STAR WARS: Dave Filoni teases clues to new animated series

Supervising director of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Dave Filoni is working on something new of Lucasfilm, and has been slipping out some enigmatic clues about it.

Dave Filoni has TIE Fighters on his mind! He’s been busy working on the new animated series set in the Star Wars universe, and he’s been dropping some hints as to what he’s been up to!

Last week, he released some of his sketches of TIE Fighters to Twitter and Facebook.

On Twitter: “Hard to believe that I’ve worked at LFL almost 8 yrs, & this is the first time I have gotten to draw a TIE fighter.”

(Click image to enlarge) If you notice, the wing struts on this TIE are not at the regular angles for the hexagonal wing panel. If the regular TIE Fighter wing was attached at this angle, the TIE would rest on the points of the wing rather than a flat edge. Is this a new design or a just a goof?.

And on Facebook:

(Click image to enlarge) These TIE Fighters are part of a larger sketch in how they are being suspended, either in a launch crane or assembly line type set up.

This week, the official Star Wars twitter released this Vine clip, entitled “This is research!”:

In the video clip, Dave Filoni appears to open up a vintage Kenner TIE Fighter, while Pablo Hidalgo looks on. But if you notice, the video snippet runs on a computer desktop and some of those other files are also hints. In the lower right, a folder has the name of a bit.ly URL, which directs to a page backdated on the StarWars.com blog:

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/05/20/stay-on-target/

The Aurabesh font script in the image reads, “Striking First So You Can’t Strike Back”.

Another file on the desktop is an image that links to an image on Flickr of a teaser poster for the Gargoyles animated series, by Greg Weisman. Perhaps the GW in the folder name: SK_DF_GW. If DF is Dave Filoni, is SK Simon Kinberg, a writer associated with the standalone films? See more of the detective work over in the discussion comments on ClubJade.net.

Other hints dropped online keep pointing to the animated show’s era as potentially being the time period between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy, and these hints seem to fall in line with that. Will the new series focus on the pilots of the Empire?