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

Mr. Tumnus the faun is the first of the mythical characters that we meet in Narnia. All images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media Llc. All rights reserved.

Mr. Tumnus
We were awarded the show on a Friday, and on Monday, when I arrived in New Zealand, at the start of the second week of principal photography, I first met with Dean Wright to discuss how we were going to create the goat legs for Mr. Tumnus. We were actually working with Giant Studios, a New Zealand effects company, to collaborate with them on a combination of motion capture and animation. We did a test with James McEvoy, the actor playing Tumnus, who wore green pants with target dots on them during filming, and we found that if he could walk on tiptoes during filming, and still say his lines, that it made his body appear more believable as a faun. The first scene we shot with him was the first day of snow work at the main Narnia forest set at Kelly Park, where Lucy comes through the wardrobe for the first time. Giant had their motion capture cameras set up on that set, and basically the way it worked was we’d get the plate from editorial, we’d do the matchmove of the camera movement, and then we’d give the digital camera plate to Giant and they’d do the motion capture integration of the legs to the body. For the leg animation, it was about 90% of the way there, and then we’d do foot interaction, and all the hair, muscle and fur details, to really complete the shot. We were able to use a lot of James’ footprints from the shot to help line up the animated hooves in the final composited shot.

David A. Smith, digital supervisor, said, “I actually thought Tumnus worked better than I expected. It’s hard to put goat legs on a man; they’ve got to fit the photography that was shot. When Andrew first saw a few shots put together, he said it was amazing how quickly you dismiss the fact that it’s a human, you just see his legs and it’s all part of his character right here. Having seen the development, I didn’t have that same jump to the final product, but if I step back for a minute, you go, wow, that is good.”

The wolves bare some teeth as the White Witch’s foot soldiers.

Maugrim, Vardin and the Wolves
We had live-action wolves to match in our effects shots for certain kinds of action and when the wolves have dialogue. They had cast Maugrim and Vardin with dogs that were half-wolf, and there were some random wolves that would run around with them, that had to move and be militaristic. We filmed as many shots as possible with the real dogs, but pretty much every plate we shot with a real dog had to be covered as a visual effects shot after the fact. We’d work with the second unit director for five hours to try to get a shot of the wolves searching the beaver hut for the kids. But in reality, you get half a beaver hut set, hide meat everywhere, let the dogs go and all you see are a bunch of dog butts pointing at the camera. The dogs are happy, their tails wagging, tongues hanging out. They’re not thinking about the drama, they’re not wondering where are those kids? So, we had to replace their wagging tails in a bunch of shots to make them look more menacing. What helped was that we had to make our CG wolves look exactly like these two wolves, which is hard and scary, but at least you have a clear direction and know where to go. The two main wolves were different breeds. Maugrim had a big head with weird spiky fur. Vardin’s kind of a Malamute, black-and-white. For the other wolves, we’d kind of blend the two six different ways so we’d have variations on their look and color. Once we really got into editing, and Andrew saw the live action and CG wolves cut back to back, like, literally, here’s their wolf and here’s our CG shot of the same wolf, it was nice to see that it looked just like the real wolf. I have so much faith in these guys at Imageworks, I was confident that we could get it done in time.