Full Prince Caspian Report from Comic-Con – Part 2

2007 San Diego Comic-Con Report – Part 2

by Gymfan15

Read Part 1 here.

In hindsight, if we had known that Ben was going to be there answering questions we probably would have tailored some of our questions for specifically him, but oh well … another time. By the way, NarniaWeb.com was represented there … I made sure they knew that my question was courtesy of y’all!

Andrew mentioned that the scene they had been filming that day had been the one where Susan and Peter find out they can’t come back to Narnia. Shane Rangi was standing in for someone in a blue-screen suit (he said he looked like the Tick). I’m not sure if he was standing in for Aslan or for someone else. To help get the actors emotionally into the scene Andrew had Shane talk to them about how this was their last Narnia movie and how sad they were going to be to leaving, and after a while he noticed that there were two big wet patches on the face of Shane’s suit because he started crying! All the panel members said that they too were sad to see Anna and Will go, but Isis mentioned that they get to come back for The Horse and His Boy, so they’re looking forward to that!

After we were done asking questions we headed back over to our seats where we stayed for the remainder of the panel. They only answered a few more questions (I can’t remember what they were; sorry!) and then Andrew and Ben had to go, since it was the middle of the night where they were, and Andrew said it was “past Ben’s bedtime, and he needed his beauty sleep”. One of the panel members made a comment that Andrew was going to go to bed and Ben was going to go clubbing or something of that ilk, which got a really big laugh. I loved Ben’s expression … it was hilarious.

So after Andrew and Ben left, the rest of the panel stayed on for a bit longer to talk more about the movie. Quite soon after that Howard Berger pulled a new-and-improved Satyr animatronic head out from under the table (he remarked that he was going to get in big trouble with Andrew for this particular stunt), and proceeded to show us how it worked. Richard took the remotes and messed around with the stuff controlling the eyes, mouth, etc. It looked really amazing and the new design looked great!

Last but not least, Richard Taylor had a guy come on stage dressed in full Telmarine armor! It was really neat to get a close-up (well, close-ish) view of it. I still think the mask looks weird, but hey, I don’t make the costumes. Isis spoke a little about the different cultures that inspired the whole look, including Tibet, Greece, pirates; just a whole bunch of stuff.

It’s kind of hard to remember the placement and order of everything, so here’s a quick bulleted list of all the random stuff not mentioned already.

– Filming goes for about three more weeks and VodT filming starts end of January/early February.
– One of the great things about PC was that since they had already done tons of the work in LWW, they could have more freedom and flexibility as far as creatures are concerned; hence the varied age demographic among all the PC creatures.
– The filmmakers want to keep continuity true to the book as far as filming goes, and it has really helped, with the kids especially.
– They had 330 people to outfit for the Telmarine army, and they made 2,500 swords for the film; a lot of which were water-jet cut and some which were hand-ground.
– Mark Johnson said that as long as people keep embracing the films, they have no intention to stop making them. 🙂
– Ben will be releasing a blog on Narnia.com in the near future…Andrew didn’t say if it would be a written or video blog, but I’m hoping the latter!
– There is a hero Satyr in the movie (his head was the one that was shown) and his name is Tyrus.
– Miraz’s armor is a rich bronze and he has pictographs of the history of Telmar emblazoned on his chest-piece. Isis said that Miraz’s armor was her most favorite and beautiful costume to date.
– They had fun shooting in the forest with the Telmarines.
– The four original kids were even more close-knit this time around; they said they all seemed like real brothers and sisters.
– Richard Taylor brought his son to the set of Prince Caspian and he was still at that age where he couldn’t distinguish the difference between characters and actors, so when he met Ben, to him it was just like really meeting Prince Caspian. Richard said Ben was so great about it and never broke character once, but treated his son just as a prince would treat a young boy.
– Prince Caspian the movie is four times the scope of LWW the movie.

So, at the very end of the panel, Howard Berger pulled out a bag of KNB Prince Caspian crew shirts that he’d brought along and showed everyone the two different kinds that he had. One was a dark blue shirt with a white stick-figure drawn on the back that was labeled “Prince Caspian”. The other shirt was dark brown and it had a cartoon of a faun on the back with a HUGE Afro that he said was a “70’s Faun”!. Then he started throwing the shirts into the audience; it was SUCH chaos. Amazingly, I was able to catch one of the Prince Caspian shirts! Thank you so much, Howard!

So, that’s my report of that amazing day! I had SUCH a fun time and it was definitely an experience to remember. May ’08 seems SO far away!

On behalf of NarniaWeb, I’d like to thank all the people who worked so hard to pull that panel off. Mark, Howard, Dean, Isis and Richard, THANK YOU SO MUCH for coming down! It was so great to see you and to hear you talk about the movie. The cool perks you brought with you were above and beyond any of our expectations and again, thanks for the t-shirts, Howard!

Thank you, Andrew and Ben, for getting up in the middle of the night to come and talk to us crazy fans! You have no idea how much it meant to all of us.