Slashdot Mirror
Behind the Scenes of Narnia's Special Effects
louismg writes "Walt Disney Pictures' Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe took in more than $100 million at the box office worldwide in its opening weekend, riding the back of special effects powering nearly all the movie's characters, from the lion Aslan to the Gryphon, Minotaur, Centaurs and more. VFXWorld has a series of diaries with the technology geeks at Rhythm & Hues behind the special effects. (Part 1, 2)
For the fantasy film's special effects, Rhythm & Hues teamed up with Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks to deliver more than 1,400 shots for the film, and used cutting-edge technology from BlueArc, NVIDIA and others to keep the effects' production running."
With that kind of doe, you'd like they could at least get the blue/green screening done properly. Quite honestly, I felt the effects in this film were very poorly done.
One more tidbit. It's interesting that on IMDB the first 20 pages of reviews are all very positive (and submitted before the offical release), yet 80% of the more recent ones (since Fridays US release) are all very poor.
Stupid login reuqired to RTFA, feel free to use mine...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
I loved it. I'm a huge fan of The Chronicles of Narnia. The movie followed very closely to the book. This made me very happy. The actors did a great job, espcially the actress who played Lucy.
I only have one complaint. The Talking Beasts and Aslan weren't big enough. Especially Aslan. Aslan should have been twice the size he was portrayed in the movie.
Other than that, I didn't have a problem with the movie. Loved every minute.
Your trolling is cute, but the Narnia series has a level of popularity on par with LOTR and C.S. Lewis was not a hack writer.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I have no idea why you've been modded down- it's a valid question.
My wife and I saw a preview showing last Monday. We recently finished reading this book to our kids so it was still pretty fresh in our minds.
The extent to which it is true to the book is pretty great. About the only really big deviation I saw is mentioned in the first response to this question. They really tamed things down in regards to blood and especially so in the sacrafice of Aslan. But looking at the intended audience and the rating this is understandable.
I wrote it up in my journal after we saw it and to sum up my impression, if you liked the book, I think you'll like the film. If you didn't like the book, I doubt you will like the film. If you were indifferent to the book, you might like the film due to all the fantastic creatures. I thought the effects were pretty incredible.
The beginning of the film deviates slightly from the book, but I think it is also a good choice in that, at the time the book came out, the reason for the children leaving London would have been understood. For children today a little explanation is probably helpful.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I think they are doing The Voyage of The Dawn Treader next. The scene during the credits set the tone for it.
With that kind of doe, you'd like they could at least get the blue/green screening done properly. Quite honestly, I felt the effects in this film were very poorly done.
One more tidbit. It's interesting that on IMDB the first 20 pages of reviews are all very positive (and submitted before the offical release), yet 80% of the more recent ones (since Fridays US release) are all very poor.
I didn't see the film, didn't read the books, so I'm not here to defend. But I actually went to IMDB and looked at the user reviews, sorted by date, and they are mostly all positive.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
The "new" ordering of the books is:
That ordering works because the "Magicians Nephew" is the one where Narnia is created, and "The Last Battle" is the book in which it is destroyed/ascended. The original ordering has "The Lion .." coming first, and the "Magician Nephew" being a followup after the initial success.
Personally I read them in the published order, and the small paperback set I have has them numbered in the "old" order - not a big deal to be honest.
Read a this page for more details on suggested reading order.
I'm not sure you went to the end. There are like 20 pages of reviews posted before the US release date.
s tart=1
s tart=350
Begining: (Start here and move forward)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363771/usercomments?
End: (Start here and move back)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363771/usercomments?
You know, I saw the movie this weekend, and I had to squint to see anything like a "retelling of Jesus Christ". The circumstances of Aslan's death and resurrection are only vaguely like those for Jesus, and there are no other parallels at all.
The White Witch as an allegory to Satan, The Angel of Light. The temptation of Edmond by appealing to his desire for pleasure (Turkish Delight) and power (The Kingship). The "Deep Magic" requirement for the spilling of blood to "atone" for traitors. The ownership of traitors by the White Witch. The table rock splitting in two after the death of Aslan (Like the veil of the Temple). The feamles witnessing the resurrection of Aslan. Aslan leaving Narnia after the resurrection (The Ascension). Aslan going to the White Witches castle to set the prisoners free (Christ is hell taking the keys from Satan).
I saw quite a few parallels, and I didn't have to squint. It wasn't exactly like the events of Christ's life, but is was much closer to it than Tolkien's books. Perhaps that's why the movie is less well received than TLOTR movies were. Yeah, that and the special effects weren't as good.
-SHPI was using the wrong sorting option. Thanks for pointing it out.
I thought it was good. My wife loved it. She had never read it as a child and actually cried in parts. I felt they did a good job of it and I was very pleased they didn't take out the Christian content. The original book was very much Christian in context and to remove it would have been to destroy the intention of the author. I would say if you liked the book you will like the movie.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Will be boycotting Sony products and productions? Yes, perhaps I'm not fully cogent when it comes to $ony, but I thought there were people on /. that wanted to actively boycott $ony.... and yes, I *AM* aware that there are a lot of products made by $ony.
So, the part that I don't like about the movie is that $ony had something to do with it.... so naturally, I've not seen it, and won't.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Funny how this thread turned from discussion of visual effects to everyone's personal take on the movie. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it proves the movie has something more than usual to it.
Spoilers follow...I saw the movie Saturday morning and had mixed feelings about the effects. As some people have pointed out, I never really felt excited at the scenery or any of the landscape. There was a lamppost with lots of snow and some mountains with a huge ice castle that we only see two rooms of. Maybe you can't expect to do that much with ice, but overall it never gave a really powerful expression. The same with the spring settings, green grass and some rocks - yay.
Now the characters looked like they had some more love put into them. All though our fawn friend never has a close up shot from the waist down, the shots done from a distance farther back show great detail and overall great walking motion. The King Lion on the other hand was, well a lion that could speak. The detail of the fur and body motion was top notch, but that was what was expected. The choice of voice was also sub par, no offense to Mr. Neeson, but something deeper and more powerful would have breathed more life into Aslan. From an effects standpoint I would also liked to have Aslan's size increased to showcase more of his stature. The minotaurs were most excellent and almost had me thinking I was watching a live interpretation of WoW.
Now a quick review - How four youths managed to lead an army against an experienced evil queen is beyond me. Yes, there are kids in Harry Potter who defeat the ultimate evil Voldamort but the circumstances are always in their favor. E.g. Harry getting help to complete the tournament from the imposter Moody and surviving the final battle due to his wand being identical, etc. etc. The overall story of Narnia seemed good and grand, but the two girls are underused in the battle and the final confirmation is all too quick with no real struggle or push of emotions. Overall, it's an average movie that I apprieciated more as a book.
Read my sig! That's right, keep reading...
I had similar thoughts upon seeing the film this weekend, and didn't recall the level of Christian imagery being there when I read the books as a child. But it's there, and there is a great writeup on it at Slate.com at http://www.slate.com/id/2131908/
The author of the above piece even gives some pretty good analysis on why we don't seem to remember the religious over/undertones from our childhood readings.
Also interesting to discover that Lewis was a contemporary of Tolkien, and that perhaps this relationship with Tolkien kindled the Christian influences in his writing.
Bryan "BJ" Hoffpauir
Dear Mr. Coward,
:)
When my mother was growing up, Kindergarten cost extra. Hers was a poor family, and both parents needed to work. They did the math and found that a caretaker was cheaper than the government's Kindergarten, so that's where my mother spent her 5th year.
When she got to 1st grade, her parents were surprised to learn from the 1st grade teacher that their daughter already knew how to read. Surprised, because they certainly hadn't taught her.
What happened? Well - while spending all that time at the caretaker's house, my mother was very bored. So, with a little help from her slightly older sister and the caretaker's kids, she taught herself how to read.
Some 47 or 48 years later, mom says that she doesn't remember getting much help from her sister or others. Which is what John T. Gatto says: when a child is ready to learn, when the motivation is present, learning to read is extremely easy.
My mother could read so well, that after she moved to a new school 1/2 way through first grade, she was getting in trouble for reading ahead. Her family moved every year or two when she was growing up, finally finishing with the last three years of highschool in one place.
Normally, nomadic children don't do so well in school. My mother graduated Valedictorian. She didn't just teach herself how to read while imprisioned at the caretakers - she learned the lesson that if there was anything she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.
Mom didn't know any better, and sent me to Kindergarten, where I learned the alphabet and short words. First grade brought short sentances, 2nd grade was contractions, etc. Education is for learning how to learn, as you put it. But government schools do not "educate". The school system as it exists today is nothing but a "spoon-feeding" process, designed to strip children of responsibility for learning. If johnny ain't learning, school rhetoric says it's because the teachers aren't good, the buildings suck, the technology is outdated, etc. No one knows to inspire children to learn how to teach themselves what they want to know. It is this way by design, otherwise, who would staff the factories and the fast food businesses, if not for an entire population of dumbed-down worker drones?
Yes, I can place the blame entirely on the "education" system. I've been through it, and after reading Mr. Gatto's books, I agree that there is little worth salvaging. Check out Underground History of American Education (available for Free on the website given in the GP post), and it's hard to feel any other way.
Good day.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The Witch invokes the Law as her excuse to put the human boy to death. The boy has violated the law and all who violate the law are worthy of death. Aslan therefore dies for someone else's violation of the law, but has himself violated none. Afterwards Aslan speaks of a deeper law that underlies the ones the witch has invoked.
Aslan is also the son of the Emperor over the Sea, who rules a great many lands ("In my father's house, there are many mansions").
From other books, the Emperor made all the lands from darkness and chaos, there's a donkey figure who is set up as the "Anti-Aslan" at Narnia's end times, Narnia suffers its own apocalipse, and the childeren all go to heaven in the end.
Oh, and there's a bunch of this stuff in LotR too. I sincerely hope this doesn't diminish your enjoyment of either work.
Who is John Cabal?
Maybe visualization is part of the problem, but not all of it. I used to HATE to read. Then one day my dad forced me to read a Norby novel (one of Asimov's for kids books, actually by Asimov himself). He's regreted it ever since. Problem was, I just needed to find something I liked. I now have an 8 foot bookshelf full of trade paperbacks stacked 2 deep, and a second one on the way. A similar think happened to me later in life in elementary. The teachers thought I was ADD because I wasn't paying attention in class. Instead, the problem was that I was bored since I picked up some of the stuff quicker than the rest of the kids. I learned quicker and as such got bored quicker than the others.
I think the main problem is that schools are teaching at the lowest common denominator (the slowest kid in the class) instead of challenging everyone.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Disney did not "bankroll it". The movie was coproduced by Disney and Walden Media, with Walden providing most of the funding. Walden is owned and headed by Philip Anschutz, an oil magnate fundy who is one of the nation's biggest donors to all sorts of anti-gay and pro-censorship groups, plus over 700,000$ to the Republican party and its candidates and runs half a dozen conservative newspapers (he's currently trying to take over Knight-Ridder). The BBC has referred to him as a "corporate vulture" and in 2000 was branded the "Greediest Man in America" by Fortune magazine for his Enron-style ripoff act at Quest (wherein he took steps to try and get employees to buy stock while he sold 6.1 million shares, based on insider info, right before the company collapsed, making himself 200m$ and leaving employees and investors with stock that went from $64 per share to $1.95; he and Quest eventually got out of trouble by a 4.4m$ settlement).
That alone is enough to make me not want to see the movie. Of course, the fact that there are two soundtracks for the movie (one Christian Rock, currently the only one that's out) certainly doesn't help. I'm not going to fund scum just because I want to see pretty CG.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
You my friend have nailed the problem square on the head. When you teach to the lowest common denominator all your students come out below or at that denominator. Which of course results in the kind of scores our students in the US have been showing.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
I think they call this magical literary device the Third Person Omniscient Perspective. It is a wonderful way for the author to relate information that would otherwise be unavailable if the story were to be told in any other perspective...in other words, rather than being limited to a first person view (single character perspective, can only internalize ones own thoughts and relies on five senses to understand everything else that is going on) or third person objective (unseen/uninvolved narrator, but limited to the five senses), you get to know everything. Though it may be a dated concept (as are the other devices), it is historically a very reliable device for fantasy/sci-fi stories.*
* - trying to be helpful here, not a jerk.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
BoxOfficeMojo called LtW&tW 'Christian/Mormon.' I'm hoping that this means Christian or Mormon, not 'Type Christian, subtype Mormon.' 'Cause C.S. Lewis definitely wasn't writing anything for Mormons...
Some USians never stop to amaze the rest of the world. Many of you parade your monumental ignorance about the rest of the world as a badge of honour, not as what it is, a shameful defect.
There is a reason that the Moslems and Buddhists and Shintoists and Hindus have never built the kind of society that we are enjoying now today.
The Muslims saved Western culture buddy. While Western Europe was happily descending in the dark ages, Muslim scholars were copying and studying the Roman and Greek classics, the monks in the late middle ages that made copies of ancient texts very often made it from Arabic or from texts copied by Arab scholars. The muslims cities from Cordoba in Spain to the Moghul Empire in India were the most enlightened places for at least 500 years.
As for Shintoists and Buddhists not being able to build the society we enjoy today, I will let Sony, Toyota, Acer, Samsung, Honda, etc. know. They will have a good laugh. The Japanese people will also be amuzed. Being the 2nd economy of the world for the last 40 years after being completely oblitearated surely is because their massive, hidden, unknow conversion to Christianity.
And as for China (Buddhists, Muslims, etc., you know), it has been the most powerful country in the world for the biggest part of the last 1000 years. They had 200 lousy years, but they are comming back and the European and American dominance will be seen as a blip in history in the future.
We've been working on the idea of how to run a country the way Christ would ever since Rome became the Holy Roman Empire
Er, no Mr Fundie, the Roman Empire was that, a Teistic Empire. Modern Saudi Arabia would be the closest we have nowadays, the only difference being that the Arabian Kingdom does not have the militaristic will or capabilities to fall in the military adventurism of the succesive Holy Romam Empires (that ended in chaos and destroyed), perhaps because they hold their holly places and that makes them less prone to such attitude.
We now a days aspire to live in liberal democracies. Democracy is inspired in ancient Greek practices that predate the alleged existence of Jesus. The liberal ideals come from the French Revolution, many of whose idealists were either agnostic or openly atheistic.
That's why we can't abuse prisoners with Abu Ghraib and shrug it off easily
No Mr Fundie, you can't do that because there is a body of international agreements signed by countries of all religions or none, that dictate the minimum standards expected when dealing with prisioners in a situation of war, or with human beens in general.
These conventions were signed by Atheists, Buddhists, Muslisms, Hindus, and of course Christians. Even US Christians, that nowadays so happily forget about those commitments, but as the guy of the parable, pray ostensibly in public to let us know how god fearing people they are.
Economics is fundamentally a Christian philosophy that teaches us to not meddle in each other's affairs
Complete and absolute nonsense. Islam always had Economics theory completely independent from Western and Christian thinking, heck Economics is fundmantal to the way Muslims understand the world. But if you haven't read the holly Koran you would not know that of course.
Adam Smith, John Keneth Galbraith and Milton Freedman, just to name a few of the most noted economists, never involved religion as a factor in how economics work. That you can come with this idea is amuzing to the extreme and shows how good communicators your sect's preachers are or how an inventive troll you aspire to be.
Enough, it is always pleasent to debunk so much nonsense but is a time consuming enterprise that others can complete if they so wish.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.