The amount and variety of unusual creatures in The Spiderwick Chronicles was so daunting that the vfx was shared by ILM and Tippett Studio. Above Red Cap and the Goblins destroy a kitchen. All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The Spiderwick Chronicles (opening Feb. 14 from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies), directed by Mark Waters, is a fantasy-adventure based on the best-selling series of books illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi and written by Holly Black. It's chock full of ogres, goblins, boggarts, fairies and sprites that populate the Spiderwick Estate, where the Grace family -- twins, Jared and Simon, their sister Mallory and Helen, their mother -- have relocated.

The amount and variety of unusual creatures from the five volumes was so daunting that the visual effects had to be shared by two studios: San Francisco's Industrial Light & Magic and Berkeley's Tippett Studio. Visual effects pioneer Phil Tippett was creature supervisor for the overall production. On set during the entire principal photography, he worked with the visual effects team from his own studio along with the team from ILM to coordinate the nightmarish logistics involved in combining live action with CG.

The team at Tippett Studio included in-house Creature Supervisor Joel Friesch, who also served as co-visual effects supervisor with Blair Clark, CG Supervisor Russell Darling and Animation Supervisor Todd Labonte.

Explains Clark: "We did all of the animation and design work on Hogsqueal, the Troll, Redcap, the goblins and bull goblins, as well as lighting, texturing and compositing and doing the final output."

At least, they knew what they were getting into from the very beginning. In fact, Tippett Studio openly pitched Paramount to secure the project as Clark elaborates. "We had a lot of people who were very aware of Tony DiTerlizzi's books, myself included, and I always thought they would be really cool turned into a movie... So, we were very interested when we heard that it was being looked at [for a feature film]. We had a little bit of down time after finishing a show (Charlotte's Web), and we had an elite modeler, Sven Jensen. He had some time and we asked him to make a little 3D goblin based on Tony DiTerlizzi's drawings in the books and in the field guide, which pretty much all through the production was always used as the bible."

According to Clark, Jensen "nailed" the goblin. "We had a couple of notes for him along the way, but he did such a good job on it with Mudbox and Maya, and it just looked great. It was very faithful to DiTerlizzi's drawings. We kind of took a little bit of license with his feet and his hands. In Tony's drawings, they're pretty much like chicken feet and chicken hands. We changed them a little bit so he could have an opposable thumb to shift and manipulate things a little easier. We just polished it a little bit so it would be easier to run and rock and stand. But other than that it was really cool."

Next, it was up to the animation team to do their thing. "Then Todd came on. He had a couple guys, and they started doing some tests to play with it and move it around and see what we had. They did a whole vignette of little things with just a goblin and a spear on a primitive platform. It was really promising. We decided to make more of those and finish it off with a little piece that had more than one shot. We ended up with a sequence where these goblins are running through a bunch of trees and then going into the water and swimming across the lake toward the camera. They get sucked under the surface by some shadowy shape and then the one remaining goblin turns pale and starts swimming away from camera."