By I don’t think anyone will be surprised to find out that Darren Aronofsky’s Noah will be quite heavy on the impressive visuals, but earning the tag of the most complicated rendering Industrial Light and Magic Has ever done means we’ll be seeing something really special or really hairy. Aronofsky is going heavily digital with the film and all the animals in it will be digital as well. Having an ark full of them set up some tough work for the folks at ILM. He told DGA Quarterly:
“It was a nice badge of honor. I don’t think it’s the most incredible shot, but I think because of all the hair on the animals it was incredibly complicated for them. They said, ‘We can only render it two or three more times so make sure those are exactly right because they take so long and are so complex.”
The director also discusses how none of the animals int he film will look like real animals because he didn’t want it to feel cliche. Instead they took the general concept of different types of animals and tweaked them. Of course, all this was much easier than getting live animals to shoot even if it was a pain for ILM. Have you ever tried to herd a bunch of unicorns onto a boat? Yea, it didn’t work for Noah either.
[via DGA Quarterly]