New Narnia Clip: Chapter III

Along with the release of the new Narnia.com website, the production has released another production featurette, this one entitled Locations and Sets. We have loaded our image gallery with screen caps from this latest clip. You can view the clip by visiting www.narnia.com and clicking on “Videos”. You can also view all the images from the clip by clicking the image below.

The clip discusses some of the locations that the filming took place and has some beautiful shots of New Zealand and the Czech Republic. The clip also talks about creating fake snow and shows some pre-viz for the battle scenes. There’s more music from the score and we hear Donald McAlpine, Roger Ford, and Dean Wright.

UPDATE: You can view the video clips directly by clicking the links found below.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Production Designer Roger Ford: We’re up here in Ceder Grove in Los Angeles. Eventually the film will be made in New Zealand. So, this is a very early test for the snow in the film.

Artificial Snow Specialist Roland Hathaway: It’s actually a paper that we’re using on all the trees. We wet the trees down with water and then we blow the matariel on and it sticks to everything that’s wet. And then when we finish, we use more water and it washes straight off.

Ford: With this sort of snow, we can use our children and they don’t have to freeze. The yougest child is eight or nine years old. So we have to create an enviornment where they can produce performance.

Director Andrew Adamson: You begin leaping into the visual side of the film and looking to all the distant places of the earth to find the beautiful untouched virgin forest that represent Narnia.

Producer Mark Johnson: Andrew Adamson is from New Zealand and he knew what this country had to offer. Every time we went somewhere else we could end up talking about, no matter how wonderful it was, it’s not as great as New Zealand.

Johnson: It’s a private piece of land that is about an hour and a half west of Christ Church. Andrew Adamson came here even before I did, sat down with our pre-visual artists and had them construct the climactic battle of this film on this specific land.
I’ve never done a movie as large as this. We’ve constructed a town here. I looked at our call sheet and we’re feeding over 600 people. So that’s 600 people you have to worry about where they’re going to go to the bathroom, where they are going to drink their water, where they are going to have their breakfast and lunch. I’m surprised we haven’t started our own elections looking for a mayor with the size of this town. But, that’s really the infrastructure you need to make a movie of this size.

Ford: We haven’t got huge studios. Where we recreated Lantern Waste was actually in a Christian Center.

Director of Photography Donald McAlpine: We walked into it and I said ‘well you cant use this, the ceiling is too low.’ And somebody came back with the great idea of actually digging the floor out.

Ford: We were able to dig down six or seven meters below the surface and created our landscape by digging it out.

McAlpine: We ended up with probably one of the biggest stages in the world to film in. And we needed to avoid Narnia getting claustrophobic.

Ford: And then we’ll embellish that with some shots of real snow.
We went to Argentina, Canada and to Poland before deciding that there was nothing better than the Czech Republic.

Adamson: And now we actually get to see a bit more of the world of Narnia, a larger expanse.

Ford: The Czech Republic has extraordinary rock formations in the snow. We hadn’t seen them anywhere else in the world.

Adamson: It’s very other-worldly. It looks like no place we’ve ever seen before. It actually looks out over an incredible expanse of virgin forest.

VFX Supervisor Dean Wright: We’re going through this incredible forest finding anything that looks brilliant. I mean, the snow just keeps changing the set as we shoot. And we’re trying to find stuff that will cut in with all the footage we did on stage. I mean, this took us seven hours on stage to try and get something to look like this. Now, we’re able to get back and show trees and expanse and beautiful snowy vistas going on forever.