“Every time you look up what you see is CG,” he continues. “The set in Queensland was huge, but it was only built to 40 feet high. So for Hook’s galleon it only went as high as the first crow’s nest. All the ship and sail detail above that had to be added, along with the clouds and sun, and even the parts of the ship that stretch down into the water.”

Flying Free of Photorealism
Farrar readily admits that a need to create artistically led special effects proved a little tricky. “You’d think not having to worry about photorealism would make things easier, but this has to be the most difficult film I’ve ever worked on. Even just from the color management point of view it was such a challenge. We literally had entire color teams, dealing with such issues as the need to tweak Tinker Bell to suit any given background.”

With Tinker Bell, the original intention had been to create a fully CG character, using Ludovine Sagnier merely for reference. In the event the actress displayed Chaplin-like comic abilities, her facial performance was utilized whenever possible, though some CG facial animation for both Tinker Bell and Pan (played by Jeremy Sumpter) was required.

For this, ILM augmented its established digital doubles approach (making use of proprietary tools ISculpt, Caricature and Zeno for sculpting, facial animation and rigid body simulation, respectively), with reference provided by a six-camera setup to capture a wealth of expressions from multiple angles. In addition, a simulation system was added to animate the leaf costumes worn by the duo, while the CG Tink and Hook (Jason Isaacs) also required new tools for handling tufted and spiral-curled hair.

It’s hard to find any scene in the film that doesn’t have a touch of magic added by the vfx fairies. Credit: Industrial Light & Magic.

Extensive work was also required to give the characters the power of flight. “We’ve seen a lot of movies where the flying doesn’t look so hot,” says Farrar, “We knew first and foremost that you need to control the actor, using wires attached to their limbs, and then be ready to swap bits of their bodies to animate as necessary. There’s no motion capture, and classical animation isn’t applicable to the human form, so we had to very carefully select animators, who could reference what the real actors were doing, then rely on their skill and sense of timing and movement.”

Having worked with motion control for so many years, the ILM team also appreciated the importance of the relationship between camera, subject and background. “What’s wrong with some of the Superman films is that they go and shoot an aerial plate then try to recreate the movement with the actors in the foreground. It’s just impossible. So we’d do matchmoves for everything, tracking all the camera moves.”

In any given shot in Peter Pan, a character might seamlessly blend from completely real to digital double. “For any move in a wire harness, you’re naturally inclined to move your legs,” points out Farrar. “That’s not something you’d need to do if you could really fly, so the answer is to take the bluescreen performance and then replace the body from the waist down.”

Farrar chuckles at the recollection of some of the tricks used to make the blends completely invisible. “One joke I make is to say the secret to visual effects is keep it dark and out of focus! Of course you can’t do that, but when possible we did use visual sleight of hand, so to speak. A couple of times PJ would say, ‘Why did Pan have to go out of frame at that point?’”

Not surprisingly, it’s Tinker Bell who clocks up the most air miles, and therefore required the most replacement work. Extra effort was also required to successfully convey her size and weight, create suitably iridescent wings and add a unique pixie glow.