Framestore CFC, one of six studios that created effects for
the fantasy film The Golden Compass put armored bears in leading roles
Two of the lead actors in New Line Cinema and writer-director Christopher Weitz’s film “The Golden Compass,“ which is based on the first book in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials“ trilogy, are armored warrior bears with some human characteristics: They have opposable thumbs, and like many of the animals in this fantasy film, they talk.
The Golden Compass“ has around 1100 visual effects shots supervised by Mike Fink and created by six facilities, and as with most of the animals in the film, artists and animators created the remarkable bears using computer graphics. In one dramatic scene, the two warrior bears fight to the death.
In this universe, everyone has a daemon, a visible representation of his or her spirit in the form of an animal, and the story centers on an attempt by an evil authority named the Magisterium, which represents thought control, to separate daemons from their people, and thus remove their free will.
The Magisterium begins its experiment with children. Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) represents the Magisterium.
An epic quest by a young girl named Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) to save her friend Roger (Ben Walker), who is kidnapped by the Magisterium, drives the story. Lyra’s uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) gives her an Alethiometer, a truth-telling device, to help with her journey, and a pilot named Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott) suggests she recruit a Panzerbjorn armored bear.
In early life, the Panzerbjorn forge their armor as a rite of passage. It covers their back and belly; it’s part of their existence. But townspeople had tricked Iorek out of his armor and Lyra discovers the splendid Iorek in a disheveled state. Iorek regains his armor, and the two become friends, maintaining a close bond through the last two-thirds of the film.
“At first, he’s a gruff, down and out has-been, a drunk and semi-slave,” says Dadi Einarsson, animation supervisor at Framestore CFC, who led a team of around 40 animators. Framestore CFC created all the bears in the film and many of the environments in which the bears appear.
“When we had our initial roundtable with Chris [Weitz] and Mike [Fink], Chris outlined his vision of Iorek,” Einarsson says. “He talked to us about how Iorek is a stoic, underplayed character. He wanted him to be bear-like.”
To learn whether it was possible for a bear to talk, and if so, how, Fink visited the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London. “My worry is that we’d end up with the real common mistake people make when they animate an animal,” he says. “They build controls for the face that are similar to those for human faces. That helps give the animals human expressiveness, but they end up looking like humans.”
At the RVC, Fink learned that bears had the physical attributes – a voice box and facial muscles - necessary for speech, but the power of language was beyond their mental capacity. “They had enough tonal range and the nerve endings to make sounds that might sound like words,” Fink says. “But they’d have to want to.”
Thus, rather than create humanistic animation controls, muscles and shapes, he had the modelers at Framestore CFC build realistic bear musculature. “That way, when they animated the bears talking, they would have expressions bears could make,” Fink says.
“You might see a couple of expressions that are almost like smiles, but they could also be interpreted as snarls because the muscles are the same. The animation is not anthropomorphic.”
Framestore CFC started by working in Maya from models based on maquettes from the production art department, and then developed the rigging for walk and run cycles for all the bears – Iorek, Ragnar his nemesis, and around 120 guard bears. In addition to modeling, animating and lighting in Maya, the studio also uses boujou for camera tracking and match moving, renders with Renderman using Liquid to generate RIB files, and composites primarily with Shake, but with an occasional assist from Inferno.
Both bears had the same rig, although Ragnar stands 12.5 feet tall and Iorek 11.5, and similar models based on a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly. “The particular problem with this rig is that the bears are quadrapeds, but they can stand on two legs,” says Einarsson. “Iorek walks on his hands, but these bears have opposable thumbs like human hands.”
Iorek and Ragnar’s faces also presented problems: “Iorek has a long snout, so it was tricky getting a round shape on his lips for an ‘oooo,’” says Einarsson. “And, when we stretched the corners of his mouth to make an ‘eeee’ shape, he looked CG. So, rather than being literal with mouth shapes, we treated him like an actor who doesn’t move his lips or articulate his face too much and concentrated more on important shapes to sell a word, and on expression in his eyes and brows.”
Ragnar, who talks with actor Ian McShane’s voice, had a wider range of emotions than Iorek and the animators had more fun with him. “He desperately wants to be human,” Einarsson says, “so we gave him more expressions in the way he talks.”
Sir Ian McKellen voices Iorek, a choice that happened well into the process. “When they changed to Sir Ian McKellen late in the process, we had to redo a lot of the animation,” says Einarsson. “Not Iorek’s characterization or how we approached him in terms of animation, but we had to re-animate the scenes based on the way lines were delivered.”
For example, in one scene Iorek explains that he was exiled from his kingdom, although he was next in line to the throne, because he had fought another bear in single combat, “and was defeated.” “We have Iorek put his head down, twist, turn and walk away on the line ‘was defeated,’” says Ienarsson. “The pause between ‘and,’ and ‘was defeated,’ controls when Iorek turns. But, the first actor had read the line slightly differently.”
To add secondary motion to the bears after the animators had created the main performances, creature technical directors (TD)s used a layer of digital fat rather than create a muscle-based system.
“The bears look like their skin is too big for their bodies,” says Laurent Hugueniot, CG supervisor. “They have flabby skin that wobbles all the time.” Texture maps defined the amount of fat on the geometry and provided general settings that described how much spring the skin had, and then the skin jiggled based on the depth of the fat.“We tried to minimize human intervention,” says Hugueniot. “If you fine tune [the digital fat] properly, it behaves itself.”
