Over at Coming Soon they have an excellent interview with some of the Effects team from the Chronicles of Narnia movies and a few shots of some of the creatures. It’s definitely worth a read, but for me the main part of it all was the complexity and the blend of CGI and real effects.
Howard Berger: We pulled every trick out of the bag. We had prosthetic stuff, heavy or light prosthetics, full suits, mechanical heads, background heads, puppets, etc. We used everything to just make it all work. Also, it’s nice talking about the digital thing. If the audience sees that there’s an actor in makeup yet he has dog-jointed legs, it might throw them off, thinking “That’s not a full digital character, so how are they going about that?” I think that’s where that plays best, instead of having a full CG creature running around. I think it’s much more believable to have that human aspect.
Dean Wright: The challenges in this film are immense in that you’ve got not only thousands of creatures that have to attack each other and look believable, but the variety is much greater scope than we had to deal with on the “Rings.” On this, there’s 20-30 different creatures that could be battling in a scene at any one time, and each of them have their own unique attributes in terms of how they walk, move, bite. It would create an enormous challenge to the developers to allow us to create these battle sequences and make them be believable.
The big thing for me is the blending of the effects, seeing a creature where the main part is physical effects and the rest is CGI will add tons to the believability. Superb news and it’s just getting me more and more excited.
They say that in Rings it was much easier because the huge battles scenes were all thousands of the same creature, in Narnia that figure of 20-30 different creatures in the same sized battle scenes is pretty immense. Imagine the complexity of those scenes.
These things are just amazing, more leaps forward to bring us some of the best stories every that could never have been given justice on the big screen before. What do you think, are these developments a good thing?
I dont have a background at all on this project, never read the book, nor saw the play that was running here in Sadlers Wells for a while, and I guess I am coming in clean with no expectations.
So glad you guys have progress notes on the project.