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Acclaimed filmmaker Zack Snyder makes his animation debut with the fantasy family adventure "Guardians of Ga'Hoole," based on the beloved books by Kathryn Lasky. The film follows Soren, a young owl enthralled by his father's epic stories of the Guardians of Ga'Hoole, a mythic band of winged warriors who had fought a great battle to save all of owlkind from the evil Pure Ones.
While Soren dreams of someday joining his heroes, his older brother, Kludd, scoffs at the notion, and yearns to hunt, fly and steal his father's favor from his younger sibling. But Kludd's jealousy has terrible consequences--causing both owlets to fall from their treetop home and right into the talons of the Pure Ones. Now it is up to Soren to make a daring escape with the help of other brave young owls. Together they soar across the sea and through the mist to find the Great Tree, home of the legendary Guardians of Ga'Hoole--Soren's only hope of defeating the Pure Ones and saving the owl kingdoms.
From Page to Screen
Young owlet Soren embarks on a quest to follow his dreams…only to discover they’re real. Stepping into the legend that he’s faithfully followed through his father’s nest-time stories, he becomes a crucial part of the next chapter in the epic tales.
Now on a true hero’s journey of self-discovery, young Soren and his friends join their mentors in an action-packed battle against the evil Pure Ones to protect not only their freedom, but the very existence of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, who have sworn an oath to mend the broken, make strong the weak, and vanquish evil.
 “Isn’t it every kid’s fantasy to become a character in his or her favorite story?” director Zack Snyder asks. “In our film, it’s a young owl who wants to find these legendary warrior owls that have been part of his personal mythology since he was born. And when the stories actually turn out to be true, it’s very powerful.”
In “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole,” Snyder and the gifted creative team at Animal Logic sought to open a window into a world that hasn’t been seen before, with mythic environments and expansive terrains like nothing they’d ever imagined, and owls so wonderfully realized that you almost forget they’re not real.
“Zack brings a visual language to his movies that is distinctive, and so do we at Animal Logic, so the marriage between Zack’s vision and our vision was easy right from the get-go,” says the film’s producer, Animal Logic CEO Zareh Nalbandian.
Drawing from his experience on the Academy Award®-winning “Happy Feet,” Nalbandian assembled a crew of more than 500 digital professionals, including a team of computer animation specialists, to bring “Legend of the Guardians” from the page to the screen, with the added dimension of a 3D film.
“We don’t think about our movies as animated,” he continues, “we think of them as movies; Zack didn’t come on board to make an animated movie, he came to make a great action fantasy adventure, tracking a hero’s journey, which happened to be in an animated world. It was about creating a visual feast for audiences that would be unique.”
In addition to the challenge of taking on his first entirely computer-generated project, Snyder, whose previous work includes the epic action films “300” and “Watchmen,” found that his motivation for making this particular story hit close to home. “I know it sounds cliché,” the director admits, “but my kids are always saying to me, ‘Dad, when are you gonna make a movie we can see?’ And the chance to work with the animators at Animal Logic really appealed to me; there were moments in ‘Happy Feet’ that I found artistically breathtaking. So when I saw their initial ‘Guardians’ artwork, and then read he stories of Soren and his friends on this incredible quest, I looked at it as a perfect opportunity to bring my own sensibilities to a family film.”
“Both Zack and I loved the notion of this young boy—who just happens to be an owl in an owl world—learning to believe in himself and in something bigger than himself,” executive producer Deborah Snyder says. “He has to battle the odds, and in doing so, becomes the owl kingdom’s only hope for survival. We felt it was a story we would love to bring to the screen.”
The filmmakers first came upon the tales of these heroic owls when executive producer Lionel Wigram discovered the popular Guardians of Ga’Hoole series of 15 books by American author Kathryn Lasky. Recognizing their cinematic potential, Wigram urged executive producer Donald De Line to read them.
“I found the books completely enchanting,” De Line says. “They tackle traditional themes—good versus evil, believing in your dreams and becoming anything you want to be—all while telling a great adventure story. The Guardians of Ga’Hoole reminded me of the Knights of the Round Table.”
Actress Helen Mirren, who takes a rare turn as a villain, says, “I loved the classic, archetypal personalities of the characters and the fact that the story is set in the animal kingdom. While it is highly entertaining, it isn’t sentimentalized, and still conveys a deep sense of morality.”
Wigram asserts, “We wanted to capture the feeling of the books and give the movie the same sense and tone of a grand adventure, something that would take on a life of its own. That is what Zack does in his work and what made him such an exciting choice for this picture.”
Jim Sturgess, who voices Soren, states, “Zack loves classic storytelling and is famous for putting together amazing visual sequences, so I knew from the start that this had the potential to be really stunning.”
“While some of his films may deal with dark material, Zack has a very child-like sense of wonder,” De Line observes. “He is also a real artist, and a whole different side of his talent comes through in this movie. Big action, creatures that fly through the air, huge battle scenes—combine all of those things with 3D animation in 3D and he’s a kid in a candy store.”
“In taking this adventure from the ground to the air and across the sea, there was no better way to capture the scope of this expedition than to make it in 3D, and no medium lends itself better to 3D than computer animation,” Snyder affirms.
 Author and executive producer Lasky put her stamp of approval on the filmmakers’ efforts. “When I saw the film, it was a dream come true,” she states. “I couldn’t believe how brilliantly Zack Snyder had realized the Ga’Hoole world on screen, yet remained so true to the spirit of the universe I created. I was totally swept up in ‘Legend of the Guardians.’”
Lasky’s first three books in the series were adapted into screenplay form by writers John Orloff and Emil Stern.
“The day I finished reading the first book, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a fantastic book and I have to do this,’ Orloff declares. “Then, as soon as I knew Zack Snyder was directing, I knew the movie was really going to be mind-blowing and that it would look like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“It was a great deal of fun working with a director as visual and action-oriented as Zack, as well as getting to know Animal Logic's extremely gifted and dedicated team of animation wizards,” writer Emil Stern reflects. “We wanted to capture the spirit of the author's world in making the script both cinematic and adventure-packed.”
Nalbandian offers, “The books are rich in imagery and the world of owls is fascinating; add to that the idea of flying above the clouds in a 3D movie in a very naturalistic environment…at every phase it became more and more compelling to develop the world of this movie."
“There’s real vigor in the story and a full spectrum of characters, from cute and cuddly to downright evil,” says star Geoffrey Rush. “Adding to that, the sophistication, the brilliance really, of the technique has truly been elevated in animated movies. I believed this could be a film that would be appreciated by both kids and their parents on many different levels.”
Stepping into the animation realm for the first time, Snyder enthuses, “Animation is filmmaking without limits. When I saw the potential of what the movie could be, and thought about the chance as a filmmaker to actually be able to create any shot I wanted…I couldn’t wait to see what we could do.”
“Words were the only proof I’ve ever had that the Guardians were real, and still I believed.”
In animation, nothing physically exists before the filmmakers begin to make the movie. Therefore, it’s the responsibility of the director and the art department to imagine what the world and its creatures are going to look like. Simple pencil drawings turn into simple animation and the character rigs follow, then musculature, and eventually all the body parts are moving and every feather is in place; but it’s a long, layered and sometimes daunting process.
That didn’t deter Snyder in the least. “From the very first meetings that we had, I was very enthusiastic about the way the characters and locations were coming together,” he recounts, “and continued to feel that every step along the way.”
Creating from scratch, the artists tried to look at the world in the way that an owl would see it. For example, as nocturnal creatures, much of the story takes place at night, so the moon is their sun. Production designer Simon Whiteley and art director Grant Freckelton, the latter of whom had forged a strong working relationship with Snyder as visual effects art director on “300,” carefully researched the various owl species, as well as the locations that would go into establishing the look and feel and inhabitants of the film.
“I like to use design to back up the story and create an emotional response to the image on screen,” Freckelton says. “Simon influenced the shapes of things—what each owl or a tree might look like, the structures and so on—whereas I focused more on how the scenes would be lit, the overall mood and tone of the imagery. We literally sat next to each other daily and theorized about how this world was going to come together, asking questions like, ‘If these owls create armor, how does it differ in design from a human’s? If they wear helmets, how does that work when they turn their heads 180 degrees?’ That’s where the battle claws—natural extensions of their talons—came into play, as did the helmets some of them wear.”
Whiteley, who spent time at an owl sanctuary in England and became something of an owl expert during production, states, “When working with owls in the sanctuaries, you immediately see that they’ve got personalities just like humans. There are happy owls, grumpy owls, angry owls, friendly owls. One particular British barn owl named Fluffy, at the Screech Owl Sanctuary in the UK, was really like a pet; you could scratch him and stroke him, and he really liked being around people. We filmed all the different species flying, running, eating, bathing and even casting—regurgitating the bits of rodent bone and hair they can’t digest—so we could replicate those behaviors in the film.”
The production designers set up an “owl school” for their animation team, immersing them in everything owl, including field trips to Sydney’s natural history museum and the local Sydney zoos. Even the rig designed to build the owls’ bodies was based on an actual owl skeleton that they were able to closely observe. The animators and technicians were taught to think and act and move like an owl.
“You have to really study them to understand the nuances of what makes up your characters,” Nalbandian relates. “As part of the crew, you’ve got to become the characters to be able to make them truly come alive on screen. The team became engrossed in the owl world, and I think the richness of that experience comes across in the movie.”
According to animation supervisor Alex Weight, the in-depth study enabled the animators to “respect the owl’s anatomy and only let the owls do as characters what they could do if they could really walk and talk. It made the performances a lot more genuine, because you could suspend your disbelief and accept the experiences they were going through and from that, the emotions they were feeling.”
In order to help convey those emotions, the animators would have to deviate from true owl anatomy in one critical area: the eyes. “Owls have these incredibly big eyes,” Weight reports, “but they can’t move them. In order to compensate, they rotate and move their heads around a lot.” “We wanted to show so much emotion with our characters, but if they were constantly moving their heads it would become very distracting very fast,” Freckelton points out. “So we had to find a happy medium.”
The animators integrated some of that familiar head movement, along with the owl’s nictitating membrane—their inner eyelid that causes them to “double blink”—into their animation, as almost imperceptible anatomical details that would add to the realism. However, says Weight, “We had to take a little artistic license by adding color and movement to the eyes, because we needed the ability to have the characters express what they’re feeling through them.”
In order to achieve the level of expressiveness they needed, digital supervisor Ben Gunsberger explains, “We put a lot of work into making the eyes interesting and detailed, adding imperfections and studying how the light bounces around inside the eyes to give them a kind of glow, making them more engaging for the audience.”
Freckelton adds, “We also made the eye motion of the bad guys a lot more animal-like and a little scarier, while the good guys’ eyes are a little more human so they moved around and emoted, making them the more relatable of the two.”
Creating Flight
There is perhaps nothing more wondrous about owls than their gift for silent flight—swooping in undetected and then disappearing again into the night sky. Therefore, the filmmakers knew that a major key to bringing their winged characters to life was “capturing the majesty of an owl in flight,” says Zack Snyder. “The animators did an extraordinary job of taking our owls to new heights, literally and figuratively.”
For the animators, allowing the owls to take flight began with replicating the arc of their wings, which was an intricate process that began with models and evolved in the computers with the riggings. “When you see an owl soaring through the air, or opening and folding its wings, you might take for granted how effortless and natural those movements appear. But when you start to break it down, you see there’s actually an incredible amount going on,” marvels characters supervisor Damien Gray.
Whether flapping to gain altitude or speed or just riding the air currents with the subtlest of shifts, “It was crucial to make the motion of the wings fluid and in no way rigid,” Gray continues. “The wings are perpetually changing posture as they propel the owls through the air, and, obviously, are quite different when the owls are ‘grounded.’ We knew we had to provide the control that would allow the animators to move the characters organically between these states.”
Nevertheless, the finer point of animating the owls was also the greatest challenge: the owls’ innumerable feathers, with their wide range of colors, shapes, sizes and textures. The rendering of the feathers demanded a true union of design and function.
“As most production does, we started in modeling and rigging to achieve the underlying character movement; then each character had to have thousands of feathers placed on it. Those had to be hand-groomed so they would appear separate, yet connected,” Gray says. “Many feathers were quite literally hand-placed to a certain design, specific to the character. Nyra, for example, is white and quite sleek, whereas Eglantine is covered with down, and appears very soft and fuzzy.”
Whiteley adds, “We also learnt that owls have developed special comb-like fringed edges to their primary feathers and soft down on the upper surfaces of their wings, both helping to break up the air and make them silent fliers.”
The team worked hard to achieve realism in the feathering of each owl, so that the movements were precise, species by species. “From the very beginning, we realized we needed to bring that level of detail to the animation, so we developed tools and techniques in order to get that very fine level of control down to each feather,” Gray says.
The feathers also had to be constantly affected by the characters’ movements and the atmospheric effects of the scene. The filmmakers found that the iterative process was invaluable when dealing with all of the details of the various featherings, both on the ground and in the air. “Patterning— keeping all the feathers in order—was quite difficult, given some of the extremes that come both from the environment and the performance,” Gray notes.
Another important factor was determining how much to use the owls’ wings, beyond flight. Inspired by the actors’ movements when voicing their characters, Gray says, “We knew we needed to open up their wings and perform with them.” But the filmmakers decided that the owls would not use their wings as “fingers” or “hands,” instead having them grab things with their talons, as would a real owl.
Additionally, though the owls in the film would be talking and using tools and weaponry, Snyder and the Animal Logic team wanted to avoid hyper-anthropomorphizing the characters and making them overly-humanistic. Rather, the filmmakers incorporated as much real owl physicality in the performances as possible, exploring a variety of subtle attributes they could use.
Gray describes, “An owl’s face feathers are very flat and act like a radar dish, their ears are positioned so they can pick up sounds in front of them and they use muscles in the face to alter the shape of this facial disk. They also have this ability to pant: they can’t sweat, so their neck swells and they puff out air rapidly to cool down. They have three toes at the front of their foot, and one at the back; but one of these front toes actually bends all the way around to the back, so they can position two front and two back toes when they need to grasp things. Getting those little things right as part of the owls’ realistic repertoire was critical.”
The art department developed what they called “owl ergonomics” for the film, ensuring the talons could actually grip and grasp and that the owls and the items in their environment fit together in the correct way.
“The work these guys at Animal Logic did was pretty groundbreaking,” Snyder states. “Everything they accomplished not only met but exceeded my expectations. They made it possible for us to really push the boundaries at every stage.”
In addition to the visual choices made by the director and the artists, supervising sound editor and designer Wayne Pashley had to determine what the owl world should sound like. In keeping with the naturalistic sensibility of the film, Pashely was able to utilize the wide array of sounds owls make. “Most people think that owls just hoot, but, depending on the species, they can purr, growl, whisper, click…their communication is just so varied. In the film, we’ve got barn owls, desert owls, great greys, and so on, so we used the real calls and cries, morphing them with the dialogue from the cast to cross over into character signatures.”
The actors were of great help to Pashley, providing him with their own imitations of the various sounds of their species, which the sound team then layered in with the real owl sounds, achieving a seamless transition from dialogue into the actual bird noises, and vice versa.
“By combining both the real owl sounds and the great actors’ voices, Wayne brought in an extra layer of texture that takes you even more into the characters, and gives you that extra bit of perspective about the world of owls,” Nalbandian observes.
Snyder was also a great help in that capacity because he was able to “model” many of the sounds he was looking for—and not just owls. “Zack is very sound-literate,” Pashley attests. “For example, when he wanted a funny-sounding frog, we recorded him imitating the style of frog sound he was after, and then I approximated that recording into the scenes. So now we have unique atmospheres based on how we felt it might sound from an owl’s point of view.” Pashley hopes their combined efforts will help the audience “be immersed in the world of Ga’Hoole.”
Designing An Owl Kingdom
“Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” takes us into a fantastical land belonging solely to its winged heroes and villains. Though there are people mentioned in relation to the environments in Kathryn Lasky’s books, for the film Snyder wanted to imagine a world untouched by humans, populated instead solely by ancient owl and animal cultures. Whiteley expands, “If there were any built or carved structures, they would have to be created by owls using owl tools, and didn't have to be built from the ground up, as in the case of Metal Beak’s palace, which was carved out from the ceiling of a massive cave.”
This dictate affected the designers’ search for reference locations. “The nice thing about Australia is that there is a lot of wild, untouched landscape. Tasmania, an island at the southeastern end of the continent, is open to the Indian and Pacific oceans and is blasted by wild weather and amazing light, perfect for our owls. It also has large areas of terrain that are untouched, ancient forests and rivers, alpine mountains and cradle lakes—the raw elements that we needed. Tyto Forest, Soren’s home, is based on the cradle lakes of the Western Arthur Range in the southwest of Tasmania,” he details further.
The team flew by helicopter around the lakes, out to the ocean and back up the estuaries. “On the other side of the island, you have Cape Raoul, a coastline full of columns of rock, which are represented in the film when the band of travelers meets the Echidna, overlooking the Sea of Hoolemere.”
“We took some creative liberties, mixing up some of the vegetation,” environment supervisor Gregory Jowle allows, “but for the most part, everything we have is indigenous to the areas we studied, and the overall rock structures are reminiscent of the specific places we scouted throughout Australia and Tasmania. We wanted our environment to look like a world that could actually exist, so why not base it on one that really does?”
Despite basing their designs on reality, Snyder and the animators endeavored to do more than present a photo-realistic look to the film, they wanted to take even that up a notch to what they called hyper-realism. Freckelton explains, “In the film, you’re looking at something that, hopefully, could be a convincing reality. But, for instance, since owls are nocturnal and much of the story takes place at night, we didn’t always have the luxury of bright sunlight. We often relied on moonlight, but we amped it up by making it appear as if the moon were perpetually full, with light striking both sides of a character’s face, and maybe coming from behind him as well. At the same time, we might have played the background much darker, making for some moody atmospheres that allow the owl to pop in the scene.”
The centerpiece of the film is the Great Tree, a magnificent, 1,000-year-old tree growing out of a volcanic rock in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere. Home to the Guardians, inside is an idyllic, self-contained ancient world with the intricacies of a modern-day city, including a wide array of hollows, rooms and common areas. The scale of the tree is about five times that of the largest redwood trees, and other, smaller trees sprout from its many branches. In coming up with the design, Whiteley was influenced by Japanese bonsai trees, the way they are sculpted into beautifully interesting shapes.
Freckelton elaborates, “The idea was to have a central core in this kind of twisting shape. The tree itself is modeled on an oak tree, but from that we put gums and ferns and bracken bushes growing over the surface. The Guardians celebrate life and knowledge and preservation, and the tree is a symbol of that spirit.”
In stark contrast to the Great Tree—and the Guardians themselves—the world of the Pure Ones at St. Aggie’s is gloomy and oppressive, as if to represent the smothering of diversity and growth.
“They’re the bad guys,” Freckelton relates, “so everything is being decimated. Instead of encouraging new life, they just take what they find and repurpose it for their own use.”
Wigram states, “With Zack’s clarity of vision leading our amazing team at Animal Logic, a world has been created that is filled with fantasy, but also feels real—and beyond. The textures and colors of landscape and sky create an ancient place that feels like it truly exists apart from our own. My hope is that this will allow the audience to fully immerse themselves in the world of Ga’Hoole and share in the grand adventure of our heroes.”
Cinematography and Choregraphy
As a live-action director who has operated cameras throughout his career, Snyder is very hands-on and very in-tune with the camera. But with “Legends of the Guardians…” there was no camera he could pick up. In an animated movie, filmmakers have to work with virtual cameras, just as they have to generate the animated characters that populate the story.
Previz & lensing director David Scott, whose team determined the camera work for the film, was thrilled to work with someone with Snyder’s background. “Zack brought an entire live-action aesthetic to filmmaking that you don’t often see in animation. He’s all about camerawork. I spent a long time talking to him about his filmmaking style, lens choices, the way he likes to block a scene, basically just downloading from him. Based on that, I ended up putting together a ‘lensing bible,’ which was essentially a how-to on making a Zack Snyder movie.”
Scott reveals his playbook emphasized that “the cameras needed to feel like live-action cameras: if we had a dolly shot, it needed to feel like someone was pushing the dolly; if we had a handheld shot, we needed to make the same kind of adjustments you’d make with a handheld camera. Same goes for crane shots. And Zack was very specific about when he wanted to slow things down to give you an awe-inspiring look at the action in detail.”
“In lensing this movie, we were really trying to create a different experience for an animated film,” Deborah Snyder shares. “Zack wanted the camera—which in animation, you can place wherever you choose—to be placed where it would normally be if we were actually shooting the film. That, along with giving the film a short depth of field since most scenes take place in the moonlight, stylistically gives it a different flavor.”
The director’s preference for a shallow depth of field challenged the animators, who weren’t always accustomed to taking the beautiful backgrounds they’ve created and knocking them out of focus in order to draw the viewer’s attention to what is most critical in the scene. “We played around with the literal eye of the movie,” Zack Snyder says. “Though it’s counterintuitive for computer animation, we really tried to manipulate the tools of 3D to make it work…to stretch those concepts.”
In order to achieve everything that their director envisioned, Scott and the team spent a day at the Australian Film and Television School. “With a virtual camera, you can do anything,” he says. “You can put it anywhere and make it go as fast or slow as you want. There’s a lot of freedom in that. But the mandate from Zack was to make it look like we actually went out and photographed these owls. In order to accomplish that, we needed to have that live-action feeling of weight. If you’ve got a push in, you don’t want to just go ‘whoosh,’ you want to make sure you get the sense someone is there pushing a heavy camera forward. We trained with real handheld 35mm cameras, went up on the cranes, did everything we could to experience what it’s like physically to move these heavy cameras around.”
Scott felt that the schooling helped immensely in the end, as did the filmmakers’ decision to play with the speed of the film. “Because owls move quickly and are lightweight, from the outset we decided that the movie should look like it was shot at 48 frames per second to slow things down and lend extra weight to the performances. Also, when you see a character land, or crash and hit the ground, we put a little camera shake in there to give things a bit more gravity, even thought that would never happen in the real world.”
Another way in which Snyder wanted to stretch the traditional sensibilities of animation was by enlisting an “owl stunt team” to perform choreographed battle sequences that the animators could then translate in the computer as the skirmishes between the characters.
Film editor David Burrows illustrates, “For example, there’s a lot of martial arts-style action going on in the scene where Nyra and Grimble fight in the St. Aggie’s library. So what Zack did was to stage it on a soundstage, with people dressed up as owls. No motion or performance capture, just stunt fighters and cameras. It was actually quite amusing to watch, but all the moves were there, blocked and edited and given to the previz department to realize, shot for shot. We refined it, but the actual choreography and camera work are intact, and it translated to the screen beautifully.”
Scott recalls, “They were all wearing cardboard, and I think in some cases they were even on roller skates, which was really hilarious. It was great fun to watch but, to be honest, the entire shot structure was really well-developed. The energy and the intent of that footage were there, and we were able to convert the human performance into owl behavior and get the camera rig to reflect that handheld quality and timing perfectly.”
“I loved the idea of getting real stunt guys to show the animators the body language of an actual fight,” Snyder says. “As a result, I think they rendered it really well in the movie.”
 Production notes provided by Warner Bros. Pictures |
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