“Little Renesmee, she’s got to be cute,” said the actress. “She can’t just be this scary superhuman teeth baby!
Wolf Mountain and Frankenwolf
The challenge wasn't just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren't distracting.
"At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable."
The book described the wolves as having eerily human eyes. "We were told early on that they literally they wanted us to plop the actors eyes into wolf, which always sounds like a good idea on paper but it does not work visually," said Fredenburg, "so we had to play how much to accentuate them as human eyes and how much to push them towards wolf eyes.
One of the key observations we made at Wolf Mountain was the complexity of the fur. From nose to tail the fur quality changes, prompting the painters to create a zone chart of the animal that divided the wolf up into fur zones; on the nose and the legs the hair was short and velvet, on the neck the mane was thick and long, belly clumped and long, the back more medium length while the tail was bushy. The coloring was not only unique over the length of the body, but the hair follicle had unique color ticking from root to tip.
Mandy's Mind - I admired the fur in the wolves, it was very realistic in my opinion... I jsut wanted to snuggle uip or pet them ha!
See ENTIRE article here.
[via twifans]
(Notice how Blonde Bella's streaks are in that last shot? hmm...
MTV Interviewed Phil Tippett whose comapny did the visual effects for New Moon>
MTV: Congratulations, Phil, the fans seem pretty pleased with the movie so far.
Phil Tippett: I suppose so; I'm not quite one of that ilk.
MTV: You're not a teenage girl?
Tippett: Nooo. [Laughs.] I've been through it — I've been through the teenage-girl thing not that long ago with my daughters. But I'm on a break from it now.
MTV: You worked on Chris Weitz's "The Golden Compass." So, did he just call you up and ask you to do "New Moon" as well?
Tippett: No, actually we didn't deal with Chris that much. We were involved in "The Golden Compass," then everything came our way right at the very end [of the "New Moon" production] in a 911 call [from a producer]. She realized that she had a bunch of wolves to do, so she gave us a call and said, "Hey, this is right up your alley, what do you think?" And we said, "Yeah, we're onboard."
MTV: What were the greatest challenges on "New Moon"?
Tippett: With the werewolves, the big deal from Chris and from Stephenie Meyer's books was that these things are horse-sized wolves, not traditional beastly, werewolf-y, quasi-human type things. They are, for all intents and purposes, timberwolves. And so, that's the trick; you get into that uncanny valley — the land usually occupied by computer-generated canines and cats, which are so much a part of our world that when you're trying to do a duplication of the character that's not fantasy, it's so common to everybody's observation that it gets a lot more tricky to make them digital, yet photographically representational.
MTV: So, real things are harder to make than made-up things?
Tippett: Very much. If you have a bug from another planet, or a giant robot, or something like that, you can get away with murder — but when it's something recognizable, then the onus is on you.
MTV: Did you do a lot of research into wolves?
Tippett: Yes, they're required to do very specific things, to move certain ways, and to that end we do an incredible amount of research — the co-supervisor on the show, Matt Jacobs, led an exposition down to a wolf preserve in Los Angeles. He brought a bunch of the animators and art department guys, and they observed a bunch of timberwolves to commune with them and their behavior and get their vibe.
MTV: This is one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of 2009. Were there a lot of top-secret measures you had to take as you worked on the effects?
Tippett: There were things that were amusingly irritating. Like, the paparazzi got so bad following the stars everywhere that in some instances we were going to these godforsaken locations out in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes the production would put up signs pointing to a different location to confuse the paparazzi. Of course, that would totally confuse us as well, which would make us show up late to the set. [Laughs.]
MTV: That's hilarious. Tell us about the wolves themselves.
Tippett: Well, we put a good amount of time into studying the behavior and the physical actions of timberwolves, and then multiplied that up to a 1,200-pound character, so that the weight and mass appear to fit properly into earth-specific gravity and all that stuff. Sam Uley is the big-kahuna wolf, definitely the biggest one. Each wolf is between 1,200 and 800 pounds, and a lot of that is on a shot-for-shot basis — Embry and Jared are the smallest. Sam is the biggest one, then Paul and Jacob are roughly the same size — Jacob is maybe a little bit bigger.
MTV: In one key scene, Jacob's wolf makes eye contact with Bella. Tell us about that shot.
Tippett: One of the things Chris was very insistent on was that all the wolves have human eyes, as opposed to normal wolves who have these golden, very piercing classic wolf eyes. The way he had laid out a number of scenes was there were some extreme close-ups of wolf eyes, with Bella reflected in them, like that Jacob scene. Chris wanted to make sure that Taylor Lautner's eyes would be the right choice, emotionally, for those scenes.
MTV: How did you achieve that?
Tippett: We got Taylor to peel his eyelids way back, and we got in really close with a camera and shot his eyes.
MTV: Wow. Was it like "A Clockwork Orange" thing?
Tippett: Yeah. [Laughs.] No, we had him do it with his own hands, so he could find his own comfort level. We didn't use any instruments of torture.
[ Mandy's Mind - I don't remember how I heard, but early on in New Moon filming I had heard this and told many people about it, then when i watched the film I was going "that doesn't look like Taylor's eye does it? does it?" Seems, it was and I am glad for that (otherwise I would have a lot of people calling and emailing me saying "why did you lie to me?" ha ha ha.... I love the signs pointing in other ways to trick paparazzi made me Laugh out loud. Overall, an awesome interview, I am so much more interested in these behind the scenes, making of stuff since being witness to filming here in Vancouver. ]
[source via TwiFans]
