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MillimeterFade to Black:
Andrew Adamson, Director
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Given his animation and visual effects pedigree, Andrew Adamson can't say he didn't comprehend the scope of Disney's Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
“I knew full well what I was getting myself into, and that made me a bit reticent at first,” says the New Zealand native. “I got into it because of my love of the [C.S. Lewis] books… But it was definitely far bigger than anything I imagined doing following the Shrek films.”
Adamson co-directed the first two Shrek movies after years as a visual effects supervisor, and was in the middle of Shrek 2 when he began the Narnia job over three years ago. He found this project far more complex than anything he had dealt with before, on several levels.
“Management from a live-action perspective was new to me,” he explains. “The scale included shooting with prosthetic creatures and horses in the middle of nowhere, needing to be lifted by helicopter up hills to location, feeding about 800 people every day for lunch, about two hours from the nearest town. Fortunately, we had a great team, but it was still very daunting.”
On the other side of the coin, in postproduction, Adamson expected things to be more familiar. Developing key CG character Aslan the Lion with Rhythm and Hues, for instance, took more than two years. “But I had dealt with visual effects challenges before, so I wasn't put off by something like that,” Adamson notes.
Still, managing visual effects on a project the size and scale of Narnia was a new kettle of fish. The lesson he learned: Moving huge amounts of imagery is tougher than it first appears.
“With Shrek, the entire project was done by the production facility in-house, and that obviously made things easier to organize,” he says. “In this case, we had about 1,600 visual effects shots, so we had to split the work up across several visual effects companies, including Rhythm and Hues, Sony [Imageworks], and ILM. In some cases, they were working on the same shot — one shop was doing the CG lion, one was adding other CG characters, and one was doing the backgrounds. That was a big lesson in terms of time and logistical management. I found out a lot of time went into analyzing color space and digital files, making sure that everybody could communicate with the data.
“In fact, even down to the basic level, I learned that everyone scans and records using completely different formats,” explains Adamson. “In a world where we spend millions of dollars on digital effects, I take scanned files from one company to another, and they look completely different. There is a lot more work to be done, in my opinion, in terms of industry standards for this kind of work.”
Luckily, Narnia went through a lengthy digital intermediate at Technicolor Digital Intermediates, under supervision from DP Don McAlpine, which helped rectify any issues related to matching imagery.
“Don had just come off doing a DI on Peter Pan, and was well prepared to maximize the value of the process on our movie,” says Adamson. “He deliberately shot in middle color space with the intention of pushing things around afterward, which we did. But because of all the visual effects coming in from all over the place, the DI was essential to balancing out shots from different places. It was a long process, but well worth it.”
Now that he's finished the job, Adamson has lots of advice to give directors trying to transition from the animation world to live-action.
“The main difference is about timing of the process,” he explains. “With animation, you get lots of iterations, lots of chances to fix mistakes in a cost-effective way. In live action, it's very expensive to go back and re-shoot something. But you also get a lot more for free. A boy on a horse waving a sword feels and acts noble in live-action. As an animation director, you have to convey all that to the other directors and animators, explaining where you want dust hits and wind and things. That stuff gets captured automatically in live action.”
