By Tehanu

This week I visit in the evening. One film crew is working early morning until mid-afternoon; the second unit starts at 1 pm and works until 1 am. Before seeing them, I have a look at some places that are starting to look familiar - the courtyard of the Witch’s house, and the great hall of Cair Paravel. The courtyard has the same feel as the audience hall I saw the other week - heavy, gloomy architecture loaded with ice and snow. The icicles are made of fibreglass. The sharp smell of fibreglass fills the courtyard. It’s an exciting smell that I remember from the past, when I would watch my brother hatch a new kayak out of its mould, all ready to paint and finish. You can make so many things out of fibreglass that the very smell of it seems ripe with imagination.

What a team of eleven sculptors has made for Narnia are dozens of creatures: Narnians who have been frozen into stone by the Witch. They’re amazing sculptures - somehow their surfaces are deeply textured, with the fur matted up into sharp points like wet hair, and yet completely grey and lifeless. I can see from a bear’s broken paw that each creature is built around a polystyrene core with the fibreglass forming a rind on the outside. But it’s incredibly detailed modelling, and the poses are lifelike. You can see eyes, hair, teeth, all in the same grey stone-like substance. The expressions of fear and despair on their faces are vivid and unsettling.

The courtyard is snowy with strangely waxy but realistic-looking fake snow. A dead tree hung with icicles stands in the middle of it, with a stone eagle frozen onto it. Other creatures are scattered about, paused in violent action. I see a male and female centaur, a bear, a panther, a griffin, a giant (modelled on a real big guy, I hear), and a faun. I can’t confirm whether he is Tumnus, who might suffer that fate after his time in the dungeon. There is a lioness. I don’t see a stone lion for Aslan to wake. He may have been there earlier - according to my guide Ernie, there were around 70 stone creatures here when they were filming. Now this set is ready to demolish, and many of the stone creatures have been moved down to the South Island where they’ll be part of the great battle scene.

I rather like the idea of Aslan waking a lioness with his breath, rather than a lion. It would be very sweet. It wouldn’t conflict with the personality of the lion that Lewis wrote, for he has a charming ditziness about him. Making him a lioness instead also has the advantage that once the stone creature comes to life, the film audience can’t possibly confuse her with Aslan.

The next place we visit is not finished yet. It’s the great hall of Cair Paravel, and it has about a week to go. The pillars I saw being painted and gilded last time are now in position. The room feels more like a large, airy church, with rows of arches between the pillars. The floor is covered with mosaic patterns, alternating marble and ceramic. Soft creams, pinks and greens predominate. Banks of lights lie in wait behind the arches, ready to give the illusion of brilliant daylight outside the arched windows.

Dominating one part of the hall is a huge window of stained glass that reaches from the ceiling almost to the floor. Panes of colour fan out like peacock’s tails and there are panels filled with leaves and blossoms in soft colour. Because it looks vaguely church-like, I’m on the lookout for saints, crosses, roses and hearts. I wonder if Christian imagery from our world would cross over into Narnia, but of course Narnia’s history is different from our own. Really I should be looking for an image of the Stone Table where one of our buildings would have a cross. In Cair Paravel the symbols of Good are images of Spring, and everywhere you see the forms and colours of buds and blooms, full of the promise of life and growth.

Moving on from there, we go to the working set for this night. This is the Stone Table! It’s in a huge aircraft hangar. Inside it they have set up a whole hilltop, covered in live grass and grey stones that poke up through the soil. Broad steps of lichen-blotched stone lead up to the stone platform at the top. Time or cataclysm has cracked the steps from top to bottom. The table however is still whole. It has the by-now-familiar look of evil in Narnia: it is low, squat, heavy and square. A deep groove or bevel runs around the sides, with words carved into it in a script that looks vaguely like Greek, only with more curves. It’s in separate letters, not cursive like Elvish or angular like runes. Shattered-looking grey standing stones, maybe 15 feet high, surround the Stone Table on three sides.

All this is hard to observe because the set is in a state of complete frenzy. Dozens of people are running round carrying cables or manipulating lights or setting up the camera on a crane (which means we will see overhead shots of all this eventually). The extras are on set already, generally getting in the way since filming looks nowhere near ready. Big ugly giants in fat suits sit and sweat, not wearing their latex giant heads yet. (One of the mask makers I talk to later says jokingly that they aren’t wearing fat suits, and don’t really need the ugly masks either, but that is just slander.) A ragged mob is being formed while somebody sorts out the paraffin-dipped torches that they will wave around when the time comes. There is all the purposeful pandemonium of film sets that keeps the adrenaline pumping for everyone involved.

In complete contrast to this is the model of Aslan. Two models in fact, which lie utterly still in the midst of all the chaos. One lies bound and haltered on top of the Table, and I can’t get near this one because of the crowds of film crew. I think the lion on the Table is the animatronic Aslan, which I’ve heard exists, despite the claim that Aslan will be “95% CGI”. They will need something solid that the Witch’s minions can handle physically and that can perhaps respond to the jeering crowds. But there is a second Aslan lying abandoned to one side of the set, where I can get right up close. He looks amazingly real, right down to the gleaming half-closed eyes, the full dark mane, the stained ivory of his teeth and the tufted fur on his enormous paws. (Ever notice how some great cats - and housecats - develop these tufts that grow out between the pads of their feet?)

I should be feeling something more - awe maybe? After all, this is Aslan! But it comes to me, not for the first time, that film is an art that combines a world of different talents to create magic. No one thing has that magic inside of it. The actors are just people, their lines just words, the music just tunes, this Aslan just a prop. But hundreds of highly talented people, maybe over a thousand people, will put their best inspiration and hard work into combining the hundreds of elements that make a movie. As anyone knows who has been awed and moved and inspired by a film, the sum of the whole is greater than the parts. This props Aslan is nothing like the one we will see when when he is part of the drama and tension of the story, when there is music and lighting and sound and speech to give him meaning.

But he is beautiful. I lift one of the limbs, and it is soft and covered in coarse, realistic-looking fake fur. Basically he’s a giant soft toy, but much more convincing. He’s tied with a kind of rough black cord, and a halter binds his jaws shut. As in the book, you feel that it could never have held him without his consent, and yet there is something malignant about the bindings, and the way the body lies there so limp and pathetic.

Sadly I have to leave before seeing the dramatic scene enacted on the Stone Table - they are a long way from being ready to start, and my guide can’t stay until they begin. But I do get to talk to some of the magicians who make the masks and bring them to life in front of the camera, and that will be the subject of my next report.