We Visit: The Daemons of The Golden Compass
In the upcoming epic fantasy film The Golden Compass based upon the novel by Philip Pullman, humans in a parallel universe have souls that "live" outside their bodies as animal companions. When you are young, your "Daemon" or soul animal will morph into several critters depending upon your shifting moods and emotions. Once you are an adult, the Daemon will settle into a shape that will be your soulmate forever.
In the film, Nicole Kidman's Daemon is a feisty golden monkey. Hot Daniel Craig's is a beautiful snow leopard whose ultra-ice-blue eyes match his own, rough and ready cowboy Sam Elliot's Daemon is Hester the Bunny (with big jackrabbit ears) and newcomer playing Lyra, 12-year-old Dakota Blue Richards' soul is Pan the super cute ferret who is sometimes a bird, a mouse, a wildcat and several other creatures.
In Playa Vista, California, Rhythm and Hues, the effects studio which was Oscar-nominated for the first "Narnia" film, is busy creating and wrangling digital Daemons galore for the film. We got to visit the effects house and were treated to the recently-released trailer for the movie and got to watch some step-by-step demonstration footage showing how the adorable and awesome creatures were created as sketches and maquettes then realized from scratch in computer and blended seamlessly into the film's live action footage.
Members of the "Narnia" team, now working on "Compass", Ray Chen and Bill Westenhofer, effects supervisors, Erik De Boer, Animation Director and Mike Meaker, Art Director, guided our video tour showing us how a Daemon death reduces the soul animal to fire-like sparkles of Dust on the wind and how Dakota interacted with a stuffed green felt football shape to represent Pan hopping into her arms. The young actress has cats at home so she was able to act convincingly with great emotion while holding and petting this "football" which was sometimes launched into her arms by swinging it in on a fishing pole! Now that's acting! Amazing.
Nicole Kidman, who plays glamorous and shady Mrs. Coulter in the film, was also adept at interacting with gadgets and animals that weren't really there. For example, in principal photography we saw Nicole handing a real box to an imaginary animal. That box is quickly yanked out of frame by a wire and replaced later by an identical digitally-created box, that is accepted by a digital animal. Ah, the magic of modern cinema.
The effects masters told us that using real animals to play the Daemons was considered then quickly abandoned because of the emotion and detailed movements needed. No matter how well-trained an animal is, he'll be looking around set for his trainer. Also, can you imagine the poor director dealing with hundreds of animals on set? In the footage, we saw how the effects wizards manipulated the principal photography so that when a digital animal steps on something, it moves! Every step of the digital critters is reflected in their onscreen environment whether it be in perfect animal shadows or a piece of paper moving under the tiny foot of a ferret. We were especially fond of a cute shot of Pan, as his usual ferret self, sticking out his tiny pink tongue.
In designing and perfecting the Daemon animals, the filmmakers looked at countless photographs and studied some of the animals in real life. First, the digital animal is created without fur. Then the fur or feathers etc. are added. An attempt was made to match each Daemon's eye color to that of the human actor he is paired with. The effects house worked on around 800 shots for the film. About 600 will survive the final cut but what we saw was truly amazing. Every feather or tuft of fur or reflection in the eyes of these lovingly-created digital animal pals looks quite real. While strolling out of the Rhythm and Hues facility, we saw rooms full of computer artists and programmers working in the dark, glued to their computer screens to make The Daemons of The Golden Compass come to life. We're all in for a treat when we see the final product in theaters on December 7th.
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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.
