Narnia Fans » The Stone Table

We were sent images from the set by a friend of ours. They include what appears to be the cave set next to the Stone Table, and a closer look at armor and a cool looking shield. I’ll let her explain:

I am something like your colleague from Slovakia My name is Elendilka and I have website about Narnia like you. (www.narnia.cinemaview.sk) I am writing you because I’ve got a message from an anynonymous person, who had some pics from shooting for me.

And I know, that much more people will look at them when they will be on your page too. So I’m sending you link to those pics, who are in our gallery.
I hope, you will enjoy them

All the best, Elen;)

View them here or we’ve also posted them here at WaldenFans.com. They’re the seven labeled “Caspian Set” starting with the last two on this page.

Narniaweb has interviewed Henrik Tamm. Tamm worked as a concept artist on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and is currently working on Prince Caspian. You can also see some of his fantastic concept art pieces.

NW: For how long did you work on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?

HT: I spent about two years on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I worked from the very beginning in January 2003 in Glendale, CA when we were just a few people. I then travelled with the production to New Zealand in early 2004. At that point the production had grown manyfold, and it finally felt like this film was taking shape. We had our offices at an airforce base outside Auckland. Sets started getting built and actors in funny outfits were wandering around. It was all very fun. Every department was busy doing what they do, all working toward the same goal. Somehow all this frenetic creative work came together to make the film. Andrew was very involved through the whole process, guiding all the departments to shape one unified vision. Let’s just say the man was very busy!

We returned to Los Angeles for post production in January 2005. At that point a lot of the work still remained. Much of the film had to be created digitally with Visual Effects, since so much of the story involved talking animals and fantastic, huge scale sets. At that point my position had changed from Concept Artist to Visual Effects Art Director, essentially carrying the look of the film through into the Visual Effects portions. The design for both Cair Paravel and the White Witch’s castle still remained to be finalized. We had gone through several renditions at that point, never quite hitting on what Andrew wanted. I spent most of my remaining time on those two locations. My engagement finally ended in April 2005. At that point I believe only the editor was left, besides Andrew himself, who had started on the project before me and was still there.

[Narniaweb for the rest]

Daan Almighty sent us a load of new concept art images. He took photos of them at a recent Narnia event in Amsterdam (at which, he said, the lighting was terrible, sorry for that). SPOILERS!

While Jasmine Watson has designed the jewelry for the movies, another jewelry designer, Bob Siemon, is doing something a little different, by trying to bring the inspirational message of Lewis to us via jewelry.

The Stone Table talked to Natalie Clark the marketing manager for Bob Siemon Designs, to find out a little more about the collection.

Why faith/inspirational jewelry? How did the company get on its feet?

Bob Siemon Designs was started over thirty years ago by our founder, Bob Siemon. He began creating inspirational jewelry because people saw the jewellery that he created for himself and asked where they could purchase it. From the beginning it has been important to the company to provide people with the opportunity to express and share what they believe. The message of hope that caused Bob to create the first piece of jewelry still inspires us today.

How did you get the license from Disney? Did you approach them or were there bids from other companies?

Because of the products that we produced for The Passion of the Christ we were familiar with the tremendous opportunity that partnering with a major motion picture release provides. Our license with Disney Pictures came as a result of this work and the relationships that were built through that process.

For the rest go to the Stong Table at the link above.

This week I visit in the evening. One film crew is working early morning until mid-afternoon; the second unit starts at 1 pm and works until 1 am. Before seeing them, I have a look at some places that are starting to look familiar – the courtyard of the Witch’s house, and the great hall of Cair Paravel. The courtyard has the same feel as the audience hall I saw the other week – heavy, gloomy architecture loaded with ice and snow. The icicles are made of fiberglass. The sharp smell of fiberglass fills the courtyard. It’s an exciting smell that I remember from the past, when I would watch my brother hatch a new kayak out of its mould, all ready to paint and finish. You can make so many things out of fiberglass that the very smell of it seems ripe with imagination.

What a team of eleven sculptors has made for Narnia are dozens of creatures: Narnians who have been frozen into stone by the Witch. They’re amazing sculptures – somehow their surfaces are deeply textured, with the fur matted up into sharp points like wet hair, and yet completely grey and lifeless. I can see from a bear’s broken paw that each creature is built around a polystyrene core with the fiberglass forming a rind on the outside. But it’s incredibly detailed modeling, and the poses are lifelike. You can see eyes, hair, teeth, all in the same grey stone-like substance. The expressions of fear and despair on their faces are vivid and unsettling.

The courtyard is snowy with strangely waxy but realistic-looking fake snow. A dead tree hung with icicles stands in the middle of it, with a stone eagle frozen onto it. Other creatures are scattered about, paused in violent action. I see a male and female centaur, a bear, a panther, a griffin, a giant (modeled on a real big guy, I hear), and a faun. I can’t confirm whether he is Tumnus, who might suffer that fate after his time in the dungeon. There is a lioness. I don’t see a stone lion for Aslan to wake. He may have been there earlier – according to my guide Ernie, there were around 70 stone creatures here when they were filming. Now this set is ready to demolish, and many of the stone creatures have been moved down to the South Island where they’ll be part of the great battle scene.

Read the rest at TheOneLion.

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.

Lewis wrote poetry, too. My first encounter with one of Lewis’ poems, was through the lyrical arrangement made of “As the Ruin Falls”, by the consummate guitarist, Phil Keaggy. I have memorized sections of it that had struck me profoundly.

One afternoon, some years ago, when I had a chat with a colleague about Lewis, I was most surprised to learn that Lewis was passionate to become a poet but was not considered by his own colleagues to have achieved that goal. Even so, Lewis sallied forth and crafted poems. One could speculate that they were possibly published on the merits of his skills as an already published author:

“You’ve read the stories, now read the poems!”

By Paul R. Miller

A big thanks to Jamie from TheStoneTable for this news:

Posters at the Sideshow Freaks Message Board have discovered that a partnership between Sideshow Collectibles and Weta to produce statues etc might be a little closer than we thought.

The statues such as Aslan, centaurs and other characters caused a stir amongst fan’s of Sideshow’s partnership with Weta for the LOTR line when they were seen on the recently released Weta video online. The clever posters quickly found that http://www.narniacollectibles.com was registered by Sideshow on December 18th, 2003.

This is of course no guarentee of any such line, but we’d like to think we’ve taken one step closer.

THE WHITE WITCH’S GREAT HALL

The next soundstage we visited was the White Witch’s Great Hall, as they’ve come to call it. It was a colossal completely iced over ballroom-like locale which showcased at the far end her glorious and immense throne (naturally larger than normal as the witch is larger than humans, as mentioned in the book). Huge columns surrounded the room and a large green screen enveloped the entire background of the area as they intend to make the room even larger in scope and feel. A crewmember was walking around with a special video-recorder capturing every angle and dimension of the place, which was in turn being fed into a nearby computer. This would allow them free reign to manipulate the entire 3D range of the witch’s hall. All that to say it would look even more grandiose than it already was. Again, having just pictured this room a little earlier during my reading, I was happily surprised to see the vision they ended up with for this place. This is the room in which Edmund shows up about halfway through the book, without his siblings, much to the dismay and fury of the Witch. That scene, we were told, had already been shot.

THE GREAT ICE RIVER FLOW

Next, we were brought to a soundstage that can best be described as a frozen over waterfall or ‘The Great Ice Flow River” as they’ve come to dub it. It’s here where they shot the sequence in which the wolves are in pursuit of the children. This is one of the scenes that isn’t, word for word, from the book. The children will basically be cornered on a large chunk of ice on the river, surrounded by wolves at which point one of them will pull out the staff Father Christmas had given to him before, puncture the ice and break free into the river, away from the predators. Dean Wright, the movie’s visual effects supervisor expanded a little regarding this particular set:

“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.“

CAIR PARAVEL

Off to the side we spotted several intricate columns, which we were told are to be used in the castle of Cair Paravel, where the four youngsters are meant to rule as the first Kings and Queens of Narnia and where a huge party will be held in their honor. We dropped by that set in the Cair Paravel on a later day. It was an immense ballroom-type hall that the filmmakers plan to make even larger with CG. But as it was, it was the least complex of the sets we’d seen so far, just a large, royal looking reception hall.

THE STONE TABLE

The stone table set was, in a word, simple; and I’m glad for it. It’s high atop a little hill they’ve built in one of the soundstages, fourteen steps up, to be exact. There is also a large crack that runs right down the middle of the steps. It would have been a shame if they’d added a bunch of “bells and whistles” to what, as described in the book anyway, is a very straightforward looking stone table, lifted up by a few small stones in the middle of the forest. The table had some ancient symbols and writings on it and was surrounded by about 8 or 9 Stonehenge-like columns. I was tempted to rush up and lay upon it just so I could tell people I touched it for years to come, until I recognized how sad an that idea was. Besides, there were “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” signs all over the place. We re-visited this set later on to interview the director. In that instance, they had Aslan laying upon it…

THE NARNIAN WOODS – MR. and MRS. BEAVER’S LODGE

On our final day, we were driven down to a soundstage in the countryside, in Wainui, to what was easily the most realistic and cozy looking set I’d ever stood in. Picture a veritable winter wonderland as the recreation of the snowy wooded areas where Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s lodge stands as well as where Mr. Tumnus makes his home. The soundstage, which is as big as the renowned Pinewood studios in England (where they shoot the Bond films), was packed with real trees (200+) all drenched in the most genuine looking snow I’d ever seen (and I’m from Canada). The authentic look was created with a combination of detergent-type materials, paper snow, insulated foam and Epson salts. The entire venture took them 10-12 weeks to build and 8 meters in the ground to dig into.

The enormity of the forest was a little overwhelming. All of us standing there, having come from outside, into another outside, into another world, well, damn it, it was almost as though we’d crossed through our own version of a magical wardrobe (yikes, did I just write that?). What my very bad analogy was trying to suggest is that the forest had all the romance and magic you’d imagine the Narnian woods would have, and then some. We all just stood there, silent for a few minutes taking it all in. From the detail of the acorns on the trees, to the Beaver’s little hut below us, it was truly a place and time plucked straight from the pages of C.S. Lewis’ book. The spell was broken when I spotted the two stuffed Mr. & Mrs. Beavers and Father Christmas passed out in the brush. Okay, Father Christmas wasn’t there but the beaver “stuffies” were and I did get a chuckle from seeing them. They’re just visual aids, of course…

Then they broke out the WOLVES for us. Okay, it was one wolf, but we did go and see the other nine, most of them siblings, later on. The wolves are actually half-huskies, half-wolves and have very crucial roles in the film. Not only is one of them the witch’s main henchwolf, Maugrim, but they also chase the kiddies across the perilous waterfalls and break into the Beaver’s abode for some investigating about halfway through the movie. We were told we could break out our cameras and snap a few pictures of the wolf. Behind it, you can see part of the Narnian woods that I just described.

THE FINAL BATTLE SCENE

During our 5-day visit, we were also brought to an office to view a sort of ‘animated storyboard’ or pre-visualization on one of their computers. The sequence was to be the final battle scene at the end of the film and it lasted about 8 to 10 minutes. Although it was computer animated, it was still interesting to see the vision they had for the extended conflict that precedes the ultimate finale of the book and movie. Seeing Peter in his armor and battle gear, sitting bravely on his horse, no longer a boy but a man leading his “troops” on the battlefield looked satisfying enough, but it was when both sides finally collided, with all the different species and creatures clashing, fighting for their lives, that was when I got a real idea of how momentous the filmmakers want to make this ultimate struggle between good and evil. Eagles dropping huge chunks of ice on the enemies from up above and seeing all the dwarves, good and bad, heading towards one another, battleaxes, arrows and all, were just a couple of the many highlights of the clip.

Bear in mind, this is only a preview of what they’re aiming at, but if the pre-vis is any indication of what’s to come, the battle will rival some of the best we’ve seen from recent movie epics.

Walking down a short little wooded trail (the equestrian center had an earth floor allowing them to dig terrain into it) the trees thin out and a small clearing emerges containing a perfect little stick structure. Standing just outside the house are mock-ups for the beavers, which will be done entirely by CGI in the movie. They give a good feel for how the scene will look on screen. It matches the book perfectly.

Around the corner from the waterfall is the Ice Queen’s main hall. While walking through this set we had to dodge several men with military grade laser range finders. The entire set, down to handprints in the molded walls, was being digitally rendered so that the CGI effects could be seamlessly meshed with the physical set. Giant translucent ice columns rose forty feet up into the rafters (special effects plans on doubling that), the walls also have the same ghostly green ice effect. The queen’s throne rests at the end of the colonnade and up a short flight of steps. Looking as if carved from one massive block of ice, it is a regal and grand seat of power for the Ice Queen.

A short walk from the Throne Room is the Ice Queen’s courtyard. This is easily one of the most impressive sets, even though it is far from the largest. The first thing that you notice is that it is made out of the same translucent material that the rest of the ice castle is made from, but then you realize that all of the people milling about are not workers on the set but statues. Just as the book describes there are statues of all manner of creatures scattered all over the courtyard, from the giant Rumblebuffin down to smaller statues of mice and beavers. The effects crews worked for six months to make over 80 statues to populate the courtyard and it is just a dreamscape of fantasy creatures in stone. The detail work is just amazing. Every one of the statues has all of the equipment that its real life counterpart would have. There are arms and armor on the dwarven warriors, whose braided beards are frozen as if in mid-charge. Whiskers can even be seen on the smaller animals.

From there, a short drive down a road takes you to the most solemn set. A short grassy hill rises out of the sound stage floor. Upon the crest of the hill a circle of boulders surrounds the Stone Table. The table is inscribed with runes and looks ready for the dreary task it will be given to do.