Was The Tiger In Life Of Pi Real

A First Mate Bares His Fangs

A scene from "Life of Pi," directed by Ang Lee.

Credit... Peter Sorel/20th Century Fox

Nov. 16, 2012

THE book "Life of Pi," a contemplative story about a boy lost at sea with a tiger companion, is not the most obvious candidate for a film. There's that tiger, for starters. But when Ang Lee set out to adapt Yann Martel's acclaimed novel, he conceived an intricate plan for extensive visual effects.

That plan involved hundreds of artists. The film's credits read almost like a short story, including people who worked around the world and around the clock to create sequences involving, for example, neon whale splashes and flying fish in bright skies.

"I'm dramatically trained, not visually trained," Mr. Lee said during an interview in New York. "So to me all the visuals, whatever you see, came from dramatic needs: the mood of the situation or the emotion of the character."

Those emotions run high in this film, which begins as a family drama then moves on to one of high-seas adventure and survival. The character with the most screen time is Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma), whose father owns a zoo in India. When the family decides to move to Canada, they take some of the animals along on a trans-Atlantic voyage. A tragic storm during the crossing strands Pi on a lifeboat with a feisty Bengal tiger he names Richard Parker.

Shooting a movie with a tiger as co-star presented some real-world challenges. "We didn't want our actor to get eaten," Bill Westenhofer, the visual effects supervisor, said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. For this reason, and for more creative freedom, the tiger that primarily appears in the film is a digital creation from the effects house Rhythm & Hues.

Here Mr. Westenhofer discusses the technical challenges of creating a tiger that looked and felt like the real thing. More images from the process can be seen in this slide show.

Genuine Big Cat Feeds a Digital Big Cat

For the digital version of Richard Parker, Mr. Westenhofer's team studied reference footage of an actual tiger, top. And real tigers were used for a few important shots, including one with Richard Parker swimming in the ocean. Four tigers along with a trainer, Thierry le Portier, were brought in, and the crew set up a movable "boat" inside a tiger enclosure to shoot some scenes.

"We used them for single shots, where it was just the tiger in the frame, and they're doing something that didn't have to be all that specific in the action that we were after," Mr. Westenhofer said. There was a debate about whether to include a real tiger at all, but Mr. Westenhofer pushed for it. "By doing that, it set our bar high for CGI," he said, referring to computergenerated imagery. "We couldn't cheat at all. It pushed the artists to go and deliver something that's never been done before, something as photo-real as anyone has ever done with an animal."

Mr. Westenhofer said some animators have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, giving them more human qualities. But the "Pi" crew was careful not to do that and to keep the digital tiger, bottom, fierce and spontaneous with animalistic instincts.

Image

Credit... Rhythm & Hues

Video player loading — A scene from "Life of Pi," featuring the film's tiger, Richard Parker.

Building a Predator by Bone, Muscle, Flesh and Fur

These images take a progressive look through the meticulous process that went into constructing the digital tiger. Artists developed each layer of the animal's physical makeup almost as if they were working on a biology experiment.

They started with the skeleton, which they used to control basic movements (segments with common colors, top right, move together), then added muscle, skin and fur. More than a dozen artists were assigned to the fur alone, focusing, for example, on how light shimmered on it.

"We studied the reference and dialed up the muscle flexing," Mr. Westenhofer said. "Tigers are really a mass of solid muscle surrounded by loose, baggy skin. And the way it moves and shakes and bounces around is really important to see." He added that they got to a point where, in most animation projects, they would have considered their work done. But they continued for three more weeks, further refining the creature's mannerisms. (In all the process took about a year.) Among the details fine-tuned were how his paws twitched as he shifted his weight and how he swallowed.

"It was these tiny things that, combined, made this really genuine, lifelike animal," Mr. Westenhofer said. "But if you look at the individual things by themselves, they seem insignificant.