ComingSoon.net Interviews The Chronicles of Narnia Effects Team

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!