A whole slew of Narnia and other film site journalists got the chance of a lifetime: to visit the set of Prince Caspian in Prague. It’s cool, I’ve got my passport ready for the next one.
Anyway, here we’ll start with our sister site NarniaWeb, where glumPuddle talks a bit about creatures and visual effects, and has an interview with our good friend Shane Rangi.
Creatures on Set
Our first stop on the second day was the Aslan’s How exterior in ÚstÃ, where we spent most of the day watching the crew film a shot where Peter and Edmund emerge from Aslan’s How. The dirt road leading to the location was lined with several trailers that had their doors wide open. Each trailer seemed to have a different purpose. One of them was full of weapons, and I saw someone putting the finishing touches on a sword. Another trailer was full of costumes, and a few more had actors getting their creature makeup on. I even saw a large group of stuntmen rehearsing a sequence from the battle. Like everything else, Adamson wants the battle to be even bigger and more complex than in the first film. Dean Wright later told us, “The goal [of the Narnians] is to sort of keep [the Telmarines] at bay, kind of hold them off till Aslan can come and help.”
It was here that I got my first glimpse of one of the biggest improvements from the first film that I saw: the dwarfs. It was just like Berger said when we interviewed him: they look like real dwarfs instead of just little people. They look quite believable and I could imagine them being able to fight well in a battle. One difference I noticed is that the ones I saw had mustaches. In the first film, Ginarrbrik had a beard but no mustache.
As William Moseley (Peter) and Skandar Keynes (Edmund) emerged from Aslan’s How, the creatures on either side began cheering. The crowd contained fauns, dwarfs, centaurs, satyrs, and yes… minotaurs (there are no minotaurs in the book). I was told that the minotaur actors are a big concern on set because they can’t keep their heads on for long in the heat. Many of the actors had to wear green pants with red dots taped on. The dots are used to track the motion of the actor’s legs so that the animators can match it to the movement of the computer-generated legs. I noticed that the creatures were wearing very little armor. Kimberly Adams (Associate Costume Designer) explained that Adamson didn’t want creatures wearing clothing in this film.
“Suck your paws!”
Of course, I smiled from ear to ear when Shane Rangi walked onto set in a bear suit, because the Bulgy Bear is a funny and memorable character in the book. In the film, he will be 100% computer-generated. Shane’s main purpose is to give the animators physical on-set reference. But I think having a real actor on set instead of having to imagine the Bulgy Bear also helps the other actors. Shane spent most of the day waiting behind the camera with his bear head off. After they finished the shot, they put Shane’s head on (which took about 15 minutes). They began shouting random directions at Shane, such as “move your arms!” and (best of all)… “suck your paws!” I hope that means the Bulgy Bear will suck his paws in the film, just as he does in the book. After he had waited in costume for hours, they only filmed Shane for about 20 seconds (just for reference). He laughed and took a little bow. That’s filmmaking.
After they finished the shot, they had to shoot a “clean plate.” All the actors had to leave the shot so they could film just the background for a few seconds. This helps them remove parts of the shot they don’t want, such as the actors’ legs. A long way off around the clearing, I noticed several pink markers set up. I believe these were being used to track the camera, so that the digital effects can be added later.
Read the rest of this amazing report at NarniaWeb
A bit with Shane Rangi
IESB.net visits a bit more with Shane Rangi:
He is playing six different creatures this time around. These include Bulgy Bear, Asterius, the wild bear, Aslan (for visual effects reference), the werewolf, and another minotaur.
It’s no doubt that when this film is released he will end up in scenes playing against himself!
His credited role will be as Asterius, a well worn but tough leader of the minotaurs. This battle scarred minotaur has beat up horns and a well worn coat, but that doesn’t stop him from being one of the toughest minotaurs in Narnia.
Berger says about the Asterius costume, “Asterius is really nice, it’s a full fabricated suit. It has flexible muscles and water bags in the chest. The suit is all hand tied which means all the hair you saw on the suit is tied one hair at a time into the spandex unitard and then sewn over the muscle suit and then the same with the head. The head is all punched one hair at a time. Rob Gary, our key mechanic on the show did a whole radio control mechanism for it so it does all this really cool stuff. It can do dialogue, although it doesn’t have dialogue, it says ‘shhhh’ in one scene. But we did it just in case. Well in the last one we had to throw a line, so I think he tweaked it a bit so that worked out even better.”
Rangi, the man in the Asterius suit, says about the mechanical head, “I haven’t seen any of that stuff yet. All I get to do is hear it going ‘zzz zzz zzz.’”
We thanked the guys for taking the time out of their incredibly busy schedule to talk with us. They really give great insight into the underworking of a film and how it all comes together.
Read the rest of this incredible coverage here at IESB.net
Caspian Mixes Up New Creatures
SciFi Wire rounds out this first set report with an interview with Howard Berger and Dean Wright.
“There’s all different looks,” Berger said in an interview on the set in Prague in June. “We’ve got female dwarves, male dwarves, old and young. It’s really fun to mix it up.”
“We wanted to have old-age fawns … and heavy-set characters and black centaurs,” he said. “One of the guys designed an old-age fawn that I really liked, and it looked like David Niven. So right now we’re trying to find an extra or an actor who has kind of a very slender, older body. But he looks just like David Niven, so I really like that. Then, we hopefully have a big heavyset fawn who’s kind of John Goodman-ish. So we kind of designed stuff around that. And then we have a really old, old centaur that were going to do as well that’s kind of like Little Big Man centaur. There are kid centaurs, too.”
In the same interview, visual-effects supervisor Dean Wright said that Berger’s concept was a “great idea, but it causes a bit of work for us.” Wright’s department is responsible for digitally duplicating the creatures in post-production to increase their numbers in certain scenes.
“He wanted to bring more variety to the characters that we had, in terms of ages and sexes,” Wright said. “The whole point [was] to add more of a variety to work with the characters. Which, again, we will have to build into our digital characters.”
Rangi said in a separate interview that his performance on the set will be captured to make Aslan much more lifelike when he interacts with the other characters.
“Aslan in the first one was a big sculpt, or they just had the head and shot it and did the rest in visual effects,” Rangi said. “I pretty much have the front feet, the mane and the head. The main reason we’re playing physical this time is that Lucy interacts with him. And from a digital point of view, it’s hard for them to recreate hair around when she hugs him and stuff like that. So basically, I’m just there for visual effects.”
In addition to Aslan, Rangi will play a number of creatures in the film, including a werewolf, a bulgy bear and a new minotaur character called Asterius, who didn’t appear in the original book by C.S. Lewis.
“Andrew wrote in more minotaurs,” Berger said. “They were really popular in the first film, and I was sad they were bad and might not come back. Then Andrew called and said were going to throw some minotaurs in, especially this one, Asterius, which is the lead minotaur. It was really cool, because I wanted to do an old-age minotaur, so Andrew was up for it and I designed it.”
Berger added that throughout the filming, the primary concern among the filmmakers was realism. “The movie doesn’t stop and hit the viewer on the head and you go, ‘Hey, look there’s an effect, there’s a makeup effect, there’s a digital effect,'” he said. “You didn’t get that in the first film. … And I’m sure this one will be the same thing.”
Visit SciFi Wire for the rest. And stay tuned to NarniaFans.com as we bring you coverage from all corners of the Narnia world.