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Director: Andrew Adamson
Producers: Mark Johnson
Visual Effects Designer: Dean Wright
Visual Effects Supervisor: Jim Berney
Visual Effects Supervisor: Scott Farrer
Visual Effects Supervisor: Bill Westinhoffer
OVERVIEW OF SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS' ASSIGNMENT
For "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," we produced visual effects and digital character animation that enabled director Andrew Adamson and visual effects designer Dean Wright to work with virtually unlimited creative and artistic freedom in bringing C.S. Lewis' fantastic story to the screen. I led a team at Sony Pictures Imageworks to create principal and background characters, impossible yet convincing environments for real actors and cg characters to act in simultaneously, and to accomplish this with a spirit of creative collaboration that invigorated the filmmaking process.
I was responsible for leading the team of artists at Imageworks to create nearly 600 shots. Our team was responsible for the principal characters of Mr. Tumnus, the faun, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the wolves, Maugrim and Vardin, and Mr. Fox. In addition, we completed six variations of background wolves and two sets of reindeer for Santa and The White Witch. Our team was also responsible for numerous environments, including the opening sequence in the skies over London in World War II, the icy edifice of the White Witch's Castle, the powerful Frozen Waterfall, and the Frozen Lake, which we created from photographs shot in New Zealand and The Czech Republic.
GENERAL CHARACTER WORK
In order to create nearly 600 shots containing one to eight characters each, techniques had to be created or refined first to facilitate the building, muscling, animating, and rending of the efficiently. To bring life to the fur, hair dynamics were integrated into the rendering pipeline as an automatic process. To speed up the simulation calculations hair collision was added to specific areas on specific shots where needed. Fur rending was also optimized, cutting the render times almost in half. This allowed for a large number of shots to be rendered each day, giving us and the director the ability to evaluate animation with fully furred and lit characters. To integrate the characters into the plates with snow and grass, tools were created to make footprints as the characters walked, add snow falling around them, and snow which would land on their fur and stick. In addition to the above, each character had it's own unique challenges.
MR. TUMNUS
Mr. Tumnus is a faun, half man half goat. James played the man half, while it was our task to add the CG goat legs. The first challenge was registering the CG legs to the hips of the actor who played Mr. Tumnis. His legs and hips were motion captured on set as well as on location (including outdoors, in the snow, in the Czech Republic) by the motion capture company, Giant. While we provided Giant with a match moved camera and a plate, they would in turn give us back the registered goat legs, as well as a first pass at animation. We would then refine the animation by hand. The next trick was to create a seamless blend between the costume fur around his waist and our CG legs. The CG fur had to be combed on a per shot basis to adjust for the ever-changing costume. Lighting of the fur had to be precise. This was achieved mostly by hand but was ball-parked by using the grey and chrome spheres shot on set. An added difficulty was the fact that Mr. Tumnus wore a scarf, which hung, down to his knees. Most of the time the practical scarf was roto'd out and put back over the cg legs, but on occasion it had to be filled in or replaced completely with a CG scarf. Although the scarf added to the complexity of the character, it helped to tie the CG and the practical together.
MR. AND MRS. BEAVER
The beavers were two main characters in the film, and therefore had to be believable. We didn't want them to take people out of the movie. They had to do more than just look photo-real. They had to be real: real in their behavior as well as their movements. Interaction with the kids and the environment had to be flawless and unlimited. More then just physical interaction between the kids and the beavers, they had to be engaged in both dialog and eye contact. Eye contact was achieved through planning and the liberal use of eye-line poles. Which meant the film crew had to get used to us using a puppet, a stuffed bear head, on a stick though most of their setups.
MAUGRIM AND VARDIN
These were two CG wolves that play the role as the White Witch's secret police. The challenge with the wolves was to match exactly the real wolves that were cast for the part. Our CG wolves had to cut against the real wolves and at times share a shot. To achieve an exact match we had to refine the in-house combing tools to create very specific combs. The texture pipeline also was streamlined to allow for quick visualization of the furred markings to assure the color markings match exactly as well.
MR. FOX
Mr. Fox was a supporting character with less screen time then the others, but was memorable nonetheless. The detailed expressions and performance given by the animators, along with his lush and vivid fur made him stand out. Like a great character actor, I hope people will remember his performance. This, combined with both the physical and emotional interaction with other digital characters, as well as his stunning transformation to stone, make Mr. Fox my personal favorite.
ENVIRONMENTS
The magic experience of watching "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" is realized through the combination of a great story, wonderful performances by a distinguished cast, dynamic character animation and convincing CG environments. It is the latter, the environments, that take the audience into the world of Narnia, a place frozen in perpetual winter. You can almost feel the cold from the moment you step through the wardrobe and into the winter woods. Such was the design and this is what informed all of our work. Environments present a sense of place for the story and everything we did was geared to support that.
Environments were also created where it was otherwise impossible. The tense, dramatic sequence beneath the frozen waterfall is an example of an impossible location that, even if such a waterfall could have been found, would have been far too dangerous, and way to impractical to film live. Instead, the filmmakers turned to visual effects to create the environment in which this action takes place. In keeping with the spirit of storytelling, the environment itself almost becomes a character as conditions change over the course of the scene, adding elements of time and danger to the scene play.
Similarly, the opening sequence of the film depicts the Bombing of London, a terrifying event in its self, which propels our principal characters to flee the city in favor of the country manor where our story unfolds. Impossible to recapture today, our visual effects were essential to creating this establishing sequence in the skies above a World War II era-London.
FROZEN WATERFALL
The frozen waterfall environment was put together using live-action, miniature, and CG elements. In order for the three to work together, and to create a convincing location, much planning and organization was needed. The live-action plates were shot first, in a 1:1 scale set of a section of waterfall. Later a 1/12 scale miniature was shot to extend the set, and a 1/4 section was shot at high speed for sections of the waterfall collapse. The flowing river and ice chunks were all cg. In order to have highly interactive and realistic behaving water, many techniques and elements were created using customized in-house software. In some cases new tools were written to allow the foam, spray, ice-chunks, and water to all interact with each other. This high level of detail was necessary for the many shots, which featured the water close-up.
LONDON
The bombing of London sequence was comprised of three separate environments; the skies over London, the Pevensie's neighborhood, and Paddington station. In creating each location, historical accuracy had to be maintained. We built planes, trains and houses using photo-grametry, which used images I had taken during a 10-day shoot in the UK. All elements in the skies over London were CG with the exception of the cockpit interior, which was shot on a stage in New Zealand. We used a customized version of our in house particle render to create flax explosions, searchlights, and clouds. The fire and smoke were both created with Houdini. The houses and ground planes were built with Cinema 4D.
WHITE WITCH'S CASTLE
The White Witch's castle location was comprised of the exterior, for wide shots, the courtyard, the foyer, and the throne room. All shared ice-rendering techniques, which employed ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and ray marching to create a volumetric ice, which reacted to light the way real ice would. The castle was made from a combination of glacier like ice, with a milky, subsurface quality, and ice, which was transparent and refractive. We found it was inefficient to have the different renderers communicate with each other, so the multiple passes where rendered separately, and fed into our in house compositing package, where they were then assembled. This gave us the ability and flexibility to create any look we desired and to match the set for all the set extension work.
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