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Ben Barnes sadly did not win the Best Breakthrough Male Performance category at the MTV movie awards tonight. The honor went to Robert Patterson for his role in Twilight.

Artisan News Service has posted a YouTube video of their interview with Ben Barnes for the film Easy Virtue. Towards the end of it, the interviewer asks Ben a few brief questions about The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In it, Ben reveals that his current really long hair is being grown out for the film!

Ben Barnes at the Easy Virtue Premiere in NYC

You can check out the video at YouTube here. The bits about Dawn Treader start at 3:24.

This story was originally published at Ben Barnes Online.

Just received an email from Weta that says they are giving away a chance to win a copy of ’The Crafting of Narnia.’ All you have to do to enter is place an order of at least $25 in their online shop before 15 June! The book is signed by more than 10 of their designers, including Daniel Falconer and Paul Tobin.

Weta has updated their online store to include their new Chainmaille Keyring. It uses Weta Tenzan chainmaille, invented for The Lord Of The Rings. It was the same type of chainmaille used in Narnia. Check it out here! Thanks to Griffle for the heads up!

From ANSA.it: An Umbrian hill-town is celebrating after finally receiving ’proof’ that it provided Irish author C. S. Lewis with the inspiration for his classic children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis’s former personal secretary and biographer, Walter Hooper, has now given local author Giuseppe Fortunati a copy of a Latin atlas of Italy that belonged to Lewis in which he had underlined Narnia. “Lewis was passionate about Roman history and in the atlas he traced the routes of the armies, highlighting the Flaminia (Roman road) and Narnia in particular,” said Fortunati, who has written a book exploring the connections between real-life Narni and the mythical realm of Narnia. “Hooper said Lewis told him he had been inspired by it for his Chronicles.” Read the full story here. Thanks to Lucy P. for the heads up!

In the L.A.Times news story “Hoping to turn books into blockbusters,” Mark Johnson talks a bit about marketing the two Narnia movies so far. “When Mark Johnson was producing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, released in 2005, he and Walt Disney Pictures were careful to hew to a PG rating. ’We were always concerned that we didn’t want to make it too young, and were worried in our campaign about exposing some of the talking animals. We thought an older audience might say it’s just for little kids,’ Johnson said. He found the problem reversed for last year’s film sequel, Prince Caspian. ’The second was accused of being too old. What happened [is that] it was less about the Narnian creatures than human creatures,’ Johnson said.” Hopefully the third time will be a charm and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will be just right.

If you made it through the [very long] Weta podcast that we posted this morning, then you’ll already know that Shane Rangi has a role in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

From the podcast at about the 1:21:00 mark:

You’re off overseas.

Shane: Yeah, I am off overseas. I can pretty much say even though it’s not up on the website yet, it will be, but it’s no big secret I’m now off to do ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader.’

Woohoo. The next Narnia movie.

Shane: Yeah, we’ll be over on the Gold Coast.

…

So you don’t know what you’re going to be doing or you know and you can’t tell anyone I guess?

Shane: On ‘Voyage of the Dawn Treader’?

Yeah

Shane: Well uh…

It’s probably safest to keep it a secret.

Shane: Oh no, no. I’ll be brutally honest, I have no idea.

{laughter}

Shane: I have no idea. All I know is I’ll be going over to KNB for a suit fitting.

So there’s a suit involved.

Shane: Yeah.

Thanks to Beren for the heads up.

We have a few interesting tidbits from the Weta Workshop front. The first is that the The Crafting Of Narnia won Kids Choice award at the NZ Post Book awards for children and young adults! On behalf of NarniaWeb, congratulations to everyone involved with the book. It’s a very well deserved award.
The other bit of news is that they’ve released a new podcast interview Richard Taylor and stuntman Shane Rangi. A good bit of the podcast discusses Shane’s work on Narnia. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but according to H.M. Swanwhite who wrote in, the interview [with Shane] starts at about 17 minutes and is over an hour long. Check it out here.
UPDATE: I’ve now had a chance to listen to the podcast and it is excellent. The first 20 minutes or so is the interview with Richard Taylor about all of the happenings at Weta right now. The other part of the podcast is an hour long interview with Shane Rangi (who played Otmin and Asterius) and it is fantastic. Definitely well worth listening to if you have the time.

‘Narnia: The Exhibition’ opens at the Kansas City Union Station today. As we reported a few weeks ago, Kansas City is only the third venue for the Narnia exhibit and the only one in the Midwest, so Union Station will be marketing it regionally. Hopefully all of you Midwesterners will be able to visit the exhibition with your friend and family and make it a success as it was a bit of a disappointment in Philadelphia.

Here is the Kansas City Star’s report on the event (complete with pictures) and if you haven’t seen it yet, here is the official website where you can order tickets.

NarniaFans.com received a tip this morning that there are some new The Voyage of the Dawn Treader concept art pieces that have appeared on the website of Greg Spalenka, Concept Designer for the movie. Spalenka, who has also worked on The Ant Bully, The Golden Compass, and the hugely popular Warcraft games, posted a video on his website featuring his work.

At the beginning of the video, he includes a quote from Michael Apted that states “Greg is highly imaginative, with real understanding of how to create magical images out of the beauty of the natural world.”

Greg Spalenka’s website can be found here.

UPDATE: Due to a request from the artist we have removed these images. Apparently the artwork depicts scenes that will not appear in the film.