all been working together, from Kilian Plunkett, who is our art designer, to Joel Aron, who’s the VFX and lighting supervisor, to Paul Zinnes, who’s the asset supervisor, to myself as the animation supervisor. That team, along with Dave obviously shepherding us all along, and Athena, who’s been our producer, we always want the best in creating the best.
I think that, along with working with a partner like CGCG, has really enabled us to know when to push things, when to dial back, and how to create these great stories and have them look the way they look. I think, hopefully, we’re remembered as being able to bring feature-quality animation to a television show, on a television budget. That was my goal when I first got to Lucasfilm Animation, to say, “All right, can we get to this feature-level quality on a television budget and produce great stories?”
Written by: Looper
