The Narnia Experience

Last night I attended a VES showing of Narnia over at the Pixar theatre. This recently released Disney film was a little over two hours long, with approximately 1600 visual effects shots done by three major houses; Rhythm & Hues, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and ILM. Some smaller studios that also worked on this film were Hatch, Gentle Giant, Svengali, and WETA Workshop.

t the screening we had two guest speakers, Dean Wright, the visual effects supervisor, and Scott Farrar, ILM visual effects supervisor. In addition to the visuals of the screening, we were treating to a film reel from Rhythm and Hues which broke down the large battle sequence near the end, as well a short making-of of Aslan.

The movie itself was quite an epic. It's definitely a childrens story, but not a pretty one. I found it to be quite melodramatic. The actors portrayed their characters well, and the children did a wonderful job of communicating with full CG characters.

The visual effects were hit and miss. The most memorable, of course, was Aslan, the lion. In the making-of, they intercut stock footage of their reference lion, and then Aslan. The similiarities were striking. It's a treat to see this computer generated character on screen, full frame at times! Definitely a must see in the theater, just for the exquisite detail created by the team from R&H. SPI did some creature work as well, mostly relegated to the beavers and secondary creatures. The work they did was well done, as was the integration with the environment. Some items did pop out, but that's mainly because I've been working with a similar creature for Charlotte's Web! I must say that our fur will definitely be tops over the beavers. Stay tuned for that in June 2006. ILM did a bunch of creature work and the camp scenes for the film. They were brought in late in production, April of this year! These three big companies did a great job with 3D, from the minataurs, griffins, lions, tigers, cheetahs, centaurs (over sixty species of animals!), to more standard fare, environments and 3D matte paintings of the camps. Unfortunately among some of this wonderful work were some sore spots. Specifically some of the greenscreen compositing. There was not a lot of integration between the actors and the environments. So much so that they really stood out. It's a shame really. Over the past decade plus, we (the vfx industry) have succeeded in making beautiful 3D characters and imagery, from cityscapes to Gollum, but the compositing falls short. Integration and balancing between live action and computer generated environments does not match the level of exactness that we are able to create with just computer generated environments and characters.

Back to the film. Story-wise I will give this film a seven out of 10. I am not familiar with the story and didn't read the book growing up, so what was handed to me in the theatre was pretty much what I expected to happen. Visual effects-wise, I'll give the film a nine, detracting one point because of the horrendous greenscreens and their integration.