Earlier today IGN attended the Academy Awards brunch on behalf of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the event, Visual Effects Supervisor Dean Wright and Rhythm and Hues Effects Supervisor Bill Westenhofer spoke about the upcoming DVD of Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. The two FX wizards also discussed their Oscar-nominated work on the film and their preparation for work on Prince Caspian now that the sequel has been announced. While LWW was an undeniably large undertaking, Prince Caspian promises to one-up the stakes.
Visual Effects Supervisor Dean Wright: “Andrew [Adamson] (director of LWW) just actually signed on to do Prince Caspian just about two weeks ago; and literally took off on the next plane to New Zealand just to get out of L.A. just to recharge his batteries, recharge his creative energy, because it was a marathon. I did read the book and more of the creatures that you saw – and there’s new ones – are back. There’s new hero creatures… There’s huge battle sequences. I know from talking to Andrew before he left, he wants to make this bigger and better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so I can only imagine what’s in store. Any of us that are lucky enough to be involved. We all love working with Andrew. I can say that on behalf of everyone here, and would enjoy working on all seven books if we could.”
Rhythm and Hues Effects Supervisor Bill Westenhofer comments on the evolution of Aslan’s physical look: “Reading the books, there are some evolutions. One of the challenges is that it is described in the text that he does increase in size. At one point, he’s referenced as the size of an elephant. So I think that’s where interpretations of the filmmakers are going to come into play and how to pull that off. In this film, he changes size slightly, but I doubt anyone would notice. He’s actually five percent bigger after he comes back to life, but even to start with, he was at the top end of the scale of average lion sizes… So, he is a big lion, even at the start. But yeah, I think that’s going to be one of the challenges… What creative licenses you carry and how believable that is to have that big a character…”
Wright said the effects team will begin computer “pre-visualization” of scenes from Prince Caspian “probably in a couple of months, and then full on into preproduction. You know, the film is going to kick off before you know it, and we’ll be going like gangbusters, probably, I would say, within the next two to four months.”
And there’s one other challenge, Westenhofer said: “We successfully avoided Aslan getting doused in water in this. But as soon as we get into the Dawn Treader [a ship that figures in Caspian] and that sort of stuff, it’s going to be harder to avoid.”
