VFX art director Christian Alzmann likened The Spiderwick Chronicles to a Brothers Grimm European-type fantasy. Getting realism into that world was his goal. All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Christian Alzmann, visual effects art director at Industrial Light & Magic, has a 10-year track record for creating imaginative creature designs, including the giant subway-train eating worm with thousands of teeth and the head modeled after an artichoke in Men in Black II; the reinvented Wolf Man and Dracula in Van Helsing; and the alien "tripods" in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds

But for The Spiderwick Chronicles (opening Feb. 14 from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies), Alzmann got to go Grimm in overseeing the design and creation of the various goblins, boggarts, fairies and sprites adapted from the children's books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Just the sheer number of creatures as well as their variety presented a formidable challenge for Alzmann and the other members of the visual effects team at ILM.

"This was the first kind of Brothers Grimm European-type fantasy, where there are a lot of rules to fairy tales. There are hundreds of years of stories, and they all have similar conventions. Getting really acclimated to what those rules are, because you have to treat something with this much history with a lot of respect, that probably was the challenge. Also, in the past, the images from these fairy tale movies have always been more cartoonier. They're so unbelievable that getting realism into that world was a big factor.'"

Just the sheer number of creatures presented a formidable challenge for Alzmann and the other members of the visual effects team at ILM.

Did he feel the need to go back and watch some of these movies to get a handle on the rules and how you might break or at least bend them a little? "No, I've read a lot of the old Irish fairy tales. I guess it's a hobby. I've read Japanese, Chinese and all of the European ones. So, I was pretty much up on the rules. But how to implement them visually was the question. So, basically, what we did was we kept looking at nature because that's like one of the main conventions (in this film): that the fairy world is part of the natural world. We, of course, have to have good film knowledge of what came before, but usually that's more something to avoid because we're always trying to come up with something new, something that's never been seen before. Usually older films are something we have to know, but the way they look, we're trying to avoid that."

Did he have to change anything about the way he normally works on a project? In one case: yes. "One of the characters that we ended up doing was a yellow flower sprite. Usually we start with the drawing, the design. We want to start with something out of our head that's 100% imagination, and we might have something in our head that we're referencing kind of in the back of our mind. Then what we will do once we make that drawing is we take stuff from the real world, and we add that into the design to give it a more realistic quality. But that yellow flower sprite, we actually found a photo of this orchid, and we started with that photo and designed it straight off. The photo was so inspiring on its own that we just drew the character into it. We don't normally work that way."