Created: 05/15/2008
Video description: Wilson G. Tang talks to the cast and director of the summer sequel 'Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian' about the film's stunning visual effects, the challenges of acting against green screen and how films and video games are coming together.
Behind the scenes: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Video Transcript
>> [ music ] ^m00:00:04 Can you explain to our viewers what are the challenges of acting with so many visual effects and CG character?
>> Yeah, I mean I love it, it's actually people that realize I don't know if it's actually done for you, we really do kind of go to these amazing places and build these bridges and smash them apart again and these castle sets are completely real.
>> You're Narnians. You're supposed to be extinct.
>> You might have an actress in a green suit kind of on her knees moving the props around the way that a badger would which is easier to communicate if you have someone to converse with and look in their eyes, but if you're doing a scene with Reepicheep, say for example, you're talking to a piece of wire with an orange stick for the eye line and someone's feeding you the lines from off the set somewheres and then the River God at the end where we're looking up at the River God, we're actually watching someone play with a toy helicopter so we can get high enough up.
>> BC Reepicheep and Aslan are 2 very important characters. They're these tropolones that they're not entirely CG. One of the things I wanted to achieve this time with those characters is a lot more physical interaction, whereas last time sure the girls rode Aslan and they came into contact with Aslan, it was somewhat limited. This time I wanted Lucy to be able to hug Aslan, to roll on the ground, and bury her face in his mane. The technology necessary to do that definitely was only just achievable last time, was a lot more achievable this time.
>> In this movie the Griffins flying in on the night raid, those were painstakingly long scenes to film because they were motion controlled, which means that we were suspended in harnesses for, you can only stay up for really 10 minutes, 20 minutes at a time because it's so uncomfortable and it means that these machines simulate the exact movements of the griffins so that when the effects guys computer generate the griffins that we're moving in an appropriate way for them to map the griffins onto us; and stuff like that takes a long time and so it was really gratifying to see the movie the other night and see that that stuff paid off and it looks really cool.
>> Did you have to do any dialogue or any acting for the video game of Narnia?
>> No, I've never kind of been on Nintendo, Playstation, or anything like that, I'm not really into it. But I did have a really surreal and interesting time recording the voices for this video game. I had a kind of sheet of instructions that I had to get through and there were sort of various noises to make like death, short death, long death, protracted death, ruptured spleen, arrow in the shoulder, and how you distinguish between those noises I'm not really sure; that was pretty interesting.
>> Myself and Vincent Grass he plays Dr. Cornelius, shot 2 extra scenes for the video games so there's 2 live action scenes that are in the video game that are not in the movie. It's kind of explaining the sequence of events between the first and the second movie.
>> One of the things that's actually helped me now is because they're coming out simultaneously, in some ways directors have been less to do with video games than they did a couple of years ago because it used to be that it would happen more as you were finishing your movie, the game would start up. Now they try to bring those release dates together so the production's actually happening simultaneously. We're using the same technology in many ways as they're using and I think the technology can really bridge closer together than it has.
>> Video games have now become even a bigger industry than the movie industry.
>> I know.
>> And well I want to know, like what kind of video games do you like to play and also how do you see the world of cinema and video games coming together?
>> Well I think they are coming together. You know, every single film now that's big has a game made on top of it, to support the film and so audiences can really get into interactive but I'm also really looking forward to playing Grand Theft Auto 4.
>> [ laughing ] Came out last week!
>> April 29th, I was on top of that, it sounded really, really cool.
>> Well thank you very much.
>> Thank you. [ music ]
Behind the scenes: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Wilson G. Tang talks to the cast and director of the summer sequel 'Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian' about the film's stunning visual effects, the challenges of acting against green screen and how films and video games are coming together.