FOUR KIDS AND IT
Four Out Of Five Ain’t BadW W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K |^047
the grumpiness still worked”.
In the first instance, concept artist Brian
Froud (the man behind the look of The Dark
Crystal) produced an early design for the
character, which was modelled as a sculpture
and then scanned into a computer, so that
the team at Milk could begin tweaking the
design and making sure the character could
meet all the demands of the script.
“We spent a lot of time talking about what
he was like and what drove him, and all that
helped you inform how he moves and how he
smiles and things like that,” Clare Norman,
VFX Executive Producer, says, giving the
example that “within the story he is a
kleptomaniac, he likes to steal things, so one
of his features was long fingers”.
The initial design process took about eight
months before they landed on a look and
functionality that worked. In the original
Nesbit book the Psammead had eyes on
stalks, an idea that was quickly binned
because, according to De Emmory, “it’s hard
to love something with extendable eyes”.
In terms of his movement, Norman says:
“We often talked about elderly kung fu
martial arts experts, who have that element
of being agile, but they’ve got wisdom, so
they carry an air of respect.” He was also a
creature that had to work in two elements –
on land, and swimming through the sand.
The VFX team decided that the latter would
be his natural element, making him clumsier
when he’s on land. The key, according to
Creature Rigging Supervisor Neil Roche,
was to make the Psammead “physicallyplausible”, even though he’s a fictional
creature, and to really commit to the realism
of the character rather than making him
cartoony. “It was about getting the little stuff
he’d do, like hand gestures or facial motions
and just really sell some of the animation in
terms of realism,” Roche says. “You can get
80% of the way there reasonably quickly, but
getting the last 10-20%is the really difficult
part of any animation job.”
The other challenge was to maintain the
consistency and integrity of the character,
a tricky feat when multiple animators are
working on him. Head of animation Chris
Hutchison tells us that he was in charge of
making “sure [the Psammead] didn’t detour
too much from what I thought made him
him. So it was just trying to make sure that
the performance was there, and that he
wasn’t doing anything out of character”.
Roche agrees, saying: “You’ve got to
understand his story and his motivations for
what he does... that’s a really tricky thing
to get across in animation, and to make it
believable and convincing for the audience
a s we l l.”
One element that helped immeasurably
with bringing the Psammead to life was
the casting of Michael Caine. They filmed
Caine’s performance, tracking his facial
and upper-body movement onto the digital
creature where possible. “He’s someone
who is known for very minimal, controlled
performances,” De Emmory says. “He was
able to let loose a bit, which was really good
fun as well. He can go quite big at times for
the creature, very emphatic. So it was quite
nice playing with that with him. He really
got into the freedom of that, playing with the
voice, playing with the movement.” When he
returned for additional dialogue recording
and was able to see animated footage of
the Psammead, De Emmory says that Caine
grew in confidence, until “there were whole
ten-minute takes of him just mumbling and
grumbling and burping and making weird
sounds, which the animators loved”.
Hutchison says that “you’d work on some
of the shots and see glimpses of [Caine] come
through, it would take you by surprise”.
Hutchison admits that after months of
working on the Psammead – he was there
from the first shot to the last – he was quite
sad to say goodbye to a creature he had come
to know inside out.
As the animators and the directors say
goodbye to the character, yet another
generation gets ready to say hello, and
meet their Psammead. This may be a
contemporary take on the character, but he
hasn’t changed all that much in the last 118
years. He’s looking good for his age.Four Kids And It is released in cinemas and
on Sky Cinema on 10 April.