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40 Squirells were trained over many months to sit still on stools while cracking nuts and depositing the kernels onto a conveyor belt, for a scene in the movie Charlie and The Chocolate Factory .....
Taken from the Production Notes from the movie .........
"As Wonkas tour reaches the nut-sorting room the children see 100 of the captivating rodents perched on tiny stools, intently engaged in doing what they do best. Evaluating each nut by scent and sound, they nimbly shell the good ones and place the meat onto a conveyor belt while tossing the bad ones over their shoulders into a giant trash chute.
Like Wonka, Tim Burton also wanted the real thing live, trained squirrels.
When I found out what was involved, it was a bit overwhelming, says Senior Animal Trainer Mike Alexander, of Birds & Animals Unlimited. Alexander was happy to re-team with Burton following his successful stint as a chimpanzee wrangler on Planet of the Apes, but admits, squirrels can be very tough, and training 100 of them was inconceivable.
Ultimately, the animals on screen were an artful amalgamation of skillfully crafted animatronics plus some CG and multiple images along with 40 individual, rambunctious and very real squirrels to set the standard and lead the animal action.
Alexanders team of four trainers (under the watchful eye of a Humane Society rep), spent 19 weeks with their lively charges, providing mostly one-on-one attention. Some of the animals came from private homes in the UK while the majority were recruited from local rescue shelters. Once rescued, squirrels cannot be released to the wild, by law, for their own protection, so those that were not returned to their owners when filming wrapped were adopted by Birds & Animals Unlimited, where they will be cared for until possibly called for another job. While undeniably intelligent and, Alexander attests, incredibly photogenic, squirrels are notoriously difficult to handle. Independent and unpredictable, theyre not necessarily good at doing specific, intricate things, he says. They dont like to sit still. Theyre hard to keep in one place. The first couple of weeks were spent in just getting the animals to come out of their crates and sit with us, never mind any of the things they were supposed to do.
We took baby steps, he continues. After they were comfortable sitting with us we introduced them to the props. We taught them to pick up a nut and put it into a metal bowl, which is not what theyd do in the movie but once they got the idea of picking the nut up and putting it into a bowl we could change the bowl to a conveyer belt. Once they grasped the basic concepts, they began to learn faster and things started coming together.
Each squirrel had a name and it wasnt long before individual personalities and talents emerged. All of them are capable of learning, but some are naturally better at certain things than others, says Alexander. We found that some of them had no interest at all in picking up the nut, while others, once they had it, refused to let it go. Those that didnt lend themselves to being good nut squirrels were moved to a second group, being trained to run across the floor toward Veruca. Our smartest squirrels do the nut gag.
There was a limit to what the real squirrels could do, by their nature or in deference to the potential danger of a scene. In those cases, animatronic or CG troops were called in.
Tim wanted to use live squirrels as much as possible, notes Nick Davis. But some actions they are just not physically able to do, for example, throwing nuts over their shoulders. Physiologically, their bodies dont work that way. Our job was to make the CGI squirrels as realistic as possible, to interact with humans in a kind of anthropomorphic way and yet remain absolutely true to their animal nature. Squirrels have a unique dynamic energy and thats what attracted Tim. He didnt want to shoot in high-speed or interfere in any way with that natural edge, that intensity and speed thats utterly charming and can be a bit unnerving.
Jon Thum, Visual Effects Supervisor for Framestore-CFC, came aboard to lend his expertise to the squirrel action, eventually contributing 88 VFX shots to the mix, multiplying the real squirrels in about 15 shots as well as the much harder task of creating squirrels from scratch for another 64. Some shots of the squirrels on stools, turning their heads, had to be CG, and once they are on the floor they are mostly CG shots.
Multiplication meant capturing the animals performing on cue, one at a time, and joining the images to present the group in unison. For example, where the squirrels are meant to jump from their stools en masse and run toward Veruca, Thum explains, they could jump, but not all at the same time. So we had to shoot each squirrel alone, jumping off its stool, and then synchronize them into one shot.
To create the virtual squirrels, Thums team took loads of reference footage of the real thing. We had them running, jumping, shelling nuts, tugging at bits of fabric. Animation cycles were built based on this reference to use in all the shots, then for any hero squirrels the animators would go in and keyframe that squirrel individually. In some shots our job was to animate actions the animals could not do, like tap Veruca on the head, but the movements you see them doing right before and after that are referenced from real squirrels.
The computer images were then painstakingly rendered hair by hair to convey individuality, as Thum describes. The tricky part was that many CG shots had to cut with shots of the real animals and we found that our close-up squirrels needed five million hairs to look authentic. Fur was groomed to match the tiniest details of length, color and direction of growth. Nuances of movement such as breathing and twitching were added to complete the effect.
Additionally, Scanlan produced 12 animatronic models, plus some partials attached to hand-held poles. In most of the shots there will be a live squirrel in the foreground performing an action and several animatronics in the background repeating it, he says. The advantage of animatronics is that they dont mind doing things endlessly and they dont complain; but theyre never going to appear as real, so mixing and matching is the way to go.
Scanlans puppet crew were driven by internal motor packs that enabled a wide range of motion including moving their heads, holding a nut and shaking it or listening to it, and flicking their tails around. We could program and control them to do whatever Tim needed.
When Veruca tries to kidnap a squirrel and is summarily knocked down by the incensed rodents en masse, a number of animatronic animals join their warm-blooded brethren in the fray, designed by Scanlan with little hand and mouth springs to grasp onto the fabric of her dress.
Great care was taken to avoid injuring squirrels that might dart underneath her or her stunt double as Veruca hits the ground. In fact, she lands on an unseen platform just above the ground, with ample clearance below. Supplementing the animal actors with animatronics and CGI in this scene created the striking effect of Veruca being completely covered in squirrels".
here is a link to the site that I got this from:
http://www.cinemareview.com/production.asp?prodid=3031
