Rick McCallum Talks Episode 3 Pre-Production

"We have a production art department in London that's started, feverishly. We have a costume dept. that starts next week in Sydney, and then the production art dept. moves to Sydney in the beginning of 2003. So all systems are go. We start our basic construction of the things that are needed in each dept. (in Australia). In about two weeks, we'll have our new set director Richard Roberts, come into Sydney to scout locations and service companies. This is just the beginning of the pre-production on the film."

The conceptual art dept. at Skywalker Ranch is in full swing. About twenty artists are now at work on Episode 3 and as of Nov. 2002, they'd already created 1,500 illustrations. McCallum says "we'll reach 10,000 before we start shooting." So far, they're of "paintings and sketches for all the costumes - of which there'll be about 1,200 different ones."

The next big step for graphic design was scheduled for Dec. 2002 with animatics expected to begin from early script pages. McCallum adds, "We won't have a completely new camera, we'll have a much more sophisticated, hot-rodded camera. It's much more sophisticated now with better resolution, better picture quality and color imagery. When asked about more EP3 questions, he says "I can't talk about that yet. This is a bad month (for news). Everything is about to happen."