#MOUSE KING NUTER FOUR REALMS FULL#

In addition to dealing with the challenge of finding a believable way to “move” the metallic soldiers, Clegg’s team had to contend with how all the characters interacted. MPC animated an army of seven-foot tall tin soldiers that attacked Mother Ginger by climbing on top of each other to form a large pyramid, as well as swarming all over her canvass tent as they did battle. There’s quite a lot of stuff that was shot that we had to enhance, but often, just completely replace, to give it the right look as it moved around.” “We built the tent and upper torso,” Clegg notes, “But, then we had to make that torso a bit bigger, along with other adjustments.

#MOUSE KING NUTER FOUR REALMS FULL#

Though an enormous puppet skirt, torso and head were used for some practical shooting, for the most part, a full CG character was used where CG extensions and enhancements to the live-action elements, such as arms and mouth, weren’t sufficient. The skirt is actually a circus tent that houses the Polichinelles, who pop out of each other like Russian Matryoshka dolls. With steampunk design elements, the Mother Ginger marionette leaks steam from her pistons and chimney stacks. One of the film’s complex characters is the giant Mother Ginger puppet, which by design, is a menacing, 40-foot tall, 30-foot wide marionette with a circus tent for a skirt that Mother Ginger manually operates from inside. We extended the forest, all the shots inside the forest, as most of the trees were cut off at the top, and then extended off into the distance as well.” It’s kind of this spooky forest where you meet Mother Ginger’s marionette for the first time. We had a lot of forest set extensions in the fourth realm, which is the dark, rather foreboding former land of amusements. We had to optimize those assets with a really good workflow and pipeline, so we could distribute them around all the shots, and render that all from any position and have it look good. So, we ended up, in a lot of cases, using the background as a guide, and then adding in a wider light source.”Ĭlegg notes that there quite a volume of that work, continuing, “We had many, many trees, vegetation, buildings, rocks, the palace itself. For example, in the front of the palace, around this sort of gate in the arch that was in a lot of the photography, the light was really focusing on the characters. We also did set extensions and replacements. That was always something we’d nudge around…find the sweet spot on the plate where we’d blend from, and where we’d take over. All of the shots you see, apart from the sky, were mostly fully built and rendered, which gave us a lot of flexibility to match the plate and make sure we extended the desired stage lighting.

“And in the end, we ended up building the entire world in CG. “To begin with, there was always the debate about how much we were going to matte paint and how much we were going to build,” Clegg explains. On The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, the environments instead was fully modeled in 3D, which provided the filmmakers complete access to traverse the world and show it from any desired angle or distance. In most fantasy films, crafting such worlds would involve a considerable amount and use of digital matte paintings to extend and enhance the environments. Waterfalls, rivers and mountains needed to seem real - each realm was separated by a CG river with numerous waterfalls, 23 in total. One of Clegg’s biggest challenges was bringing a sense of believability, with some degree of physical realism, to the fantastical worlds of the four different realms. All told, MPC handled more than 1,000 shots on the film, creating a wide array of CG environments, including the completely digital realms of snow, flowers and sweets, along with palaces, forests and rivers, over 100 different digital assets and a number of complex digital characters such as the giant Mother Ginger, the Mouse King, an army of tin soldiers and a set of Polichinelle clowns. MPC’s team was led by VFX supervisor Richard Clegg and hubbed in Montreal, with artists working at the studio’s London and Bangalore facilities as well. To help realize Disney’s new adaptation, overall VFX supervisor Max Wood and VFX producer Marc Weigert brought on leading visual effects house MPC to handle the bulk of the digital work. Hoffman that later became one of the world’s most popular ballets, featuring the music of famed composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. Directed by Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston, the film is a reinvention of the time-honored story, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” written in 1816 by E.T.A. Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms takes audiences on a journey through a beautiful but mysterious parallel world, a land filled with intriguing and magical characters.

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