09 - Virtual animals

Having an animal in the cast list no longer needs access to the real thing. At least, not a living animal.

Film directors have been bemoaning the necessity of working with children and animals for the past century but, if your budget's big enough, you can now dispense with the latter altogether in films. If you've seen 'The Golden Compass', you'll know that it's full of animals, as each human character is constantly accompanied by an animal 'daemon', all of which were computer-generated. We asked Sue Rowe, Cinesite's visual effects supervisor on the film, whether this could be the end of using real animals in films, and she confidently replied, 'Possibly, in big budget films.'

'It's easy to shoot a scene knowing that you're going to use a CG animal,' explained Rowe, 'and then place them wherever you want, and light them how you want.' Continually reshooting a scene because an animal hasn't performed correctly is a major hassle for a time-pushed film crew. 'I've worked a lot with animals and small children, and they never do anything you want them to,' said Rowe. 'In fact, most dogs just sniff each other, and try to eat each other. Whenever we've tried to shoot with animals it's taken a lot of organisation.'

However, creating a CG animal involves a lot of work. Cinesite shoots footage of real animals first to give them an idea of how they move. 'You and I know how a dog or a rat moves, so if you get the jiggle from a spaniel wrong, everyone will spot it,' added Rowe.

So how do they go about lighting a virtual animal as it would be lit in the scene? Believe it or not, on 'The Golden Compass' they used stuffed animals, and we don't mean the cuddly kind. 'We'd have a stuffed raven on the set,' laughed Rowe. 'It sounds hilarious, I know, and you feel like an idiot walking around with a bit of taxidermy on the end of a stick. But it's very important, especially for lighting complex parts such as a raven's wings.'

'There's only one true way of working out whether you have the lighting correct on your CG leopard, and that's to look at the stuffed leopard,' continued Rowe. However, for situations that involved animals moving, the special effects team would have to explain the movements to the actors so that they could behave appropriately. 'Nicole Kidman and some other principal actors were on set,' says Rowe, 'and we'd just tell them, "Okay, your monkey's going to jump from here to here, and this is going to happen."'

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