The scope of Prince Caspian is an epic leap, effects wise. © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media LLC.

7. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
The vfx bar was raised with this second Narnia installment, with Dean Wright and Wendy Rogers supervising the work primarily done by MPC (CG Reepicheep, full CG Narnians, CG Narnian/actor hybrids), Framestore (CG Trufflehunter, CG Aslan, CG squirrel Pattertwig, Dryad Dream, Tube Station transition, Magic Door, Cair Paravel) and Weta Digital (CG Bear, CG Werewolf, CG Ice and CG White Witch). "The scope of this movie is so much grander," Wright observes. "It really is an epic leap, effects wise. We had a lot more CG characters and much more physical interaction with human characters. We also had a large amount of environment work, which was minimal in the first movie. It was so much work that I was glad Wendy joined us to co-supervise the effects."

For The Spiderwick Chronicles a number of new tools were developed. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

8. The Spiderwick Chronicles
The amount and variety of unusual creatures adapted from the fantasy/adventure books were so immense that the vfx were shared by ILM and Tippett Studio. Legendary animation and vfx pioneer Phil Tippett served as creature supervisor and his studio Tippett did animation and design work on Hogsqueal, the Troll, Redcap, the goblins and bull goblins. Tippett developed a number of new tools to enhance the pipeline, including the creature manager, which provided animators a nice interface to the pipeline, and Riot Control, which allowed them to make use of particle maps and vary the cycles in order to undertake a scene involving 120 goblins. Under the vfx supervision of Tim Alexander and animation supervision of Tim Harrington, ILM handled several key creatures and environments. Thimbletack proved to be the most complicated: "We've done facial animation before, and we had a pretty good system," says Harrington. "But we thought this would be a great opportunity to push the R&D department to come up with some new tools for creating facial animation. For instance, Thimbletack, we knew he was going to have to go through a wide range of expressions, and in some shots he would go from happy to angry to confused all within the span of two or three shots because he's kind of a manic character. So, the R&D department created this next-generation animation system called the Fez. It's basically replacing our old Cari facial animation system."