Tuesday, September 11, marked the official Snow White and the Huntsman on DVD and Blu-Ray. Say what you want about the story, the acting, and the mess of celebrity gossip surrounding the film and its potential franchise, but what cannot be denied is that it is a visual and cinematic delight. All of the creatures and landscapes seen in the 127minute feature are fantastic and belong very much in the modern take on classic fairy tales. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with the visual effects supervisor, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who tells me that working on a project like Snow White and the Huntsman is why you get into visual effects in the first place.
Nicolas-Troyan’s earlier projects, from One Hour Photo to The Weatherman were all very grounded in the real world. But according to him, Snow White and the Huntsman is the kind of project he has been trying to look into for a longtime. “You don’t get into visual effects to stay in the real world, you do this because you want make trolls and dragons and fantastic environments,” he says.
That said, it is without a doubt his background in the making the mundane interesting that got him on board this project. Well, that and director Rupert Sanders, whom Cedric had previously worked with on several commercials. Once he expressed interest in bringing Cedric on, the two began to decide on the kind of the world they wanted to make. After all, it is a fairytale so it has to be fantastic, but they very much wanted to make it for a modern, somewhat jaded audience.
Cedric with Rupert Sanders on set of Snow White and the Huntsman.
“First, we had to figure out the type of film we wanted to do,” Nicolas-Troyan says, “what kind of fairytale we wanted to do. We looked at the original story–the fairytale–and it is actually really short … Obviously we wanted to make it very imaginitive, as it is a fairytale, but we wanted to make it modern for the audience. We wanted to get away from the cliches of how fairytales are told and tell the story in a new way. And then after all that, it is about constructing the world and what the world could be.”
And what kind of world did they want to create? According to Cedric, it was to lay “right between” the fantasy epic of The Lord of the Rings and the historical retellings of Robin Hood. It would not be any kind of pure fantasy like Lord of the Rings. “Once we settled on that, we began creating the creatures.”
Like the setting chosen, the creatures had their limits, too. Although gruesome and literally grounded in earth by the look of it, Cedric says the troll is the most “farfetched in the universe” he created. While it is a fantasy, Cedric wanted to make certain everything was believable for that world. “There’s no fantastic stuff. Every creature we made existed for a reason and within the terms of the world we settled upon.”
Breath mints, however, were not part of his department.
But what about the magic? After all, the very root of the story comes from the idea that the Queen, played masterfully by Charlize Theron, drains the very youth out of the women of the kingdom to remain forever the fairest. “For all the magic for the queen–for Ravenna–we tried to give everything a sort of a look, somewhat of a reasonable kind of world. It’s not realistic, but it is not all over the place.” Everything, trolls and magic proper aside, is very much in the real.
“We took the real world and tweaked it a bit to give it the look. It is very stylish, but it’s not too far out there, like you’re sitting on a massive mushroom,” in reference to the producer’s previous project Alice in Wonderland.
And he’s right. For what Snow White and the Huntsman may lack in story and character development, it truly is an visually interesting world that will delight anyone of any age, no matter their level of creativity and imagination.
Snow White and the Huntsman is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.