De échte liefhebbers zullen het natuurlijk al weten, er komt na The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' ook een sequel uit ! Die film gaat The Chronicles of Narnia : Prince Caspian heten en alhoewel het nog een ganse tijd zal duren voor de film in de zalen komt is men nu toch al druk bezig met de voorbereidingen en zelf sommige opnames van de film. Heel interessant dus en reden genoeg om eens op de set een babbeltje te doen met Howard Berger die verantwoordelijk is voor de 'Prosthetic make-up' en straks op de credits verschijnt als 'Creature Supervisor', alsook met Visual Effects Supervisor Dean Wright ! Daarenboven krijg je ook al in exclusieve avant-première een aantal foto's van de vreemde wezens die straks in de Narnia-sequel zullen te zien zijn.

Can you tell us what the 2nd unit production of Prince Caspian is currently working on ?

Dean Wright : What we’ve actually been prepping and shooting all day is the scene, that’s at the end of this whole special plan that Peter and Caspian have to outsmart the Telmarines. The Telmarines are closing in on them, but they have a secret underground cistern and they’re ready to sort of knock the wind out (so to speak) underneath the ground from the Telmarines, causing a big trap to be sprung. We’ve been prepping this shot all morning, all the bits, the dust, the debris and creatures, getting the camera movements and lighting just right.

We’re going to do another pick-up of it. This one was a little bit more explosive so the special FX guys rigged and smashed the pillars, causing the ceiling to start to crumble and buckle: we’ve added a light stream through for the sunlight up above. To create a big pit that will trap all the Telmarines that are coming in and charging at the Narnians.

Down in the ground with our team is a giant who is called Wimbleweather in the film and he goes through the cave and smashes a lot of the columns. In order to try and photograph that, we built a scale version so the actor who’s the giant can run through and smash them. Capturing the moments where he’s actually smashing the columns, then we have to pull all the CG guys in there and we scale them down and make them look half the size roughly to fit in with Wimbleweather so it all looks good. Then we add in all the rest of the environment, with a couple hundred creatures going underground and they’ll sort of pop up behind the Telmarines and catch them from behind.

Is Prince Caspian going to have more CG and Visual FX compared too the last film, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe ?

Dean Wright: Andrew has said that he definitely wants to make this film bigger, more exciting, have more complicated stuff to throw at us, not just for the sake of amazing the audience but to bring them into this world more. The more we can make the CG feel real, the more you’ll forget that there are visual FX and you can just enjoy the film.

Any particular scenes that this has proved to be the case more so than others ?

Dean Wright : We have got a big battle scene right in the middle of the film. Where the kids go to a castle and they’re trying to capture someone there in order to help restore piece to Narnia and put Caspian back where he belongs, which is ruling the Narnian world. The work there is beyond anything we did in the last film. We’ve got tons of CG characters. We’ve got a whole miniature environment that’s going to be shot in multiple scales, (24th scale) which is a pretty big size for an entire castle, and then even larger scales and smaller scales that are going to be built down in New Zealand by Richard Taylor’s company WETA Workshop and shot by Alex Funky and his miniature leads who did all the work on “Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong”. We’re really excited to have them on board helping us to create this.
Again, it’s shooting something that’s real and tangible to help create this very cool looking castle. I saw it on “The Lord of the Rings”. When you have a very well lit, photographed miniature, you fall into this world of believing everything you’re seeing, and that’s what we want to do. We just want to suck you into the movie. As director Andrew Adamson drives you through where the important emotional beats of the film are. We’re there to help make that real when you can’t shoot it live and enhance what you can shoot live.

This time, you have Wendy Rogers as your co-visual FX supervisor.

Dean Wright : She has known Andrew Adamson (Director) for many years, and because of the tight schedule and the enormous amount of work, we’ve doubled the shots going out this time, so we decided to split the sequences. The night raid scene that happens at the castle, that’s my sequence, the battle scene that’s going on in Usti right now, that’s one of her scenes, but we help each other out.

Which character has been your favorite to design so far ?

Howard Berger : I like the dwarves. I think they are my favorite characters on this film. We have two heroes, there’s Trumpkin played by Peter Dinklage and Nickabrik, which is played by Warwick Davis, and they’re really cool.
Dean Wright : They’re awesome. When they’re on set, they just take over the set. I think it’s the first time in history that a film shows a dwarf battle !
Howard Berger : Yes, it’s really great! Definitely, the dwarves are my favorite characters on this film.

Are we going to see the return of the Minotaurs in the Film ?

Howard Berger : Yes! Andrew Adamson (Director) wrote in more minotaurs. They were really popular in the first film I was worried they were too bad and might not come back. Then Andrew called and said we’re going to throw some minotaurs in, Especially this one- Asterius, which is the lead minotaur. Last time we did 25 minotaurs this time were actually just doing four minotaurs, its not a big mechanical show. Asterius is in 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 see on the suit is tied one hair at a time into the spandex unitary and then sewn over the muscle suit, and the same with the head. The head is all punched in, 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. Asterius plays through half the film and battles during the night raid and that kind of saves the day to some degree- Tragic but heroic. Then we have a satyr named Tyrus, whose a hero satyr who we did another mechanical hero head and body and all that stuff for. The horns on the minotaur are pretty beaten up. That’s the other thing why we wanted to have the old aged minotaur because he’s been around for awhile and is pretty scarred and messed up.
It’s about the realism, that the story doesn’t stop and hit the movie on the head and go hey look there’s an effect, there’s a makeup effect, there’s a digital effect. You didn’t get that in the first film. Even in the first film I was like, “oh my gosh look at that!” that’s Mr. Tumnus, he’s finished! And I’m sure this one will be the same thing. It’s always really fun to see the film completed, and even though on the first one Andrew had invited a few times to see some scenes, but I didn’t want to see any of it. I didn’t want to go see the film in any form other than completed. I wanted to be surprised to see all the stuff Dean had done. I think this film will be the same. There’s so much stuff it’s always really breathtaking to sit there and see what was on set and what’s now on film, it’s a big difference. Dean and his company will add thousands of creatures.

Can you tell us a little bit about one of the new heroes in this film, the mouse Reepicheep ?

Dean Wright : Reepicheep is going to be very cool. We already have some designs. The company that is actually designing it is the L.A. based Moving Picture Company. They are going to do the work on it. He has a good look, he’s very dashing and very dangerous, but at the same time he is also cute. We don’t want him to look cute because he is a true hero and a fighter. He is actually going to support the Narnians in their battle against the Telmarines. So you don’t want to laugh at him when he’s doing that. It’s that fine line, we have in this film that we didn’t have in the last film. We’ve got CG characters that have to be animals and look real and not like a cartoon. Especially with Reepicheep. He has a lot of fun moments but also serious ones. The audience will care about him a lot. Reepicheep and his family look very similar to each other in the book but in the film each will look very different and each one should have its own characteristics.

What has been the biggest challenge on this film so far ?

Dean Wright : Two things that have made this film even more challenging for us was bringing in more of a variety to the characters that we have, in terms of ages and sexes.
Howard Berger : Yes we wanted to have old-age fawns and heavy-set characters, black centaurs, just a whole big variety.
Dean Wright : The whole point is to add more of a variety to the look of the characters, which again we will have to build into digital characters.

So that’s one thing that added more work to us. The other is Andrew wanted to make the challenge of breaking the CG/real barrier by intermingle the two more. We got much more contact between the real players and the CG characters. For example we have Lucy reaching out to Aslan, they hug and fall on the ground and she rolls on top of him and we have to make that all work. We’ve got the kids being carried by Griffins and we’ve got the kids riding on centaurs sometimes, so it’s a big challenge for us to make all that work and look real. We’re striving for stuff that doesn’t grab your eye and take it away. It should look like it belongs there. That’s the key for us whenever we do any of this. I’m definitely a big believer in that the visual FX shouldn’t dominate the story. Even in a film like this, it’s not about visual FX, it’s about the kids.

The first film was the same way, it’s all about the kids and their story and their journey. It’s the same thing. The kids each have their own struggle that they have to go through. They come to Narnia with their own preconceived ideas of where they should be. Peter thinks he can do stuff on his own. Lucy doesn’t have the courage to stand up for her beliefs. Susan doesn’t admit that she wants to be in Narnia, but can’t face that she’s really there or wants to leave or doesn’t want to leave. Edmond’s just trying to grow up and have a piece of the action and be a man, and they all have their struggles they have to go through. If you get in and just take over that and just take things that are cool visually but distracting from what you’re supposed to focus on or the story, then we haven’t helped the movie. We’ve hurt the film. You see that, especially in this film, this film is going to come out in the summer, but it’s not going to be perceived like a typical summer you-know blockbuster. We want it to have meaning, the books did for 50 years for a lot of people, and we wanted to make sure we carried that one.

So is the film’s going to have a slightly darker tone ?

Dean Wright : It is still going to be a PG film, but it’s a little bit harsher for the kids. It’s a rougher time, it’s a thousand years and there’s a tremendous amount of guilt that they have, even though they didn’t mean to leave, they left not of their own accord, they just sort of wondered through the wardrobe, but what they left behind when they left is this chaos. The Telmarines came in, they slaughtered a lot of their friends or the children of their friends, and these poor creatures have had to live underground and so, they have to sort of atone for that, and no matter what, they’re going to help these creatures take back what’s rightfully theirs and hopefully, do it in a way that they can all live peacefully with at the end, and so that’s the message of the film, along with the individual messages the kids have, and that has to be what you take away when you leave the film.