VFX Supervisor Susan MacLeod on Wolves, Ghosts and New Moon

The extent of the first film's effects was essentially some flying here, some sparkling there. How much of a mandate did you have to really push that forward with higher expectations and a higher budget for New Moon?

Well, for what we had do, it wasn't like we had a massive budget. There was definitely a mandate to stick to the budget and to do things efficiently and cost-effectively. Having said that, there wasn't a mandate on anybody's part -- on Summit's part or the producer's part -- to mimic anything that was done on Twilight. We were liberated to be able to explore other possibilities, which was great. I sort of envisaged it [the sparkling] as more of a three-dimensional effect that they had in Twilight. That's not to knock Twilight; we just had other thoughts. Same thing for what we called "vampire speed"; we had other thoughts about what might enhance that sense. And then there were all-new effects that hadn't appeared in Twilight at all -- being the wolves, obviously, and then there's an effect of Edward's apparition appearing to Bella when she's in moments of danger. Then there were just a bunch of other things that we developed for transitional effects. The movie is a series of transitions in a sense, and many of those transitions were achieved by effects Chris had written into the script or which we'd developed in pre-production.

What do you mean by "transitional effects"?

In the book, after Edward breaks up with Bella, Stephenie Meyer illustrates Bella's depression by having three months go by. And you have just one word on a page; you get "October," "November," "December." It's very evocative of the fact that she's feeling nothing. So the script said that Bella would sit by her window in her rocking chair, and the camera would rotate around her. And every time we were behind her head, you would see the weather had changed outside, and the scenery has changed outside, and the time of day had changed outside. Being that we wanted to keep Bella in-frame the entire time, we did that as a visual effect.

Or there's a scene where Bella and Jacob are building their motorcycles, and rather than have your standard movie montage to show the passage of time, Chris wanted to do all in a single shot. That was sort of a last-minute notion that we had to put together a concept for and decide what we were doing in a week. We had to previsualize a motion-control shot that I think came out really well and was fun to shoot. There are things like that that might not be readily apparent to the audience, but [work] subliminally and hopefully help convey the emotion of the scene. Which is what we try to do -- support the movie.

The Golden Compass is perhaps best known for its great polar bear fight sequence. The New Moon previews we've seen so far imply that we're going to get something similar with wolves. What can you tell us about it?

Well, it's not quite on that scale, unfortunately. It's funny you ask that, because it was not thought about when we were doing the previsualization of the scene and when Chris was storyboarding the scene. Certainly I wasn't thinking about the bear fight. There were times we were looking at the shots as they'd develop, and we'd think, "Hey, this is kind of like that scene where Iorek rips Ragnar's jaw off." Maybe it just subliminally occurred to us. But it's definitely a bid to add some action and some threat into the movie that's entertaining. Complexity-wise, there just wasn't time and budget to do something on as grand a scale as Golden Compass. But for what it is, it's correct for the tone of the movie and the tone of the story. And it was a lot of fun to do.

So what's next for you?

Nothing at the moment. I'm hoping I can go on and do more supervising work like I did on New Moon -- kind of the mid-range effects film. There are a few projects I'm talking [over], but right now I'm taking a little bit of time off. I'm just looking forward to whatever comes up next.

[New Moon photo courtesy Tippet Studio]

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