LOS ANGELES – FEBRUARY 22nd – For “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the first in the highly anticipated series of big screen adaptations of the classic C.S. Lewis fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Director Andrew Adamson, (“Shrek” 1 & 2), knew Aslan the lion, Narnia's spiritual leader, would have to be as realistic as possible. After all, the key to the success of the film, and ultimately the entire Narnia movie franchise, would center on whether or not audiences bought into the majestic mythical lion as the movie’s emotional heart, delivering lines and emoting alongside flesh and blood actors.

After much consideration, the task of bringing Aslan to life was placed squarely on the shoulders of Los Angeles-based Rhythm & Hues Studios, one of the world’s leading producers of character animation and visual effects for entertainment and advertising. The first effects facility on the project, R&H’s Narnia 390 person crew, under the creative and technical guidance of Visual Effects Supervisor Bill Westenhofer, labored for two years to create Aslan, as well as dozens of the other CG characters that populate Narnia. Perhaps best known for “Babe,” (Academy AwardÆ, Visual Effects, 1995), Rhythm & Hues has worked on more than 100 feature films and countless commercials during its nineteen year history, and is currently working on a new slate of films including “Superman Returns,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “Garfield 2,” “Night at the Museum” and “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”

Since opening in early December, 2005, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has enchanted audiences, grossed more than $650 million worldwide, earned rave reviews and collected a significant amount of awards season attention, including the Academy Award nomination for Achievement in Visual Effects as well as similar nominations from BAFTA, the Saturn Awards, and the Visual Effects Society Awards.

As Visual Effects Supervisor and fellow Academy Award Nominee Dean Wright states, Aslan the lion is “the single most remarkable achievement in computer-generated character animation and technology.” Such recognition is due in large part to the studio’s use of key frame animation techniques combined with real-world reference.

"We did go to an animal training facility,” notes Westenhofer. “We were actually in a cage with a lion and a high def camera. You're looking around you to make sure there's someone slower than you in case the lion gets out. Later, we'd take a clip of a lion walking and play it side by side with our animation, and you could see immediately, 'Oh, this muscle wasn't firing right,'" he adds. "With visual effects, 80 to 85 percent was there the first couple of times you try. It's really that last 15 percent that is incredibly difficult to get."

Aslan also required a wide range of human facial expressions to reflect his noble personality, but animation had to begin before Liam Neeson was cast as Aslan's voice, so the animators looked again to a real world counterpart for inspiration.

"We went to Gregory Peck from 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' The Atticus Finch character had some of the same regal qualities that we wanted," says Westenhofer. "We took traits of Gregory Peck from that movie and then took our Aslan facial rig and ... built our library of shapes. Wonderfully enough, Liam Neeson's performance gelled perfectly well with our Aslan character."

In addition to the accomplishment of creating Aslan, Rhythm & Hues also created 40 different CG character types including such mythic creatures as the Centaurs, Gryphons and Minotaurs. The studio also utilized Massive crowd simulation software to create the spectacular battle sequence at the climax of the film, which featured some 20,000 distinctly individual creatures controlled through an artificial intelligence system.

ASLAN COMBINES HIGH ARTISTRY (KEY FRAME ANIMATION) WITH
ADVANCED TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT (MUSCLE, RIG STRUCTURE, FUR DYNAMICS)

Animation Rig controls:
1851 controls, 742 in just the face alone
98 facial shapes
53 body shapes

Fur and Hair:
3 versions of Aslan were built: normal, shorn, and golden
7 hair pelt types
5.2 million strands of hair
R&H technical animators used thousands of guide hairs to simulate the effect of physics on Aslan's mane. The guide hairs drove a high-density pelt rendered as moving fur.

Rendering:
13 hours a frame render
†1.6 million render hours = 200 years of computer rendering time
Lo res 21,884 polys