Narnia Fans » Dean Wright

ComingSoon.net has spoken with the people behind the effects in Narnia, the crack team of Richard Taylor and Dean Wright of Weta FX (“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy) working with make-up effects specialist Howard Berger of KNB EFX. Essentially, the three men supervised a huge crew of people to combine make-up and practical on-set effects with groundbreaking computer-generated digital effects.

At Comic-Con International, ComingSoon.net had a chance to speak with all three men about their work on the film directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek fame.

CS: In terms of the scale and the amount of practical effects work, how did it compare with Lord of the Rings?
Dean Wright: I wasn’t on the film for the initial shooting; I came onto the trilogy for “The Two Towers” and “Return of the King.” On “Rings” we had Gollum, which was really the one character that had to act alongside the actors, and you had to believe him. In “Narnia,” we’ve got Aslan who’s the key character for the film, and he basically drives the whole story. And the lion has to be entirely CG, except for some scenes where Howard created an animatronic character for us for a very pivotal moment in the film when he gets man-handled by some creatures. The first creature that the kids meet is Mr. Tumnus and he’s half human and half CG, and then they run into other characters called The Beavers, and they’re all CG. There are tons of scenes where they have to interact and talk and bring the story to life.

Richard Taylor: As a single movie it was still considerably smaller in sheer bulk, but the focus on the work was much more acute. Like the level of prosthetics that Howard had to do on Mr. Tumnus was very complex work, compared to say an Orc that has an elaborate prosthetic piece, but it’s a creature so you’re able to hide some of the sins in the design. The purity of the human form in front of the camera almost makes it unbelievably difficult.

Howard Berger: Very difficult. Tami Lane, who was my second on the film, worked with Richard on “Lord of the Rings.” When we were in the heat of it, she just looked at me and said, “Rings was like shooting a commercial compared to this.” This was so labor-intense, and we ended up having 42 make-up people on our crew that traveled with us from September to December wherever we shot. There’s a large variety of creatures and species–23 different species on set. We had monsters all day long. We ended up standing there everyday doing all these make-ups, all these suits, all these creatures. We pulled every trick out of the bag. We had prosthetic stuff, heavy or light prosthetics, full suits, mechanical heads, background heads, puppets, etc. We used everything to just make it all work. Also, it’s nice talking about the digital thing. If the audience sees that there’s an actor in makeup yet he has dog-jointed legs, it might throw them off, thinking “That’s not a full digital character, so how are they going about that?” I think that’s where that plays best, instead of having a full CG creature running around. I think it’s much more believable to have that human aspect.

Taylor: One of the things that we’ve been a little bit disappointed with is that the press has asked us “What can you do to top Lord of the Rings?” With our work, especially with the armor and the weapons, it was monumentally more difficult than working on the weapons for “Lord of the Rings,” because of the challenge we set for ourselves. We set about making much more complex armor, and the quality of the swords. We could have done it with much greater simplicity on ourselves but we didn’t want to do that, we wanted to up our game and we hope that you’ll see that in the film. For this film, to get it done in time, we actually had to commercially create a process, and we formed a business partnership in China to get it all done. To get through the massive amount of swords in such a short length of time, we actually had to invent a machine that could make the swords.

CS: What about some of the bigger challenges of the CG work and what was done to help improve those techniques?
Wright: Where we are growing on the technology developed during the Rings trilogy, is one of the climactic moments of the film where we have a battle sequence. Peter leads Aslan’s troops to fight against the White Witch’s bad guys, which are filled with all these mythological creatures. The technology developed for the battle sequences for the Rings was using a software program called Massive. One of the main companies that is providing the effects for the film, Rhythm and Hues, contacted the developer of that software project and invited them down. The challenges in this film are immense in that you’ve got not only thousands of creatures that have to attack each other and look believable, but the variety is much greater scope than we had to deal with on the “Rings.” On this, there’s 20-30 different creatures that could be battling in a scene at any one time, and each of them have their own unique attributes in terms of how they walk, move, bite. It would create an enormous challenge to the developers to allow us to create these battle sequences and make them be believable. You don’t want it to just look like a mess out there. That’s why some of the stuff can be too calm if you’re not careful. You have to have the tools to run these computer simulations and have it look as good as you want it to be.

For the rest, visit ComingSoon.net
Thanks to John Richter for pointing us to the story!

The panel featured Howard Berger (the B of KNB EFX), Dean Wright (visual effects designer), Richard Taylor and Ben Wootten (Weta peeps) live and in person and later featured director Andrew Adamson and all four of the kids from the movie via satellite. They were in London doing ADR (Addition Dialog Recording) for the film, but took the time to sit in on the panel discussion. The over-lapping discussion and odd flow of the panel thanks to the 10 second delay was classic.

-It was revealed that at one point the studio wanted to adapt THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, but set it modern day… in LA… just after the Earthquake. They wanted to replace Turkish Delight with Hot Dogs. Thank God that didn’t happen.

-There are about 1300 VFX shots left to finish before the December 9th release date.

-The director thought having Tilda Swinton as the White Witch would bring a certain sophistication to her evil, a good counter to Aslan’s sophisticated good. They’re really pleased with her.

-Andrew Adamson was asked about the voice of Aslan… and he announced/confirmed what “some internet sites have already guessed.” Liam Neeson is the voice of Aslan. He has recorded and they were blown away by his performance.

-They were all asked about the religious aspect of CS Lewis’ story. Adamson commented… He’s making a film that tries to capture his memory of reading it as a kid, not necessarily his critique of it as an adult. He said that some people read it and come away with a good deal of spiritual values, yet others read it and see it as just a grand adventure.

He’s being very faithful to that original material, so if you walked away from the book with a sense of spiritual fulfillment, then you’ll walk away from the movie with that. If you walked away from the book having had a great adventure, then that’s what you’ll walk away with from the movie, he claimed. I like that stance, myself. I’m not Christian, but the parallels in the story doesn’t turn me off of the inherent classic quality of the drama.

CLIPS:

They showed a new “storypod,” a series of behind the scenes documentaries that show on the Narnia website as well as a montage from the flick.

The Storypod didn’t have much interesting in it, besides a look at Jim Broadbent as Professor Digory. He had a bit of a crazy white beard… a little Col. Sanders inspired, but more full.

The montage clip is where it’s at. My criticism of the trailer and poster is that the film didn’t seem to have it’s own identity, but the look and tone of other fantasy films. I want the movie to be as great is the material promises it could be, so I keep looking for something to grasp onto. Today I saw some footage that gave me more hope for a stand out flick.

In the clip we see the kids having tea with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. The beavers were completely CG and not totally photorealistic, but a lot less cartoony than I was expecting them to be. The effects are done on them, either, so I don’t have any worries when it comes to these guys. They tell the kids of the prophecy of the 4 sons of Adam and daughters of Eve taking over Narnia and that the White Witch will stop them at all costs because if the prophecy is fulfilled then she will lose her power.

The sequence show that really got my juices cooking was a bit about 40 seconds long that had Aslan walking through the creatures of the black up to the stone table. Those who have read the book know where this is headed. A bat-like creature taunts him as he nears the steps leading up to the stone table. He doesn’t growl or roar at it, but his stare stops the taunt and sends the creature retreating.

The look on Aslan’s face is 90% sadness and 10% humiliation. It was heartbreaking.

I’m hoping for the best with this one. It looks like they’re really nailing Aslan and his role in the story. That’s half their battle right there. I gots my fingers crossed for this one.

Can you talk a little about the range of effects you’ve got planned? We’ve seen the digital matting, –

Yeah, tons and tons of breadth and snow and stuff like that. The biggest challenge, I mean, it’s a pretty wide swamp of effects and obviously the CG creatures are for us, the toughest. Not just because we want to make them look real and all that, it’s because in this movie they’ve got lead roles.

There is Aslan, the beavers – both beavers are very funny and they’ve got pivotal dramatic points, they have to help the kids along the way -, you’ve got the bad guys that help the Queen and Ginarrbrik [her dwarf], who are real people, and they’re all fully CG except for the wolves. We do have real wolves that we’re basing our characters on, being that they’re basically a hybrid of wolves and dogs. They’re good for little bits of running and small pieces of action and then they’ll tend to go and be a dog again. So, it’s good for a little bit but for the most part we’re planning on doing CG because the wolves in this movie are not your typical wolves. The wolves are smart and intelligent and they may be brutal and mean but they have a purpose. So, when they’re moving and looking around you have to see the intelligence. It would differentiate them from all the other characters. We’re creating the beavers who are smart and talk and all that stuff. And then we’ve got it for this other character, the fox, which is a very endearing character and heroic as well.

So for us, to be able to pull off convincing performances that reach the audience emotionally and don’t blow the illusion of – this is an animal but he’s a character and he can talk too – is going to be a tough one but we’re up to it. And then have the kids with their performances when they’re all interacting together, you want to believe the kids are believing the animals are there too. Even on set, it’s a daily challenge to make sure the kids are really in the moment, that they’re seeing the animals there, and a lot of times Andrew [Adamson] and his assistant will actually perform the scene. So Andrew will sit there and he’ll be the Beaver and she’ll be Mrs. Beaver and just sit there and make eye contact with the kids and get them to feel it and believe it.

Other times we use wacky things on set. I’ve been wearing this stuffed lion head, I’ve got sort of BMX motorcross chestplate with a speed rail connection and there’s a head that’s got a pole and I stick it there and I’ll be on set talking to the kids so they can look right at where Aslan would be and we’ll shoot a take or two of that. Sometimes I put a little stuffed animal or a piece of tape, just something for them to look at.

The beavers have a pretty big role, did you motion-capture somebody and then map the beaver onto it or are they entirely in the computer?

No, they’re all going to be CG-animated. There is a lot of full animation, they’ve done a lot of reference for wolves, I don’t think we’re going to motion capture wolves, we will have all their running plates that were shot, all the second unit footage. We aren’t currently motion-capturing lions, we haven’t decided that but we are going to do horses, there are going to be CG horses in the battle as well as centaurs so we can use that motion for both characters to some degree. We are using on-set motion capturing extensively for all the creatures with hooves, we’re capturing all the data. We know we’re using it for Tumnus, we’re likely to use it for several other characters too but we’re going to capture it for everything and whether it becomes just a help for tracking or if we use it specifically to draw the animation, we’ll decide as we process the data and look at the shots. Sometimes when you’re doing 40 characters out there you might decide that motion capture isn’t the way to go, we can just do it animated, but we’re going get he data just to make sure – and the stuff we’ve seen back has been great.

What was the experience like doing the motion-cap for the faun, Mr. Tumnus, specifically?

It was interesting when James [McAvoy] flew in we only had a few hours to deal with him. He arrived literally days before our first day on set with him and so Howard [Berger] needed his time with him, Andrew [Adamson] needed his time with him and of course we needed our time with him because we had to figure out – how does a faun walk? – Tumnus being a lead character is going to set the tone for all the fauns. So what we did for James is we put him in a whole motion capture suit, we had our faun rig, a CG character with the bone skeletal structure and we just let him practice and do different things and try different stuff and see what works, what looks good and where does he break?

Because you can only go so far and the legs actually won’t do what human legs can do. So we wanted to test those boundaries so then when we’d get on set, we’d get data that would work. For him, I mean we ran the set, I played Lucy (laughs), and he used that as a tool to find the character too. Because on the day [of shooting] we didn’t want him to have to worry about it or think about, he would concentrate on his performance and the legs would just be there. We were watching the dailies and it’s amazing, the slightest little shuffle, step or movement, it’s those nuances that just add to his character. At first, he had created this jittery goat character but this little stuff will just be priceless, you would otherwise need weeks and weeks to try and animate it, and it’s just there.

Besides the characters, what other type of CG animation can we expect?

We have a host of other effects we have to do for the movie. We have CG ice that’ll be used in a couple of structures in the film. You saw the White Witch’s courtyard, of course, and the whole castle itself is made out of ice. There are several of the sets inside the castle that are ice structures. Also, the kids come upon a frozen waterfall and that’s going to be a huge sequence for us because we’re going to use a combination of miniatures and CG ice, CG water and all that stuff and as the kids run across the ice, the idea is it gets more and more precarious for them. We’ll have ice cracking and water gushing and all sorts of craziness will be going on around while they’re trying to make their way across the waterfalls.

We saw this process by which they’re using lasers to measure sets down to the millimeter and it gives you 3D environments. How does that help you?

It’s been used previously and at first I wasn’t sure how much we were going to use it. It’s called LITAR and those guys can tell you a lot more about how it works, it does so many scans and it’s got such a resolution that apparently if they turn it up really, really to high, like 11, it could sort of burn a hole through the ground or something. (laughs) It’s a pretty strong laser. For us, it grabs all the terrain which is essential for when we need to put all our CG characters up there in and have them moving across, so it looks like they’re really hitting the ground. An added effect for us is that we can track our cameras to it, so whenever we have a moving camera, and the camera is constantly moving on this movie, since we have the whole set basically scanned and digitized we can use pieces of it to help track the shots and not have to put so many markers all over the place.

We also have tons of set extensions, mat paintings obviously helping to create the environment. We’re shooting lots and lots of green environments so we just have to extend it out and create it. One of the cool things about going down to the South Islands is that we’re going to open up and see a lot of area. Another cool thing is Don McAlpine, our director of photography, who is just a great guy, he’s like a kid on set, he buys all these toys, he has more Mac toys than I do; he is doing something really amazing on this movie, basically he is lighting the movie for digital post. It’s something we did on both The Two Towers and The Return of the King completely and a little bit on The Fellowship of the Ring. What Don is doing is he’s lighting the set and knowing what he’s going to do later.

Can you speak a little about the final battle sequence?

That sequence will be pretty cool because there are several scenes where, when the kids meet Aslan and then when the Witch comes to confront him and then later in the battle there are scenes where we’re going to have to populate the environment with tons and tons of creatures. We’ve got everything from ogres and cyclops’ and centaurs, some which will be part prosthetic and others will be completely digital. Same thing on the good guys side, we’ve got little animals and big cats and all sorts of things that’ll be brought into the battle. So, once we get going on that it’ll send it all into high gear.

We saw the pre-viz [animated storyboard sequence on the computer] of the final battle, does that help you a lot?

Oh, did you? It’s actually a great help. We’ve been trying the pre-viz, off and on, so far in the movie and when we start a scene we usually look at it and then talk about it and then Don [McAlpine] and Andrew [Adamson] will sit and sort of make their shot list based on that. Sometimes scenes just get chucked aside because they could tell that’s maybe too many shots. So they’ll ink their essential shot list and we always have the B camera that can be thrown in for bonus shots. What typically happens is Don will get out there with our camera operator and they’ll just find this cool new shot that we never even thought of and that’ll be our master.

For the actual creatures themselves, how photo-realistic are they going to be?

We’re going for completely photo-realistic. Andrew won’t be happy otherwise. We are going to have prosthetic creatures on set that we will have to match to for any of the on-set creatures. We may do some enhancements in terms of facial stuff because not every creature has a radio-controlled face; there are some that aren’t. So we may go into post and add little extra emotions and facial movements that we can’t get on the day.

Will who the voice actor is, play any part in the look of the character?

It could. I mean obviously once we hear the voice we may want to adapt some of the facials to help reflect that. The stuff that Howard [Berger] is doing on set, in terms of facial for Aslan, is when he is on the Stone Table. Anytime he’s acting, talking or moving other than that, it’s us. It’s CG.

Howard Berger of KNB EFX, Richard Taylor from WETA and Dean Wright who was the Visual Effects Supervisor on LOTR and is the same on Narnia as well as a representative from Disney were all on hand to report on the progress of the film, and Prince Caspian!

Disney started with THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE because it’s the most well known of the series, even if it isn’t the beginning of the story. The big news is that Disney is about to hire a screenwriter to begin work on second film in the NARNIA series, to be PRINCE CASPIAN. That’s really super cool, but he did make sure to stress that production on that won’t be greenlighted until Disney sees how the first film does. But the fact that Disney’s taking the step to hire a screenwriter while the first film is only half-way through production means that they want to hit the ground running, so to speak.

A question was asked about how they were going to make a full length film out of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE as it is one of the smaller stories in the NARNIA series. It seems that the beginning and the ending is going to be expanded. We are going to be seeing more of war-torn London at the beginning of the film, presumably before Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Susan are delivered unto Professor Digory Kirke. I’m actually a fan of that idea as a way to counter-balance the fantasy of Narnia.

The end battle for Narnia is also going to be expanded into quite a big battle, another expansion I’m a fan of. Richard Taylor made a comment about how he remembered reading THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE as a kid and how when he read the battle scene at the end… he felt like he finished a major tome, a hefty read… he felt like he accomplished something in getting through that epic battle. But then when he went back to read it as an adult it’s almost comical how he remembered the book as it’s only a few pages long.

Other tidbits: Aslan will be 99% CGI, with the only animatronic lion being used during the tied and bound Stone Table sequence. Apparently they’re also going to attempt to motion capture a real lion… hehe I don’t envy the poor bastard that has to apply those little mo-cap balls onto the lion! Mr. and Mrs. Beaver will be 100% computer generated whereas Mr. Tumnus will be half and half. Half prosthetics (supposedly very much keeping the actor’s human characteristics with only some pointy ears, different nose and goatee… oh, and his red skin) and half computer (for the goat legs, which start being CG about mid-thigh).

Apparently, the actor playing Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy) didn’t win over Howard Berger upon first glance. He thought the young actor was too young for the role, but when he was brought to KNB’s studios and saw the giant Aslan they had in the studio he immediately went wide-eyed and reverently approached it before dropping to his knees and saying, “My Lord!” So, yeah… he’s a geek for the material, which gives me some joy as Mr. Tumnus can really use someone with that excitement for the world and material.

Those were the big bits from the panel… Oh, Aslan’s voice has not been found yet… that, too! I should be getting a tour of Weta soon, so look for a write-up on that in the near future, and I’m also working with Disney to arrange a set visit while I’m in New Zealand. I’m happy with what I’ve heard from the effects whizes and I hope I get blown away by what I see in Auckland. While NARNIA is not as ageless as Tolkien’s LOTR series, this could make for a fantastic film series to be enjoyed by all ages for many, many decades.