Aslan the CGI Lion
Overwhelmed audiences gasping in awe, cinema halls across the globe reverberating with the mighty Aslan’s roar, worldwide box Office collections at $530 million in 5 weeks!
A faithful adaptation of C S Lewis’ masterpiece, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe directed by Andrew Adamson and produced by Walt Disney Pictures & Walden Media is as expected, taking a lion’s share of Box Office collections worldwide. The blockbuster distributed by Columbia Tristar (India) roars into Indian Cinema halls on Republic Day .
The movie is a marvellous mixture of moving human performances, cutting-edge, photo-realistic techniques in CGI animation and animatonics and prosthetic make up. The CG and animation effort was lead by Rhythm & Hues Studios with overflow tasks handled by Sony Imageworks and Industrial Lights and Magic while the animatronics, prosthetics and make up effects were done by Weta Workshop and K.N.B EFX.
From the Indian VFX perspective the icing on the cake, rather quite a good part of the cake itself is the role that Rhythm & Hues India has played in the making of this CG extravaganza.
The work that R&H India did in Narnia
Peter’s CGI Army preps for battle
Commenting upon the involvement of Rhythm & Hues (LA) as well as about the role that the Indian facility played, Rhythm & Hues India Digital Production Manager, A. R. Seshaprasad, told Animation ‘xpress, “Rhythm & Hues was the lead house on creating all the visual effects and animation for Narnia and as the show grew, Sony Imageworks and ILM were brought on to help with the additional work”
“R&H was tasked with creating a fully CG Aslan, the lion, and handling the majority of the battle sequence at the end of the film, which required the creation of as many as 60 photoreal characters and a simulation to deal with their combat. We spent well over 18 months working on this project and R&H India has been involved from the beginning. In total R&H India worked on several hundered shots right here in Mumbai, primarily in Compositing, Camera Tracking, and Character Matchmoving” he added.
Oreius, the lead Centaur: Example of body replacement
Prasad further elaborated that, “A specific example of the various compositing shots we did involves our work on the centaurs. A lot of centaurs (a character which has horse’s legs & a human upper half) were shot with riders riding the horses. Our compositors had to remove the riders & the horse heads from the live action footage so that computer generated human upper halves could be integrated. In some shots the lower half had to be removed so that computer generated horse bodies could be fitted on.”
“As for an example of the camera tracking and matchmoving work that our artists did, we can look at the final battle sequence. For a realistic integration of the large number of CGI characters that were created in our Los Angeles facility, the camera tracks had to be perfect. The large battlefield terrain had to be populated with CGI characters which were very sensitive to even the slightest mismatch between the live action and the virtual cameras. This challenging task was accomplished very smoothly by our talented team. The character matchmoving was an added complexity in addition to the camera tracking where we had to match the live action character movements with CGI character rigs. This was a very important phase as a lot of characters were half live & half CGI and thus the computer generated legs had to be perfectly integrated with upper half of the characters to give us a seamless effect. In many ways this was a first pass of character animation that we did in India which was then passed on to our talented colleagues in Los Angeles who added the main animation performance.”
The Time and number of artists it took for R&H India
CGI Griffin created by Rhythm & Hues Studios
On being asked about how many people at R&H India worked on the project and for how many months? Prasad replied that,”R&H India has been involved from the beginning (18 months ago) in various R&D tasks and artists from the various teams got involved in Narnia in a phased manner as the production tasks started ramping up. We were working on several other projects such as The Longest Yard, Serenity and The Interpreter at the same time as Narnia so it was quite exciting to juggle these various projects.
“At the busiest phase of production over 50 artists, pipeline support, technical support and production support personnel from Rhythm & Hues India were working on Narnia. Of course, in addition to this team, we also had a lot of supervisors and support personnel in the Los Angeles office that worked fulltime with R&H India to help us achieve our goals. Finally we really need to give credit to our Admin and HR support departments without whom these accomplishments would have been impossible.”
Narnia is special
Aslan and Edmund in a pivotal moment
Narnia is a phenomenal accomplishment in terms of the complexity and scale of the visual effects. We are very proud that R&H India was able to contribute in a very significant manner, and delivered at the highest quality standards required by such a high profile project. The work is truly amazing and is a landmark achievement.
The most special aspect of our work on Narnia is how we managed the project within R&H India. Everyone here worked very hard on the project to deliver high quality work, but at the same time we accomplished it in a very sane manner. We were able to plan our workflow ahead of time and achieve tremendous efficiencies such that our artists rarely worked more than 5 days a week throughout the duration of the project and we were all able to enjoy the process and have fun at the same time.
Looking Forward: R&H India
“R&H India is building from this success. We are currently working on several major Hollywood feature films such as Superman Returns for Warner Bros., Garfield 2 for Fox, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift for Universal and The Charlotte’s Web for Paramount Pictures. Due to our success on Narnia, R&H India is now expanded its role on the upcoming projects to do all aspects of the visual effects and animation. We are now growing our artists in modeling, 3D animation and lighting and are very excited by the potential in these areas. It has taken us around 5 years of hard work and patience to slowly and methodically grow our team and skillsets to focus exclusively on high quality work rather than quantity and this strategy is paying off handsomely.”
*All Narnia images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media Llc. All rights reserved
*Box Office figures sourced from Yahoo.com