Nine vendors worked on Prince Caspian for a total shot count of 1,600. CG Aslan was created by Framestore. All images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media LLC.

In 2005, the first installment of the Chronicles of Narnia franchise met an enthusiastic response from audiences worldwide. It also garnered an Academy Award nomination for best visual effects, rewarding the remarkable work achieved by Dean Wright (overall visual effects supervisor), Bill Westenhofer (Rhythm & Hues), Jim Berney (Sony Pictures Imageworks) and Scott Farrar (ILM).

Two-and-a-half years later, the Pevensie children are back in Narnia in Prince Caspian (which opened May 16 from Disney), and most of the first film's creative team returns, too, including Wright as overall vfx supervisor. This time though, he shared his supervisory position with Narnia newcomer Wendy Rogers, a former colleague of director Andrew Adamson at PDI. "The scope of this movie is so much grander," Wright observes. "It really is an epic leap, effects wise. We had a lot more CG characters and much more physical interaction with human characters. We also had a large amount of environment work, which was minimal in the first movie. It was so much work that I was glad Wendy joined us to co-supervise the effects."

With a vfx shot count of 1,600, Prince Caspian has only 100 shots more than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Yet, the work turned out to be far more complex. "On the first movie, those 1,500 shots included 300 fix-its and miscellaneous effects," Wright notes. "So, we really had about 1,200 complex shots. On Prince Caspian, we had 1,600 very complicated shots! Ninety percent of them featured digital characters, sometimes hundreds of them…"

The film's major environment, Miraz Castle, was built as a miniature and was featured in more than 300 shots. Here, Edmund is about to embark on a night raid. 

A New Narnia Made in London
Although Wright and his production colleagues were very satisfied with the work accomplished by the U.S.-based vendors on the original movie, they decided to turn to London-based companies for the sequel. "The first movie was shot in New Zealand and post-produced in L.A.," Wright recalls, "which made American vfx vendors a logical choice. This time, though, we shot in Prague, Czech Republic, and post-production took place in London. It made sense that all the key visual effects were created there too. It was also a question of resources: who had the capacity to produce so many shots in the time that we had? In the last show, the lead vendor did about 400 shots. This time, it was more than twice as much!"

Nine vendors worked on Prince Caspian, some of them working on shared shots, which explains why the total shot count of 1,600 isn't a sum of the individual shots.

• MPC -- 842 shots
  CG Reepicheep, full CG Narnians, CG Narnian/actor hybrids (Centaurs, Fauns, Satyrs and all other CG creatures except those noted below) for all sequences (castle raid, final battle sequence, including CG trees attack, Council sequences, etc.), Telmarine army extensions

• Framestore -- 514 shots
  CG Trufflehunter, CG Aslan, CG squirrel Pattertwig, Dryad Dream, Tube Station transition, Magic Door (CG tree), set extensions (Buruna bridge sequences, including CG soldiers, trebuchets, etc.); Cair Paravel, etc.

• Weta Digital -- 296 shots
  CG Bear, CG Werewolf, CG Ice and CG White Witch enhancements (hair and dress extensions); plus all Miraz Castle environment work, including miniature comps, CG set extensions, fully CG environments, 2D & 3D matte paintings

• ScanlineVFX -- 22 shots
  CG River God

• Studio C --34 shots
  CG breath and CG Hag eye enhancement

• Rising Sun, Cinesite, Rainmaker, production unit --141 shots
  Additional vfx work