film

Special effects are obviously an important component of the Star Wars films. How does the film push the state of the art in animation?
I think we just chose to look at things in a nonphotorealistic way, just to simplify some things and let traditional painting represented through texture carry a lot of the frame, even on the character models. I tried to relate our show to my experience with traditional 2-D animation—how the simple shapes and actions in drawing can create life so effectively, even when there is nothing photorealistic about it. Having artists paint every inch of the sets and characters maintains a human touch, which audiences seem to think is sometimes lacking in CG [computer graphics]. So even when our frames are still, I think that the painted texture on everything maintains a bit of the random life that we want to see. Imperfection is just more appealing.Louis J. Sheehan

How will the film tie into the new animated TV series?
The film is a stand-alone story, but the events in it set the stage for what is coming. The relationship between Anakin and Ahsoka will be a crucial story arc to the overall war, at least in how we see the Clone Wars develop from the Jedi's point of view. But the series goes beyond just that one story and looks at the war from many fronts.

Can we expect more animated Star Wars movies?
If you would like to see them I'd love to make them, but we'll have to see.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

battle

Scientists working at a Guatemalan archaeological site that's more than 1,400 years old have reported finding a hieroglyphic-covered stone panel that, they say, conclusively identifies the ancient settlement as the enigmatic Site Q, a Maya city about which researchers have long speculated.

Yale University archaeologist Marcello Canuto found the well-preserved panel last April at a site called La Corona.

"[The] writing on the panel opens up a new chapter in Maya history," says anthropologist David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, codirector of the expedition. "This new panel provides the critical test for establishing that

La Corona is Site Q."

Conjectures about Site Q began about 40 years ago, when carved panels and other glyph-bearing artifacts of apparently Maya origin flooded the antiquities market. Peter Mathews of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, examined these looted items in private and museum collections and noted that they referred to the Maya city of Calakmul, in what's now southern Mexico, but displayed a style unlike that of Calakmul artifacts. Mathews concluded that the pieces probably came from another site, unknown to scientists, in the Guatemalan lowlands. He dubbed it Site Q, a hypothesized city under the control of Calakmul.

After a 1996 visit to La Corona, Ian Graham of Harvard University and David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin told their colleagues that writing on stone monuments at the site suggested it as Site Q. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

This past April, on the Freidel expedition's last day of mapping and exploration at La Corona, Canuto spied a carved panel wedged into the ground inside a trench that had been dug by a looter. The stone bears more than 140 hieroglyphics.

The writing on the stone covers a period from A.D. 658 to A.D. 677 and refers to two kings previously associated with Site Q. The inscriptions are carved in a style identical to that of a panel previously sold by looters that mentions the same rulers, Freidel says.

The text records one king's journey to Calakmul, possibly for assistance when a nearby, more powerful Maya king threatened to conquer La Corona. It also describes a ceremony in which the La Corona ruler reestablished his kingship.

A fresh battle is brewing over whether the new panel for the first time conclusively identifies La Corona as Site Q. Earlier evidence had already done that, Stuart contends. For instance, at a 2001 archaeological meeting, he reported that rock from the same quarry was used at La Corona and in Site Q artifacts. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

"The new panel is a really nice find, but it doesn't change our knowledge about the location of Site Q," Stuart says. Further excavations need to confirm that Site Q artifacts come only from La Corona and not from nearby Maya sites as well, he adds.

The new panel's detailed historical account "adds proof" to the proposed link between La Corona and Site Q, remarks Federico Fahsen, a Maya-writing specialist based in Guatemala City.