Adamson was determined to make Caspian a bigger film than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Above, Edmund rides on a gryphon, about to embark on a night castle raid. 

"Doing a live-action picture vs. an animated one is largely like the difference between a sprint and a marathon," he reflects. "The intensity is the same but the duration is different. In animation you get a lot more chances, you can refine things over and over again. Live action, obviously, when you've got 500 people looking over your shoulder, you haven't as many chances.

"Well, this is kind of like both, because you do the live-action part and then you have to go and do the part with all the animated characters. But the nice thing about doing a combined live-action/animation film is that you don't necessarily have to reshoot things. You can give lines to animated characters that you do six months down the track. In both films, I actually redid scenes with animated characters and added lines later on that made the live-action part work better."

A global consortium of vfx houses was used, lead by MPC, Framestore-CFC and Weta Digital. Above is the brave minotaur Asterius.

Adamson admits that he was determined to make Caspian a bigger film than its predecessor The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. "I didn't quite exploit locations to the same level in Wardrobe. That film started small -- in a winter landscape that we shot onstage -- then expanded into a bigger and bigger world. This time we wanted to shoot in more real locations and take advantage of them. We used a huge variety of cameras: from cable cameras to vertical cameras, to the largest camera crane we could find: a 100-foot one. We actually strung cables in the woods and had someone run along with cameras. The problem is there's always a natural tendency to put more challenges in front of yourself. There's also the audience's expectations: the last film was this big -- they're going to expect at least that. From there on it just expands. The film takes over and begins rolling on its own."

For Caspian, a global consortium of vfx houses took over from Wardrobe's team of Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rhythm & Hues and ILM: The Moving Picture Co. (MPC) in London was the film's lead shop, assisted by neighboring Framestore-CFC, Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based Weta Digital and ScanlineVFX in Munich and L.A. (Studio C and Rising Sun Pictures also receive mention in the film's credits.)

"It was a financial decision," Adamson explains. "I was obviously very happy with all the effects in the first film, but when we started looking at where we were shooting and where we could do post-production, the British effects firms were very aggressive in their pricing.

"There's a huge affinity for this property in England," he says of C.S. Lewis' beloved parable. "We had an English composer, an English editor and production designer, a German cinematographer -- we had enough things to qualify for the British [tax] rebate scheme. Suddenly, the financial side of doing the effects in the U.K. became very attractive. On top of that the companies really wanted to prove they could do it."