Why weren't these characters' faces shown in Ahsoka S1E5?

Question

In Ahsoka Season 1 Episode 5, "Shadow Warrior", there's a sequence where

Ahsoka finds herself in a vision of a Clone Wars battle with Anakin. After some fighting, they're in a field hospital of sorts with medical droids and wounded clone troopers.

I noticed that in this scene,

all of the helmetless clone troopers have cloths fully covering their faces, presumably for injury or air quality reasons. This struck me as an unusual dramatic decision—the sequence is a clear callback to The Clone Wars, where the clone troopers tend to show their faces fairly often, and the focus of the dialogue in the scene is Ahsoka's sense of responsibility for their lives, so depicting them as "faceless" seems at odds with these aspects of the scene.

My first thought was that it was due to

Temuera Morrison being unavailable, but he apparently voices Rex during the scene. I also considered that it might have been meant to show that Ahsoka and Anakin were the only "real people" in the flashback, since they're some sort of Force spirit projection and everyone else is illusory, but the Twi'leks in the background all appeared to be normal.

Has this been discussed by anyone working on the show?

Answer 1

There's no definitive answer (yet) largely because anyone on the production that could talk about it are currently on strike and thus can't. However there's a few educated guesses one could make, that broadly speaking amount to the same thing: budget.

Last I checked Temuera Morrison still lives in New Zealand, so assuming he wasn't already in town during the shoot; getting him on a plane to just shoot one scene where he lies on a stretcher with no lines really isn't worth his time and inconvenience. Conversely if they paid him enough to make it worth his time, well that would be a needless and rather extravagant expense for the production. And even if he was in town; they'd have to digitally de-age him too which is likewise a needless expense. Just digitally comping his face onto the doubles would again cost money, and add nothing of value to the scene.

Either way, it's much easier (and cheaper) to just have the in-costume performers keep their helmets on/faces covered, while Morrison can record his lines in a booth from literally anywhere in the world.

It's also worth noting that this show needs to work just as well for long term fans that get the references as it does for brand new fans. What we got was the right balance of fan service cameo and what was right, and objectively make sense for the scene.