12:00 AM, 16-FEBRUARY-06

Caspian F/X, Creatures Previewed

Dean Wright, the Oscar-nominated visual-effects supervisor for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, told SCI FI Wire that he and his colleagues are already looking ahead to the sequel, Prince Caspian, but with the same guiding principle. "Realism," Wright said in an interview at a brunch to celebrate Narnia's F/X Oscar nominations. "Make the characters look real. Make them feel real. Make their acting [real]. ... Make the moments memorable, and create a heck of a movie."

Wright also revealed that the sequel will bring back the main animal character, Aslan (voiced in the first film by Liam Neeson), as well as a host of familiar and new creatures. Director Andrew Adamson, who is vacationing in his native New Zealand, hasn't written the sequel's script yet, but the C.S. Lewis book on which Prince Caspian will be based offers clues as to what creatures to expect. "I did read the book, and Aslan is back," Wright said. "Most of the creatures you saw, and there's new ones, are back. There's new hero creatures, specifically Badger and his mouse, Reepicheep. Again, there's huge battle sequences. I know from talking to Andrew just briefly before he left: He wants to make this bigger and better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So I can only imagine what's in store for any of us that happen to be lucky enough to be involved. We all loved working with Andrew?I can say that probably for everyone here?and would enjoy working on all seven books if we could."

Wright said the effects team will begin computer "pre-visualization" of scenes from Prince Caspian "probably in a couple of months, and then full on into preproduction. You know, the film is going to kick off before you know it, and we'll be going like gangbusters, probably, I would say, within the next two to four months."

How will Aslan, the regal lion of the first film, differ in the sequel? "Reading through the books, there are some evolutions," said Bill Westenhofer, whose Rhythm & Hues F/X house created the computer-animated Aslan in the first film. "One of the challenges [is that] it's described in the text that he does increase in size. At one point, he's finally referenced as being the size of an elephant. That's where interpretations of the filmmakers are going to come into play, how to pull it off. ... [In the first Narnia film,] he changes sizes slightly, but I doubt that anyone would notice. He's actually 5 percent bigger after he comes back to life. But ... even to start with, he was at the very top end of the scale of average lion sizes, and ... he was a big lion even at the start."

And there's one other challenge, Westenhofer said: "We successfully avoided Aslan getting doused in water in this. But as soon as we get into the Dawn Treader [a ship that figures in Caspian] and that sort of stuff, it's going to be harder to avoid."

Wright was honored at the brunch in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 15 with his team, which included Westenhofer, Sony Pictures Imageworks' Jim Berney and Industrial Light & Magic's Scott Farrar, who were nominated for the Oscar for best visual effects. Narnia's makeup team, headed by Howard Berger and Tami Lane, were also nominated for an Oscar, as were the sound team of Terry Porter, Dean Zupancic and Tony Johnson.

The DVD and PSP version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will hit stores on April 4 from Walt Disney Home Entertainment. ?Patrick Lee, News Editor

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