#Will there ever make a golden compass 2 how to#

They would coordinate and share materials with the other effects houses. In scenes with many daemons, like battle sequences, R&H animators used 'Massive,' an artificial intelligence program, to add background characters. 'It's the little touches that fool the eye into believing he's in the scene,' says Westenhofer. Other aspects of daemon placement were equally tricky, such as when Pan and the Golden Monkey fight in Mrs.

'We had to get to put her hands in the right place and react in the right way.' An on-set puppeteer would also act out Pan's part and read his dialogue with Richards. 'We used every sort of contraption you can think of, from a little green football to a cat on a fishing line that we could swing into Lyra's arms for situations where Pan is a cat,' says Rhythm & Hues visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. We'll learn about that process on the next page.

#Will there ever make a golden compass 2 how to#

Once the daemons' designs were established, Rhythm & Hues had to figure out how to insert them into live-action environments and have them interact with the human characters. 'You can see the difference when you see the real animals that don't have the daemon quality to them.' The animators also added a sheen to the fur of the daemons, which makes it clear 'that they are somehow different and special,' Chen says. 'He's definitely a Scottish wildcat, but he has a slightly softer look, younger in the face.'

'So we worked on the shape of his eyes, his coloration, the shape of his head a little bit,' Fink says. Its 'macho look' had to match Pan's toughest persona, but it wasn't very visually appealing. The wildcat incarnation was particularly tough, Fink says. Pan's design required several evolutions. We also tried to keep the same palette of browns and golds.' 'When he's a ferret, he has a little bandit mask around his face, and we put a hint of that in all the forms he takes, such as the dark area around the wood mouse's eyes. 'We wanted to have his look be similar across the many animal forms and make him as cute as possible,' says Chen. His personality, reflecting the smart, spirited Lyra, had to come across in its many incarnations and be consistent within the various designs. Lyra's daemon, Pantalaimon ('Pan'), transforms according to his mood - so at various times, he's a ferret, a wildcat, a wood mouse, a cobra, a bird and a moth. Coulter is a beautiful woman but she has a dark heart, and the Golden Monkey exhibits that part of her personality,' Westenhofer says. The effects team also had to figure out how to express the daemons' personalities. On the next page, we'll meet the Rhythm & Hues team and learn how they created the daemons. Los Angeles-based Rhythm & Hues worked on the main daemons, and a number of other special effects companies handled various CG tasks.

The armored bears, or Panserbjorne, were the work of London effects house Framestore CFC. 'Lighting is the biggest issue - lighting a white bear in a snowy environment, or any environment, is one of the hardest tasks in CG,' he says. 'We had to create a photo-real environment with bears that you'd really believe are fighting.'įink notes that such a sequence would have been impossible five or six years ago and 'could have been done badly' two or three years ago. But the tougher problem was 'a fully CG, fully animated fight between two bears in front of 100 to 120 other bears in the middle of a live-action movie,' he says. The effects team had to come up with a way to make the computer-generated fur react to contact with a human hand. One big challenge, Fink says, was the frequent interaction between humans and digital creatures - like when people touch their daemons. 'There's an animated character in just about every one of those shots.' Fink, the effects supervisor on 'X-Men,' 'X-2,' 'Lethal Weapon' and 'Batman Returns,' says 'The Golden Compass' is more complex than all of them combined. 'There were 1,100 to 1,200 CG shots, average for a film like this, but the level of complexity far exceeded most,' says visual effects supervisor Michael Fink, who worked on the film for 22 months. It required nearly two years to complete - and the skill of hundreds of special effects artists in three countries. It's a fantasy on an epic scale, set in a parallel universe where armored polar bears do battle and people's souls take the form of animal companions known as daemons. Shot at England's Shepperton Studios - and also in London, Oxford and the North Pole - the film follows a young British girl named Lyra (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) on her journey to rescue a kidnapped friend.