ComingSoon.net Interviews Narnia Effects Team
ComingSoon.net has posted an interview with Richard Taylor and Dean Wright of Weta Workshop and Howard Berger of KNB FX about their work on “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. They talk about the challenges involved with the amount of digital and practical effects in the film.
CS: Obviously you did a lot of design preparation before you entered the project. How was it working with Andrew on set? If you had already built something was it hard to make changes?
Berger: What was great is that Andrew, because he comes from a digital background, came into this saying, “I don’t know much about this practical stuff. Teach me.” Some directors you get don’t care, but Andrew wanted to know everything. He wanted to absorb everything that we could teach him. There were a lot of things that were storyboarded in the animatics that were to be digital, but we ended up doing practical, because we were able to build all of our mechanical heads. Andrew understood the limitations of what we were able to do but also understood how much we could do. This is how KNB and Weta are. We know what needs to happen, so we’ll overbuild at a cost to ourselves to make sure that what ends up on set is the best and that the director has everything he needs at no cost. Also, I made it mandatory to read the book; no one was allowed to be working at the shop unless they had read the book. I wanted them to understand the source material and then be along on this journey of working on the film.
