Double Negative had the task of creating the fairy tale world of Ella Enchanted. Courtesy of Double Negative © Miramax Films.

Vfx help create the magical world and fantasy characters for Miramax Films’ Ella Enchanted. A twist on the classic Cinderella fairy tale, the film, directed by Tommy O’Haver, is based on the best-selling, Newberry Honor-winning novel by Gail Carson Levine and stars Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries).

The single most challenging shot, according to visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton, was the three-minute-plus opening aerial shot, designed to introduce the audience to the magical style of the film and various locations in the story, including environments that only existed in vfx. Double Negative (Dneg), headed up by Matt Twyford, Jesper Kjolsrud and Hal Couzens, were awarded the sequence.

Based at Ardmore studios in Dublin, the film used locations in the neighboring Wicklow mountains for the landscapes. The vfx team reconned the hills and valleys by helicopter for best features, times of day, etc. Bickerton then selected locations and landscape models were created from ordnance survey maps. Concurrently the vfx art department, led by Dave Allday, drew up miniatures from production designer Norman Garwood’s lead. Allday also designed a skyline that matched the Miramax logo so that their graphic could gently segue into the opening shot. Previs artists Pete Bebb and Pieter Warmington incorporated these elements into the 3D landscapes to create previs animation for approval by O’Haver. The previs then helped to guide the actual helicopter aerial shoot. Adam Dale operated Wescam, while ground teams raced around the valleys to lay out huge day-glo orange tracking markers in time for the camera’s approach. Bickerton and vfx editor Kevin Aherne then selected takes and retimed in the Avid.

Robbie Scott headed up a team of modelmakers at Cutting Edge Effects to build the 15-foot high Lamia skyscrapers and the complex Elf village. Leigh Took and Ben Hall of Mattes and Miniatures handled the construction of the Frell suburb, a smaller Lamia city, the end shot landscape and various vfx elements. Dneg tracked the aerial footage to translate into appropriate Moco moves on miniatures of the Lamia castle skyline, the Elf village and the Frell suburb. Over a period of four weeks, the miniatures were shot using the motion control camera’s Wotan extended crane arm operated by Ian Menzies. Because of surrounding trees, the final approach to Ella’s house could not be achieved on the real location, so the Dneg crew created a photogrammetry version from the opening frames of the final stage crane shot and tracked that into the landscape. A CG window bridged the crane shot into the studio bedroom set. Dneg spent nearly six months compositing all the elements in Shake. “Phew! Without doubt the single most complex shot in the film that we worked on from the earliest days of pre-production to the very last days of post,” admits Bickerton.

Previs and final shots of Double Negative’s effects. Courtesy of Double Negative © Miramax Films.