“Visual references for beaver dams covered in snow turned out to be surprisingly hard to find, so we had to imagine what it would look like and create our set based on that,” says Jules Cook, art director and designer of the Beaver Lodge set. Much of the inspiration for the beavers’ environment, both in the interior, shot on stage 3 at Henderson Studios and the exterior, filmed as part of a vast snowscape at the sprawling Kelly Park Studio in Wainui north of Auckland, was taken from watching beavers in their natural habitat in the 1988 IMAX film Beavers, directed by Stephen Low. In a climactic scene in that film, a bear tears apart a beaver dam; close examination of the destruction provided a strong basis for the scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where a pack of the White Witch’s wolves infiltrates and tears through the lodge looking for the Pevensies.
Beaver dams generally let part of their river’s water through the structure, and Cook acknowledges that particular attention had to be paid to how a flow of water would freeze around the habitat. Chainsaws and Arbortec drill attachments were used to create a unique “chewing” effect on the logs, and as beavers tend to strip the bark off branches, this was done as well. The wood used in the lodge “would have been aged by the river,” Cook notes, and is thus gray and bare of branches.
Set Builder Pete MacKinnon, who constructed all twelve sections of the set with his team of three carpenters over three months, estimates that he used over 4500 sticks, all “between finger thickness and leg thickness,” to create the set. Each stick had to be individually “beaver-ized,” to eliminate all machine cuts, and every screw holding the set together had to be hidden while at the same time maintaining structural integrity. “It was a bit like making giant wicker baskets,” says MacKinnon.
In the film, director Andrew Adamson has envisioned the Beavers as rustic craftsmen, creating their home, furniture and tools from their surroundings, and trading with the local dwarves for other commodities. Many of the props and the general look of the lodge’s interior comes from Pauline Baynes’ illustrations of Lewis’ books, but the general feeling the art department wanted to create, in the words of lead set decorator Kerrie Brown, was that of “a rustic English countryhouse, but beaver-ized.” Accordingly, the furniture is makeshift, the Beavers’ living area is cluttered with miniature tools, fishing rods and collectibles, and Mrs. Beaver’s “homey” touch is responsible for the spun and knit textiles and homemade preserves.
