The day before I went to London, the filmmakers put in a greenscreen shot of a corner of Paddington Station they had shot without me. I had a little QuickTime of the shot with a camera tilt-down on my laptop and I had about two seconds to talk to Dean before I left. He said just collect the pieces, that train, Paddington Station. It was a scavenger hunt, getting these random pieces of the puzzle. It finally came together and it’s amazing how well it works in the final shot, which was filled out with CG extensions.

Filming in cold, harsh conditions with children was a challenge during principle photography.

When I got back from London, we shot multiple stages and multiple units in Auckland for a couple of months, during which my wife and sons moved down to be with me. At the end of October 2004, there was a big exodus to South Island, where we did various locations here and there, and finally ended up in Christchurch shooting the battle stuff just before Christmas. I got back to Los Angeles in January 2005 and had a month to get some of the simpler non-character stuff together. Just as I was getting back in the swing here, we took off for the Czech Republic for five weeks’ shooting in the snow. You can’t shoot kids in cold weather all day long, but you need a little bit of it to make the whole thing look believable. Dean and I spent three days doing helicopter shooting in the Northern Czech Republic, then we went back to Prague, where we were setting up a big wave tank for the water sequence. We got back to Culver City tired, and started shooting miniatures, while the rest of the Imageworks team was continuing character animation.

Animation
Andrew is used to exploring his animated characters for a year before starting filming, but we didn’t have that luxury. In February 2005, we needed to get going to finish what were eventually 580 shots in eight months. At our peak, we had a team of 150 people working fulltime. We had to explore the look of the characters within the sequences with blocking, and once Andrew had bought off on that primary stage, we’d fur it. We’d developed incredible fur combing tools on Stuart Little that allow the artists to create very specific fur shape and style, and also optimizations where we could actually render something as complicated as Stuart Little’s head with 500,000 hairs in an hour-and-a-half. I anticipated that the level of fur detail these characters would need was a problem, and that we’d need to create a pipeline where we could make that happen very quickly.

Part of the challenge of creating Mr. Beaver was to make him talk and walk convincingly, but retain a natural quality.

The Creatures: Making Beavers Walk Upright and Talk
The first characters we started working on were Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who are principal characters in the movie. They’re very interactive with the kids, and they’re the most anthropomorphic of all the critters. The animals were all supposed to look like real animals that just happen to talk. With the beavers, you’re kind of eased into them, so by the middle of the film when they’re really moving around and gesticulating like humans, you’ve bought into the fact that they’re real. Originally, we slightly underestimated how much musculature the beavers would need. Beavers are fat, jiggly things, but Andrew’s very sensitive to what muscles move and how. We figured we’d need to have two sets of muscles to deal with the challenge of having an animal that normally walks as a quadruped walk bipedal, so we did walk cycles for months, but it was very hard to get the muscle movement. It wasn’t really two full sets of muscles, just some muscles that work in the bipedal movement but not in the quadruped mode. It’s scary to have to use two sets of muscles, but we knew there weren’t many places where he’d make that transition from quadruped to bidepal. We got the look of the back of Mr. Beaver’s head bought off first, so we did all those shots, and then the shots where he was sitting, to give us time to get the bipedal walk down. Once we got Mr. Beaver figured out, Mrs. Beaver was much easier. The way we did end up exploring their characters is actually in the Beaver Hut sequence. We worked out different facial expressions and body gestures. In some shots there were really big arm movements that made them look very endearing, which Andrew would approve of. That’s why he specifically didn’t want us to look at the video of Ray Watson giving his lines as Mr. Beaver. He wanted us to explore the characters within the scene so we’d discover the beaver-like characteristics on our own without the human performance to influence the animation. We also did a great effect close-up of Mrs. Beaver when she comes out of the water dripping and shakes off, which looks awesome.

“What was difficult about the beavers,” according to David Smith, “was that they had to have both the physiology of a beaver and the more anthropomorphic kind of motions. That was a struggle, because when you put a muscle in one place, it would kind of mess it up for the other directions. We basically had a customized set of muscles you could turn on or off, or blend, too, if needed. Fortunately, they were usually in one mode or the other.”

Since joining Sony Pictures Imageworks in 1996, Jim Berney has served as visual effects and CG supervisor on a number of notable projects, including The Polar Express: An IMAX 3-D Experience, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Hollow Man and Stuart Little.