The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Diaries: Part 1 – R&D and Principle Photography
In the first installment of VFXWorld’s exclusive production diaries, Rhythm & Hues’ Bill Westenhofer talks about R&D and principle photography on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
By Bill Westenhofer
I still remember the moment I first heard that Rhythm & Hues was being considered as one of the production houses to work on the visual effects for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s not often that a chance to work on one of your most cherished stories from childhood comes along, and I was pretty excited, to say the least. After a lengthy process of bidding, doing a few creature tests for director Andrew Adamson, and a seemingly endless series of meetings, that chance became a reality, but eventually the excitement morphed into a gnawing terror, as I wondered: “How on earth are we going to do this?”
VFXWorld asked me to create my own chronicles of sort, by requesting that I keep a log of the goings on within our part of the production from that point onward. As with any project of this overwhelming size, my favorite tactic is to divide and conquer. Basically, this means that I need to reduce the task of the job into manageable chunks and worry about each one in a timely fashion. In that spirit, I am breaking this diary into two parts. This installment covers the visual effects version of pre-production, which includes creature construction, rigging and prelite, the development of software and pipelines and the actual principle photography of the film. The next installment will detail our actual shot production in animation, lighting and compositing.
For this movie, Rhythm & Hues was tasked with creating Aslan, the lion, and handling the majority of the battle sequence at the end of the film, which required the creation of a large number of hero CG characters and a simulation to deal with their combat. We also took on the sequence in which Aslan meets with the White Witch and is sacrificed in front of a throng of those same creatures that would appear later in the battle. For the sacrifice and battle sequences, our biggest issue was the challenge of building, rigging, lighting and controlling that many different characters across a large number of shots. For Aslan, it was the equally scary prospect of doing justice to the iconic character that everyone expected to see executed perfectly. Many an early sojourn onto the various fan websites cemented the reality that, for many, pulling off a convincing lion would make or break the film for them.
[Click here for the rest of Part 1]
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Part 2 – Final Character Setup and Shot Production
In the second installment of VFXWorld’s exclusive production diaries, Rhythm & Hues’ Bill Westenhofer delves deeper into The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with Final Character Setup and Shot Production. Includes QuickTime movie clips!
By Bill Westenhofer
I previously explored our “pre-production” phase, which involved developing and integrating the software we would need, starting character rigging and development and our responsibilities during principle photography. This part will cover everything else that brought us to final delivery at the end of October 2005.
At the point where this installment picks up, our team is all back at our studios in Los Angeles and our primary focus is on finishing up the significant portions of our pre-production still remaining. We have to finish our character rigging and setup, especially the facial rig for Aslan. We are also heavily into the motion capture and motion editing for our Massive agents and are working on the agent brains so we can start placing Massive into shots sometime in May. While this is going on, we do have our first batch of shots in-house, which are all from Aslan’s sacrifice scene at the stone table.
Jan. 16, 2005
The final touches for Aslan’s facial rig are finally being put into place. This is the culmination of work that really started last August. The challenge now, as was then, is that we still do not have a voice from production. The voice really determines a lot about a character and will inform some of the subtle specifics of our facial poses. In the meantime, we have to make do with our best assumptions. Our facial rig is a combination of a shape-based blend system with an additional layer of muscle and traditional deformers layered on top. A shape-based rig uses pre-built facial poses that an animator can select, combine and animate between. At this stage in our development, we have incorporated everything we can until we have a voice and can evaluate whether we need additional improvements.
[Click here for the rest of Part 2]
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