This is the third of four installments in VFXWorld’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe production diaries.

Sony Pictures Imageworks was involved very early on in testing the animation for Mr. Beaver and his wife. All Narnia images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media Llc. All rights reserved.

My Own History With the Book
I first became aware of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1971 in kindergarten. My teacher started to read the story to us, and I created the world in my head. She only read for a few days and then we moved away, but I still wondered what the rest of the story was. Then while living in Stockholm in 1989, I was traveling on a train, talking about books with a guy I’d just met. He was telling me about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I said, “I know that book — you’ve heard of that book?” I thought, I’ve got to complete that story, but, being in college, I never did. And then, here at Imageworks about four years ago, we’d just finished working on The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, and I was trying to figure out what the next big property out there would be, and I was thinking: I bet it’s the Narnia series.

About two years ago, I was in between projects and getting a little nervous. Deborah Giarratana, our rep, always has her ear to the ground about what’s coming up, and she told me about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. While she wasn’t certain that I’d want to be a part of it on a limited budget, what she didn’t know was my history with the book. I really did want to do it, and I thought: They’ve got to get it right. I knew the budget would get bigger, because there are not a whole lot of properties left that have this kind of scope and history. When I read the script, it reinforced what I’ve always had in my head about the story: that initial walk through the wardrobe was my introduction to fantasy, that initial world, and that they’d really pulled it off in the script. What I liked about it was that the characters were diverse, both good and evil.

The filmmakers originally planned to have one visual effects company bid to do all 1,400 shots, which was giant. They had about 10 main CG characters, but there were 40 different creatures to build, and multiple variations on the theme (not just one centaur, but 10 distinctly different centaurs). Besides Imageworks, the other effects houses they were talking to were ILM and Rhythm & Hues. The first step for each one was to do an animation test on some of the CG characters in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Jim Berney had to fly all over the world to help find his place in Narnia. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The Beaver Test
We started with an animation test, which gave us a chance to work with director Andrew Adamson, and he could also see the process he’d be working with, and not just the dollar amount of our bid. The test of the Beaver character began with literally just some stills the filmmakers shot while location scouting. They gave us some plates and two dialogues pulled out of the movie, and we started putting a beaver together. I believe they gave us a model from their original rotoscan, and we started rigging it to animate without muscles but furring it and figuring out the plate. We turned it into a day for night and put the lamppost into it, where it’s a dark glowing forest in the snow and this beaver came down and gave this absolutely random line.

We went all-out just to polish off two shots. The whole team wanted to show creativity, and what we bring to the table with just a digital still and some dialogue. I thought it went really well. I think Andrew did enjoy working with us, but in the end Rhythm & Hues won the bid. Just doing the test was exhausting. It took two or three months, and bidding the whole picture took a good five months. It was a real letdown not to be awarded the show. I went on vacation with my family, and when I got back, I began to pull together The Polar Express IMAX 3-D team. That was well underway when we learned that Dean Wright, with whom we’d worked very well on The Two Towers, was finishing the third film and was set to produce the visual effects for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. By now we also learned that production had broken down the visual effects for the film into three different packages. Dean asked us to bid on about 50 shots initially, and it grew from there. By the end of July 2004, we were awarded the characters of Mr. Tumnus, Mr. & Mrs. Beaver and the wolves named Maugrim and Vardin.

Principal Photography
There was a lot of gray area about what our shots might be when I packed my bags and flew into Auckland, New Zealand, a week after principal photography began in August 2004. I shot plates for two weeks, 16-hour days, and then flew back to Los Angeles to get the Imageworks people set on what we were going to do.

Animation director David Schaub and digital supervisor David A. Smith led the team. We knew the broad strokes of the characters they could start on, like building and animating the beavers from the test, and we knew the schedule would be tight. I don’t think people here understood that I wasn’t planning on coming back until the end of principal. I shot another week in Auckland, and then took a 36-hour-long flight to London with a small 3^rd unit. By then we were doing the Bombing of London sequence, which opens the film, and there were also things with trains I had to get.