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.