It’s unusual to find a crowd of people at the studio who aren’t doing anything, but today I find such a crowd. They are standing and admiring. The reason for this is that Richard Taylor and his team from Weta are visiting, and there is a kind of show-and-tell in progress in one of the studio sheds. The Weta people – already famous for their work on The Lord of the Rings, and currently busy on King Kong – are also making some of the prosthetics for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Today they have brought up the rigs and costumes for some of the C. S. Lewis’s most magical characters.
In one room I met Stephen Ure, who should be familiar to Rings fans – not that you’d recognise him out of orc costume. He played both Grishnakh and Gorbag, and he’s certainly used to being encased in latex and hair suits. Just as well, because he’s doing it again – this time as a satyr. Satyrs are the ugly cousins to the cute little goat footed fauns. In Narnia they’re very hairy, with stubby-fingered hands and curling ram’s horns. Stephen’s satyr was armed with a short curved sword. Weta’s latex mask gave him a very different face, with a blunt muzzle and a lipless mouth. I asked him if he had to act under all that and he said he did. He has a very mobile face and I remember him saying a while back that he had learned, with Peter Jackson, how to move his features enough to transmit his expressions through the thickness of a latex mask.
There was a good deal more excitement in the next room, and I had to push through a press of photographers and bystanders to see an astonishing sight: Four centaurs lined up with their armor and weapons.
The centaurs – three men and one woman – are standing with a kind of rig harnessed to their hips which provides the horse parts to their bodies. The back end of the horse is supported on a post that rides on a pair of small wheels. How the post attaches to the undercarriage of the horse is clever: I noticed that whenever the centaur actors shifted their weight from foot to foot, the body of the horse moved to counterbalance in a very natural way, just as a real horse would. I couldn’t see the join – you can’t see any of it. The centaurs are clothed in leather and chain mail armor, and the camera will only show them down to the tops of their legs. Just as well, because you could see their shoes and socks poking out from under their beautiful breastplates.
