CATEGORY: ACHIEVEMENT IN VISUAL EFFECTS
INTERVIEW WITH: MICHAEL FINK, BILL WESTENHOFER, BEN MORRIS, TREVOR WOOD
FILM: "THE GOLDEN COMPASS"
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Q. Congratulations guys.
A. Hi, Bill.
Q. Mike, you talked about recently with me the great achievement here which was intimacy. And Brad Bird talked about the best special effect being characters. Would you all talk about the challenge of creating intimacy for visual effects.
A. Whoa. Uhm, I you know, it's all about performance. So, it's the problems are the same problems anybody has acting in a scene, performing a scene. So and it's the small moments that count, and actors are well known for doing less, being more. And that's what we are striving for with Golden Compass. Did that answer it, Bill?
Q. For any of you, especially for Michael, you said on stage that you quoted Walt Disney, "It's great to do the impossible." When you look back on this movie, what effects in this film make you grin and say: That is so fantastic; it looks so great. We can't believe we did that.
A. Whew. Pan (sic) at the high tables, Ben Rishi, York (sic) being hugged by Lyra after the bear fight. The bear fight itself. The sky ferry, London. Those are some highlights. But the character stuff more, more importantly. Dialog scenes meant everything to me.
Q. Congratulations. Were you surprised? And what do you think in this very competitive year for visual effects made the difference?
A. I am surprised, but I'm extremely happy as well. This was an amazing year. There were three huge films there, and I think to go back to the first question, there was a lot of spectacle in the other films and there's an awful lot of delicate intimacy and character performance in this film. And I think that sort of stood out in a very quiet way which played to our strengths when we had a wonderful story behind it as well. Philip Pullman has written an incredible trilogy. So I think it played to our favor and think we are all very happy.
A. Definitely the world that was created, the richness of his universe that you see with people's demons running around, and the tremendous amount of character that was shown in the film with demons portraying their humans and York doing his performance, I think that that perhaps is what tipped the scale in our favor.
Q. Congratulations to the Brits. So, were you Brits responsible primarily for creating the armored bears? Is that my understanding? And tell us how that went about.
A. We the group of Brits something I should say, four people standing up here represent over a thousand artists. So, it's kind of a strange award. It's not like best actor. We have hundreds and hundreds of people working with us, but we created the armored bears in London. And very tricky character performance, a large fight sequence where the entire frame is generated in the computers. But the key the key for it is, the scene certainly with the bears that were there, although they are created in the computer, they had to exist within a beautiful live action film.
We weren't breaking the rules of live action film making, and that was something that we spent a lot of time integrating our scene into the rest of the film. Creating the character performances, the director and Mike, when they came in to speak to us early on, said, "You guys, along with Rhythm and Hues, are all costars of the film. That's a great responsibility. We are casting you as a team of hundreds of artists to create costars for this film. You got to sing like Nicole Kidman, Dakota, and all the other actors who are there." So, it's a big responsibility.
I would like to say it was a fantastic team effort on all their parts. I represented the mechanical effects side and a lot of the work that we do you don't even see on the screen. There's a lot of visual references for the actors and actresses. There's a lot of rigs and everything built to support some of the animation that's done. By these guys here. And I was I'm really, really pleased to work with this, and it's a great honor to be here to night. Thank you.
Q. Thank you very much. And congratulations.
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