All Pop-Culture Roads Lead to Comic-Con
Speaking of The Chronicles of Narnia, director Andrew Adamson appeared live from Prague via satellite feed at the Disney session to introduce the series' next film Prince Caspian, due out next May. Unlike Spielberg, Adamson attempted to chat with the onstage panelists, a start-and-stop effort thanks to the two-way time lag of trans-Atlantic video transmission. According to Adamson, Disney plans to release the remaining Narnia films on a once-a-year basis, a schedule that may challenge cast, crew and post-production houses alike. After a reel of in-progress footage the audience was treated to onstage demonstration of an animatronic satyr head and an actor modeling grim-masked 'Telmarine' warrior armor from the film.
After successfully tackling The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, vfx supervisor Dean Wright admitted that the bar has definitely been raised for the second installment, Prince Caspian (from Disney and Walden). There is not only more action, but also more complex models from creature supervisor Howard Berger. "There are huge battles in this film, so we've got a lot more character integration," Wright said.
Since this time they shot primarily in the Czech republic, it made financial sense to use London-based MPC and Framestore CFC along with Weta Digital for vfx. Framestore is doing Aslan, Trufflehunter, the badger, the River-god sequence, kids entering and leaving Narnia, supervised by Jon Thum. MPC, under Greg Butler, is doing mainly the battles. Weta is doing three things: a werewolf, a wild bear and all of the environments for the castle.
Pixar director Andrew Stanton followed, on behalf of WALL•E, the studio's summer 2008 effort about a trash-collecting robot (whose resemblance to Short Circuit's "Number 5" is unmistakable) spending centuries cleaning up an abandoned, trash-strewn Earth while yearning for love. An altered version of Pixar's famous Luxo Jr. logo featuring WALL•E was shown, followed by a mock commercial for a Wal-Mart style robot superstore where WALL•Es are on sale. Sound designer Ben Burtt joined Stanton to discuss the robots' beep-and-boop voices. It's a subject the Star Wars veteran is intimately familiar with, and which apparently constitute the majority of the film's 'dialog.'
Following Stanton's, brilliant, detailed presentation of WALL•E, he discussed some of the joys and challenges of directing Pixar's first foray into sci fi and the story of a rusty 400-year-old compacting trash robot. ("What if mankind had to evacuate earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off... it really combines two things I love -- the space movie genre and the giving of life to an inanimate object.")
Inspired by Luxo Jr. and then by using his son's binoculars at a baseball game, Stanton saw the potential for facial expressions. "I just wanted it to feel like R2-D2: The Movie... I definitely knew that I didn't want it to be the world of the Tin Man. You get a whole different audience response when we look at a pet or an infant, because they don't fill the whole equation and they can't express exactly how they feel, so you're forced to pull from yourself... to fill in the blanks, and I think you get a much more tactile response.
As for the lonely Robinson Crusoe scenario, he remembered reading that the biggest fear was loneliness and it stuck with him for seven years. He also longed for a great space adventure. "We're in a weird place now where if you can think of it, it can be done..."
However, Stanton admitted that there have been some technological hurdles.
"I felt that there was a look to the space genre, because of the special [large format] cameras and anamorphic lenses that I hadn't seen in any of our work, and a lot of the R&D guys said you could use those same kind of lens settings and get shallow focus and depth of field and barrel distortion with an anamorphic lens. And, we put in the settings and it didn't look like that at all.
"We honestly got a dp and consultation from Roger Deakins and we made a mock, actual size WALL•E and Eve and put them in space at Pixar with the grids and everything, filmed them with the correct lenses and correct cameras and then we made the virtual set with the virtual characters with our virtual lenses and, sure enough, they didn't match at all. We had to have that to prove to the guys that it's not doing what it's supposed to. So there's a little laundry list of things like that we have, in the last three or four years, fixed and corrected, and then there's been a lot that we've gained and learned since Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Ratatouille for improving our lighting and rendering that contribute to it making feel much more familiar territory -- for what it's like to watch any movie with the right camera rig, specific kind of lighting and so forth. That was a big thing for me. I said I want it to feel just as real and as dimensional as if we were underwater in Finding Nemo."
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