A moment from The Chronicles of Narnia

It?s the next big movie franchise for Hollywood after Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings and the first instalment of the series has already grossed over $580 million globally.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is slated for release in India on January 26, but the connection with this country runs much deeper.

The special effects for the Walt Disney movie was done by Los Angeles-based visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues (R&H). And a chunk of that work was done by the company?s Indian arm in Mumbai.

?R&H India worked on several hundred shots, primarily in compositing, camera tracking and character matchmoving,? said A.R. Sesha Prasad, production co-ordinator for R&H India.

Camera tracking is the technique required for seamless integration of computer generated imagery (CGI) with live action where the movement captured by the live action camera ? as shot by the filming crew ? is extracted for use by the CGI camera and software.

Matchmoving is the process of digitally extracting the movement of actors with whom the computer generated objects would interact.

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels by C.S. Lewis written in the 1950s with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe being the first book.

The story is of four ordinary children who make their way into the magical land of Narnia where they meet the talking lion Aslan and try to smash an evil witch?s powers.

The movie has been appreciated for its visual effects, particularly for the computer-generated lion Aslan, voiced by Liam Neeson. Tech bible Wired magazine notes that Rhythm & Hues spent a year developing specific fur techniques for Aslan, resulting in the character having more than five million individually rendered hair.

The bulk of the work done by R&H India ? the four-year-old Indian subsidiary ? comprised creating centaurs for the movie.

The upper half of human actors had to be matched with horse?s legs to create the half man-half horse fantasy characters (see graphic below).

?Putting the two together was a challenging task. We had to take care of various aspects like the centaurs leaving a pattern in the grass while walking,? explained Prasad. The actors were first filmed riding horses. ?The Indian compositors had to then remove the riders and the horse heads from the live action footage to integrate computer-generated human upper halves.?

Camera tracking and matchmoving tasks involved the final battlefield sequence where a large number of CGI characters fought with each other. ?The large battlefield terrain had to be populated with CGI characters which were very sensitive to even the slightest mismatch between the live action and the virtual cameras.?

To make it an even more daunting a task, every frame of the movie ? each second utilises 24 frames ? had to be created individually. A team of 50 artists, pipeline support, technical support and production support personnel of R&H India toiled on the project for 18 months, in tandem with their LA counterparts.

The company has worked in major Hollywood releases such as Daredevil, The Cat In the Hat, The Chronicles of Riddick, Garfield: the Movie and The Longest Yard.

Next up is visual effects work on the much anticipated Superman Returns ? some ?water-related effects? ? Garfield 2 and The Fast and the Furious.

?We feel that appreciation and recognition for the work done in The Lion? would act as a strong confidence boost not only for us but the entire Indian animation industry. It would also help us tackle more challenging areas,? offered Prasad.

When you catch the movie next weekend, don?t miss the ?Made in India? stamp on the centaurs!