Aaron Ehasz

Yeah, so when 'Avatar' came out, the social media world and the idea of fan communities were very new. There were forums and you could obviously go to conventions and talk to people, but it wasn't as clear or easy.

The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.

I'm not a moral relativist, I do think at the end of the day there's right and wrong, there's good intentions, and then there's bad paths that you can go on even if you have good intentions and we believe that.

We learned that there was a super intelligent, passionate audience that wanted material that was nuanced and detailed and authentic.

It is a labor of love, but there is a lot of labor, especially when you're trying to build a big, epic world with lots of details and a kind of physics of magic that makes some sense and actually has some rules to it.

Our experience on 'Avatar' heavily influenced how we approached 'The Dragon Prince' and how we built our team.

On 'Avatar', I learned that it's worth taking some risks and doing some weird little things with characters or having an off-joke here and there, even if it's only for 5 percent of the audience.

Wonderstorm is a new company and 'The Dragon Prince' is our first kind of big, exciting story that we're trying to bring to an audience.

On 'The Dragon Prince', we wanted to push that even more to leverage the strengths of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the character designs, in the costumes and sets, that you really can't get in traditional 2D animation.

Fantasy stories have almost always been very white and European-focused, and we wanted to tell a story that would feel both more modern and more global. We wanted to attract a diverse audience.

We have a wonderful head of social media and community, Danika Harrod, who has a knowledge of community that's really authentic, and she just loves connecting with people and she's very empathetic to what fans might want.

One of the great things about now vs. 10 or 12 years ago is we can see how the audience responds and the audience has an opportunity to be a community that engages each other and engages us and we're excited for that conversation.