Keeping the vfx in Bedtime Stories believable was the challenge of creating effects that contributed to the storytelling in a realistic way while fitting into the style of comedy. All images © 2008 Disney Enterprises.

In Disney's Bedtime Stories (opening Christmas Day), Adam Sandler plays a hotel maintenance man who finds the fantastical tales he concocts for his niece and nephew are somehow coming real. And the stories Sandler tells veer wildly, from a chariot race in ancient Rome to a Wild West horse race and a showdown in outer space.

Keeping it all believable and of a single piece was the task handed to Visual Effects Supervisor John Andrew Berton Jr., who was intrigued by the challenge of creating effects that contributed to the storytelling in a realistic way while fitting into the style of comedy moviegoers expect from Sandler.

"That to me was a really interesting mix to try to find, to get the effects into the story so that it didn't look like sort of cheesy comedy effects, but was really high quality visual effects work in service of a really family oriented story," he says.

Berton oversaw eight visual effects facilities working on around 500 shots for the film. And the sequences were as different and challenging as the stories within the movie, which ranged from a Ben-Hur-style chariot race to a medieval knights in shining armor scenario to a zero gravity showdown in outer space.

Each section needed to have its own kind of spectacle to it, Berton says, while still looking photorealistic instead of too fantastic.

"We wanted it to look like a real place, a real story with real people in it, but yet still have this feeling of these sort of grand landscapes and grand storyscapes, if you will," Berton adds. "So each one of those had to be handled a little bit differently, but still had to have a tonality that went across the whole movie in terms of the way the visual effects work with the story."

A prime example was the medieval sequence, created by Hydraulx, for which Berton says footage was shot at a winery in Napa that turned out to look too small on film. "We ended up rebuilding the entire thing in computer graphics, but it still had to match all the photography that we did at Napa," he continues. "It's sort of a classical visual effects problem, to take something that's fantastical and wonderful and put it into a live-action environment and make it all look like believable photography."

The chariot sequence, created by Hydraulx, was shot with a minimum of live-action elements and the rest created digitally.

Similarly, the chariot sequence -- also created by Hydraulx -- was shot with a minimum of live-action elements and the rest created digitally. "We had a couple of little set pieces where the main actors stood and we had the real chariot and we had the real horses and we had a big piece of dirt, but that was about it," Berton explains. "It was very difficult work, actually, working with these environments that have to match into something that's not really there. There's lots of dirt, there's lots of dust, there's real animals. All the stuff is giving you clues to realism, and to make the rest of the synthetic stuff fit into it to look like we actually shot in the big stadium somewhere was really the trick there."

Berton says director Adam Shankman, who previously helmed the remake of Hairspray, was a real collaborator when it came to the visual effects. "Adam was very open to ideas and in fact the visual effects team did quite a lot of creative work in terms of developing the ways in which these scenes would play themselves out," Berton suggests.

The space sequence was another challenge, as Sandler's character faced off in a zero gravity duel aboard a spherical space station that had to be created from scratch. The challenge for this sequence, shot against a bluescreen on the Sony lot, was making it look as real as the rest of the movie. "We don't have any reference, we don't know what space stations look like when they're floating out in the middle of the galaxy somewhere," he says. “So we had to make it all up, but we still had to give it that feel of reality that we needed to have it carry on with the rest of the film."

The space sequence was done by London-based Cinesite Europe and supervised by Matt Johnson, who worked out of Los Angeles for the duration of the production.