Aug. 20—As a 15-year-old, Paul Fleschner wrote a letter to famed filmmaker George Lucas. The teenager got a response, sort of.

The encouragement contained in that response paved a path that led to Fleschner breaking some ground in the film industry a quarter-century later.

It was 1996. An avid fan of Lucas' "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" movies, Fleschner was making his own home movies like "Gummy Wars" and "Illiana Jones" on a digital camcorder. After writing to Lucas, a letter appeared in his family's Terre Haute mailbox. Fleschner saw the emblem of Lucas' visual effect company — Industrial Light & Magic — on the envelope, grabbed it and excitedly tore it open.

The response wasn't from Lucas. Instead, it was written by the legend's secretary.

"It was like, 'George Lucas is busy writing the "Star Wars" prequels, but I'm his secretary, Anne Merrifield, and here's some advice for being a filmmaker,'" Fleschner recalled earlier this month. "And it was great. It was like, 'Study the humanities, study literature, make films with your friends, maybe look into film school.' It was very practical, and I tried to follow it."

Now it's the summer of 2022. Fleschner and Adam Maier are producers of the new Reel FX animated comedy series "Super Giant Robot Brothers." The 10-episode series debuted on Netflix this month. Reel FX studios produces "Super Giant Robot Brothers" using live-action filming techniques with traditional animation tools.

Fleschner and Maier are working with director Mark Andrews, who won an Oscar in the Best Animated Feature category for "Brave" in 2013. Veteran animators Víctor Maldonado and Alfredo Torres created the series.

Yet, the twist that has attracted attention from animation trade publications to Forbes magazine is the show's real-time animation production. It uses Unreal Engine, a popular computer video game engine, to provide three-dimensional scenery — live action filmed in digital world.

"These are two very different ways of making things," Fleschner told the Tribune-Star in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles. "They're very different mindsets; animation is its own kind of thing, and there's live action. But this new technology kind of allows you to merge the two, and we just happen to be in the right time at the right place to bring it out for this show."

Thus, "We definitely think we're on the leading edge of something," said Maier, who joined in the Zoom interview.

As for its story, "Super Giant Robot Brothers" centers on gigantic robotic siblings, Shiny and Thunder, "who discover they are brothers, as they help defend Earth from the forces of intergalactic evil," as Netflix writes in its synopsis.

Actually, Shiny and Thunder "find out they're step-brothers and come to terms with each other," said Maier, who joined in the Zoom interview along with Reel FX publicist Mike Rizzo. "Plenty of sibling rivalry. Plenty of bickering with each other while trying to save the world. And that's something that drew me in immediately," Maier added.

Its pace is "rapid fire," Maier said. "This is the 'Mad Max' of kids animation."

An animated, technologically pioneering comedy series probably seems to Terre Hauteans like a vast departure for Fleschner from the independent film projects he produced in his hometown nearly a decade ago.

Fleschner teamed in 2014 with friend William Tanoos to co-write and co-produce "The Drunk," a historical-fiction comedy about Terre Haute labor activist Eugene Debs' fictional grandson that also starred Tom Sizemore and Jesse Ventura. That same year, Fleschner crafted the poignant documentary "Piercing the Veil" about his beloved uncle Larry Fleschner's battle with colon cancer.

Yet, a logistical thread connects those films with "Super Giant Robot Brothers," Fleschner explained as he walked through a brief Los Angeles thunderstorm.

"In some ways, it's not entirely different from my experience producing 'The Drunk,' but just [that it's] in the industry with a much larger crew, kind of interacting with the apparatuses of multiple studios," Fleschner said. "Being a producer is kind of like being a house contractor. You're hiring the best team you can to build that house and supporting them in the best way you can."

He moved from Chicago, where he'd been acting and writing, to Los Angeles, where he'd lived and pursued a film career in his 20s. Fleschner's second move to L.A. was a crucial step toward his current role as a producer with Reel FX. "It's very challenging to break into the film industry initially in kind of a meaningful way, even if you're doing a lot of indie kind of films, if you're not in Los Angeles," he said.

Someone in Illinois read a newspaper story about his work in "The Drunk," told a relative in the film industry and that led to Fleschner landing a job at Fox VFX Lab, a virtual effects company in Los Angeles. "I was in my mid-30s and sold my condo in Chicago and started couch-surfing in L.A.," said Fleschner, now 42.

At Fox VFX, Fleschner met a guy who helped develop the first virtual camera. He also met Maier, whose mother is a born-and-raised Hoosier, with roots in Muncie and Kokomo.

"We first bonded over our mutual connection to Indiana," Maier said of Fleschner.

While working at Fox VFX, they met representatives of Reel FX. One of that company's developing projects was "Super Giant Robot Brothers." Fleschner and Maier are now part of its fruition. It's rekindled the fun of filmmaking that led Fleschner to write the letter to George Lucas decades ago.

"I kind of lost what the heart of it was for me, which was not taking yourself as seriously," Fleschner said. "So this was just like returning to that absolute core joy of entertainment, which in itself has value."

An animated series about giant robot siblings requires Fleschner and Maier to channel their middle-school minds, to a degree. "You've got to tap into the child inside," Flescher said.

"I don't think I ever lost my middle-school mind," Maier quipped, "so I don't have to channel it too much."

Maier's spirit reminds Fleschner of his 97-year-old grandfather, George, "who just loves life and has a zest for life." Fleschner added, "We're trying something that's brand new, and doing this would've been impossible without Adam."

Likewise, Maier sees Fleschner's tenacity as a driving force behind the new real-time animation series' success. "[Paul's] very much a go-getter," Maier said. "So he really has, from the very beginning, gone out there and pushed to make this happen, and continues to do so every day."

"Super Giant Robot Brothers" could be the first of a technological genre of animated shows.

"It's a foot in the right direction of where these kind of shows might go," Mike Rizzo, Reel FX publicist, said on the Zoom interview.

So where could this innovative production take "Super Giant Robot Brothers"?

"To the moon," Fleschner said. "Or Season 2."

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.