This scene was part of the dream sequence, it was one of the longest and one of the most important scenes in the whole movie, as it is, in a sense the origin of “The Tree Of Power”.
From scrip, storyboards, designs and early small concept models made out of card, this scene was never set in stone, either the look or whether the set was to be real, model or virtual, even the Wise One’s physical appearance was in constant flux, because of financial and practical restraints, such as location filming.
The look of the Wise One will be touched upon in a future page but for now we will just look at the previs and why previs was so important for this scene.
Early designs of the interior of the Wise Ones home, had the bedroom on an upper level, and to get there The Small One had to climb a stairway which appeared when he raised his arms. The house later evolved into a more living, growing house with more moving walls and things, all emphasising the house as a living organic growing habitat that was in constant change.
Originally when The Small One entered the Wise One’s home in the dream sequence, the moving tunnel scene was shot using a model tunnel and very small wire skeletal Small One, stop frame animation was used to grab a frame at a time. This took days to do and only when some of the frames were assembled did I then realise it wasn’t working, not that it didn’t look good just there was a lot of restraints in gaining access to the Small One puppet. So the physical aspect of the tunnel enabled what little nuances I could not add. This inevitably had a knock on affect to the next scene, which was to be shot all for real. So I took a step back and re-designed the whole scene, from the Small One entering the Wise Ones house, walking through the moving tunnel hallway and finally him entering the Wise One’s room, where he is lying down before he dies... These shots were all going to have to be conceived in a different way as to originally planned.
Not in the finished movie and final design of the Wise One’s home, but these storyboards show how at one stage in the story, The Small One back tracks into the hall after looking for his father in the living area and then proceeds to head up to an upper level of the house.
The Tunnel shot was to be achieved using CGI and once the Small One had entered the Wise Ones bed chamber, CGI would be combined with live action and puppetry, (sounds easy if you say it quickly but that's still a lot of elements to come together). A live action Wise One, a puppet Small One and a computer animated moving back plate, with moving walls and burning braziers of which lit the room and which inevitably had to be replicated on the live set.
Knowing before hand what back plates and live foreground plates you need to shoot really helps with time and money, the previs is invaluable and it saves shooting shots, that either don't look good or just won’t work.
With the set being entirely computer generated I knew I could place the virtual camera anywhere in the set and find a good angle. By replicating a reference bed and a stand - in Wise One lying on the bed, I could move the camera around finding the shots I needed. There were still restraints and these were... The Wise One and bed would be eventually shot for real and this limited camera movement and also keeping the shots to what could be achieved in the real world. This applied to the puppet Small One where angles had to be taken into consideration so as not to expose the puppeteers while they operated him.
The aesthetic look of the bed was the least of my problems, the design however was. A normal size bed would not have worked for several reasons, the size of the blue set and also the bed must allow for the puppeteers to be able to hide under it but at the same time operate all the movements to the point of performing one of the most complex and demanding performance that the puppet must perform, emotionally and physically.
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