In the April 2026 edition of Animation Magazine (No. 358), Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord’s Supervising director Brad Rau and animation supervisor Keith Kellogg talk about how the show was made including the development of a new power rig.
Star Wars: Maul — Shadow Lord, arriving April 6 on Disney+, is a 10-episode animated series following the onetime Sith apprentice as he rebuilds his criminal operations on Janix, a planet so far untouched by the Empire.
Created and developed by Dave Filoni — who was recently promoted to president and chief creative officer of Lucasfilm — and Matt Michnovetz, the series stars Sam Witwer reprising his role as Maul, Gideon Adlon as Twi’lek Jedi Devon Izara, Wagner Moura as Janix police detective Brander Lawson and Richard Ayoade as Lawson’s droid partner Two-Boots. Additional cast members include Dennis Haysbert, Chris Diamantopoulos, Charlie Bushnell, Vanessa Marshall, David W. Collins, A.J. LoCascio and Steve Blum.
Supervising director Brad Rau, a veteran of Star Wars animation, says Filoni presented the series as a chance to finally learn a little bit more about Maul.
Motivated by Revenge?
“The thing that Dave put to us is, how do we tell this portion of this guy’s story? What is he doing when the Empire rises? What is he doing, trying to get revenge?” he says. “He only has, like, two lines in Phantom Menace, so he’s just always been this mysterious, interesting character that we felt like the time was right to tell his story.”
However, fans shouldn’t expect to learn everything about Maul. “We keep a measure of mystery around him,” Rau says. “It’s an interesting narrative balance. How do we focus on facets of this character without ruining him by telling you too much?”
The other unusual aspect is that Maul is a villain, so you need characters who are worthy of taking him on and giving the story some stakes. They include a young Jedi who’s disillusioned and hiding from the Empire when Maul shows up and offers a new path, which creates an interesting dynamic, animation supervisor Keith Kellogg points out. There’s also Brander Lawson, a cop who’s tired of the job and has a strained relationship with his son. He’s trying to figure out what Maul’s doing and stop him before the whole thing attracts too much attention from the Empire.
“We’ve kind of never done a full-on, for lack of a better word, cops-and-robbers kind of Star Wars,” Kellogg says.
From the start, Filoni wanted viewers to see the artist’s hand in every frame, Rau says. That meant updating the rigs, improving cloth textures and trying to get more nuance, fidelity and weight in the performances, he says.
“At no point do I ever want the show to look like we’re crossing the line into live action,” cinematography and effects lead Joel Aron says. “That’s something that Dave has always made sure that we don’t do, and so I think because of that, we have a very, very tight relationship with the artists that are producing the show.”
One of the key advancements for the show was the development of the power rig, which “allows us to distort in a frame-by-frame manner, not unlike in the old days,” Rau says. “You can see it in the trailer: There’s a couple of shots of Maul spinning and whirling, and if you look frame by frame, you’ll see distorted fingers, and the overlap is a little bit more like 2D features.”
“We really tried to push our rigs at the start of the show so that our character rigs could both deliver a little more subtle facial performances,” says Kellogg. “And then for the action scenes and things, we really wanted to try and concentrate on silhouettes of the character. So we enabled the rig … to really shape that silhouette a bit more, so that we could really get a very artistic, slightly anime kind of style.”
The power rig enabled the animators to create forced-perspective shots that make the action feel more hyperreal, Kellogg says. “We really wanted the show to reflect the aggressive style of [Maul],” he says. “The other thing we did was really try and focus on crisp posing … especially for fight and action scenes. We really wanted to make those really strong clashing moments with lightsabers and things really … read in a very strong, graphic kind of way.”
Sequences are planned using a proprietary software called Zviz, which helps the crew achieve a cinematic quality, Kellogg says. “We shoot things much more like live-action,” he says. That means the story department would plan shots that an editing team would assemble. “Then it’s up to the animation team to really plus that stuff and really make sure that we’re staying true to what the director’s vision is, but also adding some rhythm to it, adding sort of that feel of clash and trying to get that Star Wars vibe to everything.”
Read the article in full here. Maul – Shadow Lord is set to debut on Disney+ with the first two episodes on April 6th with two new episodes weekly until May 4th.
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