Rhythm & Hues visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer talks to vfxblog about the challenges of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

Interview by Ian Failes

‘Narnia’ sounds like a character animator’s dream. Was there some competition at Rhythm to get on this show?

Narnia was certainly a dream job for me as the story was one that I had cherished since childhood. Of course that is always a double edged sword, because you end up putting yourself under even more pressure to live up to your own high ideals of how it should be. Fortunately, we were working for a director like Andrew Adamson whose creative vision and high standards for the visual effects work were already a great target to strive for.

There was a great deal of competition for the visual effects work on Narnia. The production auditioned the studios by commissioning an animation test of Mr. Beaver. We were all handed a piece of dialogue, a collection of stills for backdrops and told to make something of it. It was interesting to see the results in the end as each facility brought different strengths to the table. Ultimately the test landed us the work. Ironically, after the shot count grew the workload was split amongst ourselves, Sony Imageworks, and Industrial Light & Magic, and our part did not include the beaver.

What was involved in your role?

My role as Visual Effects Supervisor for Rhythm & Hues included both the onset and post-production supervision of our portion of the work which included Aslan the lion, and the large battle sequences including some 40 hero characters and armies simulated with the artificial intelligence package Massive. In all we produced 380 visual effects shots for the film.

I actually started with the production before they hired their overall supervisor Dean Wright, so I also helped with the technical aspects of creature design being done at WETA Workshop, and developed methodologies to accomplish characters like fauns and centaurs which would often have live action upper bodies and CGI creature halves.

What kind of planning and preparation did Rhythm undertake in terms of animation for ‘Narnia’. Did you produce any pre-viz or motion study tests? What real world references did you look to?

We did an extensive amount of referential resource collection at the start. We were fortunate as well in that the production’s animal training facility, Gentle Junge, in Fraiser Park, CA allowed us to spend a day in a cage with a lion, cheetah, leopard, eagle, bear, wolves, and several other creatures. We brought a Hi-Def motion-picture camera with us along with a host of still cameras to get fantastic close-ups of the animals we had to build. We were able to use this reference directly as we built and prelit the characters – doing side by side matches of specific walk cycles and cross dissolves of the still frames.

To deal with mythical creations we did a number of animation studies with early rigs. I had done a survey of fauns and centaurs from other films and worked with Andrew to come up with a list of things that worked and didn’t work from those efforts. Using this as a guide, we worked out ideas on how an idealized centaur would move so that we could work out how we needed the live action humans shot on location to move in support of the to-be-added lower halves. We did several video tests with the prosthetics vendor KNB to see how these ideas panned out when the digital portions were added.

I also attended the tech location scouts in New Zealand. This gave us an idea of the terrain we would be dealing with, including tall grass that we would need to integrate our characters into. At that time we also had Paul Maurice’s Lidar Services, LIDAR the entire battlefield, Aslan’s Camp, and a few other small locations so that we’d have digital terrain to run our Massive armies over.

How closely did you refer to the previz or how far did you have to move away from it?

The previz for the film was handled by the production, under the direction of previz supervisor Rpin Suwannath. The previz for the battle had been in development long before we were even brought on the film. Ultimately, his team would previz the vast majority of the movie that would contain visual effects.

I would say, to a great degree, the film matches pretty closely to the scenes as they were prevized. This is largely due to the fact that Andrew spent a lot of time working out his shots in the previz stage to make sure it was faithful to his vision of a scene. Drama sequences tended to drift from the previz a bit more, but this is to be expected as dialogue changes or performance moments are created that merit an adjustment to the cut. The battle sequence, however, particularly the warm up and charge are extremely close in the final cut of the film. The fact that we adhered so closely to it was essential during principle photography as we often had as many as six units filming over a huge expanse of terrain – some units would be literally miles away. Because we all new exactly what Andrew was looking for, it allowed the necessary degree of autonomy to complete the filming on schedule.

What helped you make decisions about what should be motion-captured or key framed?

The use of Massive required the use of a lot of motion-capture. The motion-captured results were stunning, but even if they weren’t it would be nearly impossible for animators to create the hundreds and hundreds of little actions needed by the agents to perform within the package.

Initially we even toyed with the idea of motion capturing animals like a lion, leopard, and so on. Ultimately the success of early key-frame motion studies, and the huge practical difficulties of doing this kept it from happening. All of the big cats, including Aslan, were completely key-framed. Flying creatures like the gryphons and hawks were also key-framed. We were able to motion capture a horse, however. These cycles were used extensively in our animation including the Massive centaurs, and even as a basis for hero animation of both ‘freedom horses’ (the name given to actual – non centaurified horses in Aslan’s army) and the centaur horse bodies.

All of the humanoid characters were captured for Massive and for motion vignettes that could be used on mid-ground hero characters. Our motion capture director, Michelle Ladd worked with Giant Studios to capture all of the creatures. Giant’s system was able to show the capture retargeted onto our rigs in real time which was crucial to gauging the success of reverse-legs like the goat-legs on a faun.

One of the most challenging characters from a mocap standpoint was the centaur. The key to selling a centaur as a being is that the human and horse have to move with a single mind. We did a test where we combined the capture of a horse with that of its rider and the result looked like what you might expect in that the human felt like it was along for the ride as opposed to motivating the horse. The way we accomplished the centaur was to first make selections from our horse capture for the actions we wanted to include in the Massive agent. For each of these, we captured a human that performed stationary in a chair. We were then able to procedurally add the necessary overlapping action of the torso, limbs, and head in both the motion edit stage and within Massive itself. Careful timing of this overlap made the human feel like it was leading the horse which achieved that ‘single mind’ we were after.

How were your creatures modeled and rigged?

All characters were modelled using a combination of Maya and our propriety tool. When available we started with cyberscans of WETA maquettes. For the exotic animals we would either adapt an existing model, or find other sources such as taxidermy forms for the body and detailed areas like the teeth and gums.

Our lead Creature Supervisor, Wil Telford, employed our newly implemented ‘construction kits’ (CKs) to do all of the skeletal rigging for our characters. We had a set of CKs for bipeds and quadrupeds which could be rapidly instanced onto a model in a matter of hours. This not only made the inital rigging process fast, but it insured that every rig was completely consistent in terms of naming conventions, rotation orders, etc. which would allow animators to easily jump from character to character.

The skeletal rigs were very fast, but the soft body deforms still took a bit of time. We used just about every trick in the book to do this, including full muscle systems, blend shapes, compression driven displacements, harmonics and dynamics driven skin and fat layers, and traditional deforms. Each were custom fit to the base model. Some characters like Aslan had a great deal of this complexity proceduralized so that it performed well even without direct animator input. For creatures that were more ‘one-offs’ we would include a similar complexity in the rig, but an animator would have to spend time hand adjusting the results.

With a limit on our rigging resources within our schedule we had to make decisions like this to put the most emphasis on things that would be amortized over large numbers of shots. Aslan’s setup included a unique post animation process that overcame one of the former limitations of muscle systems with regard to the timing of muscle firings. Past systems were steady-state in that the amount of contaction exhibited by a muscle was just the result of the joint angles on a given frame. In reality, muscles fire and begin to bulge in anticipation of a motion and often relax before it completes. The post process was a script that analyzed an animators performance and would correctly fire muscles according to this more realistic timing. Our technical animation staff still had the ability to alter this afterwards, but in the majority of shots, this process produced the final results you see on screen.

Our facial rigs also varied in complexity and proceduralism based on the amount of scenes a creature would be featured in. Aslan’s face was incredibly complex in so far as it was a blend shape system built from an underlying muscle system on top of which was applied another muscle system! But the miraculous thing, was that this complexity was hidden from the animators and did its magic behind the scenes. A relatively small number of controls produced his facial performance.

The process of building his face started from reference. We poured over the vast collection of lion photographs we had and found examples in which the lion appeared to portray the expressions we wanted to include in our library. Starting this way guaranteed anatomical authenticity in the poses. A given facial pose was free sculpted by the modelling staff. This was fed into a full muscle rig which analyzed key facial landmarks to determine which muscles would have needed to fire to achieve that expression. The final blend shape pose was then reconstructed by the muscle system. This added subtle skin motion and interrelationships that were not sculpted in by the modellers. The final facial rig was a blend-shape system, but even with that we added back a subset of the final musculature to help interpolate correctly between poses.

As a final test for the rig before shot production, we chose frames of Gregory Peck from To Kill a Mockingbird as a performance target. At the time, Liam Neeson had not been cast, so Gregory’s character Atticus Finch seemed to have the right sublime quality we were after. We made sure the rig was capable of reproducing expressions for Aslan that mirrored those of the human actor.

What approach did you take to the final animation? Were your animators given individual characters to work on?

Our animation director, Richie Baneham, and our animation supervisors, Erik DeBoer, Matt Logue and John Goodman, were responsible for assigning animators to shots and characters within the shots. While we always like to keep animators on the same characters throughout a movie, the shortness of the schedule, and the order of shot turn-overs from production often make this impossible. To keep the pipeline moving, we must move animators from character to character, which is why innovations like the CKs were so important. That said, we did manage to keep animators who found a particular knack for Aslan facial performances on the majority of those shots, and tried to keep others who were very successful at fast action and impacts working on the battle scenes.

What tools did you use to animate the characters? How ‘final’ were you able to take the shots in animation?

All of our animation was conducted on our in-house animation package, Voodoo. Our animation work proceeded in four steps:

- Blocking: this would place the characters in frame and would employ simple animation, and/or motion cycles to get a sense of the motion;
- Rough Animation: this would be actual animation crafted for a scene to demonstrate our attempt to portray what Andrew was after;

- Animation Approval: this would include all of the detail necessary for Andrew to sign off on the performance;

- Cleanup: typically minor adjustments to foot placements for lighting, or tweaking a pose for the muscle systems.

After animation was complete, our technical animation staff would take over to polish the muscle systems, clean-up deforms, add cloth and hair simulations, and so on. Our character animators would often handle the sympathetic animation of armour, etc, but this too would optionally be passed to tech animation for certain shots.

Can you talk about the challenges of fur and feathers and any other dynamics or simulation issues you had?

Rhythm & Hues has been working with furry characters for a number of years now and as a result our hair tools are fairly robust. Still for this production, the number of characters that had hair and the realism required would prove quite challenging. Aslan’s lead pre-lighter, Greg Steele, utilized over 15 different hair types in the mane alone each with a different density, colour, transparency, and degree of curliness. We also had to be able to have multiple ‘combs’ for each character to allow variations across, for example, the number of different minotaurs portrayed on screen.

One of the biggest challenges for our hair simulations was the wind that was ever present in New Zealand. While on set, I would joking mumble that the title should be [???]. Our digital characters then, had to match the effect that was evident in the live action plates. Our software programmers developed two layers of wind for the tech animation staff. The first, simply called ‘Dynamic Wind’, handled the macro motion on the guide hairs of a strong breeze and caused the hair to wrap around contours of the body and also maintained a degree of collision detection to maintain overall volume. The second layer, dubbed ‘Pelt Wind’ for the ‘pelt system’ of dealing with hair types, would move individual hairs like whispy edges in a light breeze. The two could be combined and animated with noise forces to simulate the various conditions in which our CGI creatures had to be placed.

On the topic of feathers, we did have a challenge in the gryphon. The gryphon is a combination eagle and lion and flies by way of huge eagle wings. Our shots had to portray these feathers blowing in the wind and had to show them as the wings fold. Amazingly, the complex folding action of the flight feathers during wing fold was accomplished through careful rigging and procedural action. Some hand cleanup was required, but they performed very well out of the box. Animator controls handled the wind effects on the major flight feathers, while the rest were handled by our fur package and the same wind controls that dealt with Aslan’s mane.

How was Massive was used by Rhythm for the show?

We used Massive to handle the mid and background characters in both Aslan’s and the White Witch’s armies. We would often have as many as 30,000 creatures in frame at one time. Combined across the 130 shots that employed Massive, the program handled the animation for over 450,000 characters according to our Massive supervisor Dan Smiczek.

It took about a year and a half to process the motion capture, build Massive brains, and integrate the tool into our pipeline. We had to develop a way to efficiently handle the volume of geometry that would be passed to the renderer. To do this we built multiple levels of detail and had to build skeletal rigs for each that would work consistently with the mocap data. After this lengthy setup, however, Massive was able to populate a shot with realistically behaving agents in as little as a day to as long as a few weeks of time. Changes to performances could be turned around very quickly and those individuals who chose to remain ‘non-conformist’ could be culled from the crowd with ease.

I was actually surprised by how close we could bring Massive agents. In Narnia, we were the first team to put fur on Massive characters. This coupled by the quality of the animation output from the package brought them into the mid ground of a frame. A packed battle scene would feature, at most, about 20 hero animated characters – the rest would be Massive agents.

How were your visual effects shots reviewed by the vfx supes and director?

We met with Andrew and Dean several times a week. We used both video conferencing and in person visits for animation which was supplied via QuickTime files uploaded onto each side’s respective Avid. Film was screened either at Rhythm & Hues or at the production’s screening facility depending on Andrew’s location. Some lighting work was reviewed via hi-res QuickTimes on a Mac, but the vast majority of lighting decisions were made on film.

Did you look to the work of the other vendors while completing your shots?

Not all that often. We did do a lot of sharing up front: we supplied ILM with all of our models, textures, prelighting turn-tables, and some motion-capture data for them to build their libraries. After that, it was really Dean and Andrew’s responsibility to insure consistency within shots. This was possible, because the designs for everything were pretty well established when ILM was brought into the picture.

One notable exception was a series of shots featuring Aslan pinning down one of Sony’s wolves. This did require careful back and forth on both sides as we animated each separately and combined the two at the various stages (blocking, rough animation, final animation). For a given shot, we decided a priori which character would be the lead and which would act sympathetic to that. This allowed one side to establish the blocking that the other could play off too. Interestingly, these shots matured later in the production so neither of us saw the other’s finished render under a few weeks before the end of production.

Is there one particular shot or sequence you could break down, and talk about the elements that made up the shot?

One series of shots that encompass all of the challenges we faced involved the ones of Peter on his unicorn in front of his army waiting to strike. In the shot, Peter, his unicorn, Oreius, and the front row of centaurs were all live action. The gryphon was a full CGI hero character, and the entire rest of the army was handled by Massive.

- The shot was filmed on location at the battlefield. All of the centaur performers wore green tights and were placed on 14 inch platforms so they would be at the right heights for the horse bodies to be added underneath.

- The next step is to matchmove the camera. We had LIDAR of the location, so this task fit the ground to the same terrain in frame. Having a 3D representation of the ground and rock formations was crucial to allow proper placement of the Massive characters.

- Next we have to track the centaur actors. These were hand fit to all of the live action upperbodies. Doing this allowed the horse bodies to be attached and pick up any rocking or swaying that the actors performed.

- Our hero animator for the shot then began animating the gryphon. In one of the shots he has to fly-in, land, furl up his wings and deliver a line of dialogue. The animator also animated the wind blowing through the flight feathers to match the strong wind visible in the plate.

- Our leg animation team then works on all of the horse bodies. It is a sort of reverse-engineering process, where they must work up horse animation that supports what the actors are doing. Adding touches like the occasional foot twitch and so on keep the lower half alive. Careful attention must be paid through all this to insure that the blend area remains consistent. They have controls to select the amount to blend the hip rotation of the actor into the front of the horse, for example.

- Massive simulations were then setup and run. A great deal of time was spent blocking out the location of various formations within the army – for example, 2 lines of centaurs, followed by squads of fauns & satyrs, followed by more sporadic mixtures of all the various creatures in Aslan’s army. Even the first pass of Massive was very successful – foreground fauns have believable agitation and shift from foot to foot. More time was then spent adding background characters that are moving about as if to find their final positions, and so on.

- Tech Anim now steps in to animate the chainmail hanging down off the cenatur’s bodies. The wind also has to blow across the gryphon’s body hair and fine wing feathers. Tech Anim also adds motion to the various battle standards and flags being held by the Massive agents.

- Finally the characters are lit and rendered, and compositing adds details like ground shadows, dust from the landing gryphon and so on.

[VFXblog]

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Sony Pictures Imageworks animation supervisor David Schaub talks to vfxblog about his work for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The characters are quite amazing. Why do you think the characters are so successful in the film?

Well, I’d like to think they are the successful. I think it goes back to the idea that if they’re talking animals you make sure they don’t look caricatured. We’ve gone out on a limb and tried to make them as real as possible. The wolves, for example, need to have all the nuances and mannerisms that you see in real wolves, but timed in a certain way to support the dialogue. As soon as you start going too humanised, you’ve got a cartoon on your hands.

Then with the beavers – they are a little more stylised and human-like. They’re not really built like a beaver. If you look at real beaver anatomy, they’ve got very short arms and their bodies are essentially just a bag of fat, but we needed to do more with them. If you look at a beaver standing on his hind legs, it looks pretty strange. They’re got the short arms and balance on the ground with their tail, which means their upper body tetters in a very strange way. We took those liberties in design to make the beavers more human-like in their performance.

What kind of toolsets did you have to develop for this show?

Our facial system was fairly new for Narnia. In the past we’ve always used a blend shape system, in other words, we used model shapes that we just morphed from one shape to the next. We used to have a selection or list of pre-modelled face shapes to choose from to go back and forth between. This time we used a muscle-based facial animation system, which we had used for the first time on The Polar Express. The Smokey and Steamer characters were our keyframed characters in that show, with all the others motion-captured. The idea of that show was to have those guys mo-capped as well, but of course Michael Jeter died during the show. So we didn’t have the data from the motion-capture to finish the animation. So the whole thing was stripped down and we employed the muscle system being built for Sony Pictures Animation (for Open Season and Surf’s Up). It was given some great results and you could get some really expressive movements out of it. You weren’t limited to the poses that had been pre-built. You had this intelligent muscle control system that let you pull things and stretch and inflate while retaining the volume. On top of that you had the additional controls to make fine adjustments, whereas with blend shapes you’re pretty much stuck with the shapes that had been pre-modelled. With the muscle system you can have main shapes in a library but still have the ability to nudge muscles as needed.

The muscle system was used on all the characters. It was a little tricky on the wolves because of the muzzle. You’ve got this long snout which, when we did it on The Polar Express, it worked better for a human face, or was at least built with a human-type face in mind. When we put it onto the wolves, it had to be re-built a little, but the principle is all the same.

One thing I liked about the wolves was that real ones interacted and appeared with digital characters in the same shot.

I think the idea was to do a lot more of that. They spent a fair amount getting the wolves down there and training them up. But, like always, there are ones along the way that didn’t do what they needed – either they just weren’t angry enough or didn’t jump in the right away. As we showed them what we could achieve digitally, we basically stopped using the real wolves. Basically after the attack on the Beaver’s hut the wolves are all digital. The introduction of Maugrim in the White Witch’s castle is all digital. When the wolves run out of the castle those are live action with a couple of CG ones inserted. The Beaver’s hut is a mixing and matching of live wolves with CG ones, and sometimes live wolves with CG parts like augmented tails. Beyond that, the CG wolves worked well enough that it made sense to use them for the rest of the film. It’s always a compromise with real animals to get them to do what you want – you do get happy surprises sometimes. Andrew Adamson is big on performance and has really sharp instincts and desires in that area. When you can design a performance and make it work as you see it in your mind, I think that’s the way to go. Of course, this meant our shot counts just kept increasing all the time.

Can you talk about the creation of Mr Tumnus?

The actor wore greenscreen stockings. There was some motion capture data from the character on set. We used the motion capture for that character to help us get the hips where they needed to be. When there was a lack of survey data, the motion capture came in handy to work out where the hips were in 3D space, and it helped us get about 50 or 70 per cent there. Then our matchmovers took over and lined up the hips. They needed to be aligned with a really high degree of accuracy, because obviously any swimmyness or sliding in there would really show up with the mix of practical and digital fur. Once the hips were aligned it was a task of actually animating the legs. Even though there was motion capture for the leg, it really didn’t apply because it was a goat leg that we were after. Once we got that done, it was pretty simple process. Once the hips are where they needed to be, you just place the legs underneath them, using the proper compression between the heels and the hoof, so that you get the proper weight.

We accomplished Mr Tumnus on a shot-by-shot basis. Every shot kind of had its own problems. There were only 30 or so shots, but we worked on Mr Tumnus throughout the entire duration of the show. We started with him and ended with him – there was no mad rush because we knew we could do it – we just chipped away at it over time.

I liked how the fox emotes through his tail and ears and eyes. How did you approach the animation for him?

I think the fox is one of the more interesting canine characters because there is a lot more going on there. I should mention that 90 per cent of the fox shots were animated by one guy – Patrick Osborne. He came up with some really nice ideas. The wolves tend to be the hoodlums. We just needed to make them mean for their personality. The fox is more calculating. You see so much of what’s going on in his thought process through his eyes. There’s a lot of eye adjustment when he’s thinking. When Maugrim grabs him and asks where the kids are, you can really see that thought process. He doesn’t say anything, but you can just see the attitude through the ears. Is he going to give them up or isn’t he? The ears were tricky to rig because they can physically rotate 180 degrees. To get that to work without breaking the rig was a bit of a challenge. We did try to get the fox to emote with his paws but it didn’t look right, so we used the tail a lot. It’s so big – it’s a huge fluffy tail – which makes it hard not to use. Using it to make little flourishes does kind of replace hand gestures. Trying to get that reality factor in there was important. The body is constantly in motion, the breathing is tied to the dialogue and you feel it throughout the performance.

What were some of the other shots Imageworks completed for the film?

There was the whole waterfall sequence. That was made up of many, many different elements. If you look at what we started with – in raw form it’s bits and pieces of the kids, greenscreen all over the place, miniatures, CG water, CG ice, crashing waterfall and other stuff. We also did the opening bombing of London, which is entirely digital except for some shots of the German pilots. The professor’s house is a digital house that doesn’t exist. We did the ice castle and the shots around it as the kids are watching Edmond go into it. It was all kids in bright sunlight against greenscreen, so all the backgrounds and snow had to be added digitally.

The interaction between studios was pretty straightforward. We had to add the beavers in some shots there. The shots were rendered in layers, so the studio delivering the shot would be the studio that had the foreground characters. For example, ILM might have done the backgrounds, and then R+H had the next layer and then we’d finish it up with a beaver in the foreground, using their plate. The only real physical interaction we had was when Aslan pins down one of the wolves.

It was all such a huge undertaking with so much being digital. I thought at the beginning how on earth were we going to do this? And, just like always, we got it done.

[VFXblog]

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the seven films in consideration for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 78th Academy Awards®.

The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

“Batman Begins”
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”
“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”
“King Kong”
“Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith”
“War of the Worlds”

Fifteen-minute clip reels from each of the seven films will be screened for the Visual Effects Award Nominating Committee on Wednesday, January 25. At this screening the members will vote to nominate three of the seven films for Oscar® consideration.

All nominations for the 78th Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, at 5:30 a.m. PST, in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements for 2005 will be presented on March 5, 2006, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5 p.m. PST.

Thanks to Katie for sending me the news

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See how the filmmakers utilized visual effects to create a whole world of Narnia’s creatures and characters. Go behind the scenes of the film’s visual effects.

Moviefone’s got the fifth Behind the Magic clip up on their website! Check it out at our source link!

See Mr. Beaver speak! It’s pretty incredible the way he moves… it’s not cartoony and it’s not photo-realistic, but it is completely logical somehow.

Spoilers!

Mr. Beaver: “Aslan’s return, Tumnus’ arrest, the secret police… it’s all happening because of you!”

Susan: “You’re blaming us.”

Mr. Beaver: “There’s… there’s a prophecy.”

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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.

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