The company recently created a remarkably lifelike animatronic baby orca for the latest Free Willy movie.
The famous family film Free Willy, released in 1993, made the world fall in love with Keiko, the live killer whale who played the role of Willy. Ironically, while the film was about the escape of a captive orca, Keiko himself was confined to a Mexican amusement park. The film prompted an international campaign to have the whale returned to his natural habitat.
Free Willy and its two sequels used phenomenal animatronics, but Keiko was always needed to add naturalism. Seventeen years later the fourth instalment of the franchise keeps that naturalism without the need for a live animal, thanks to animatronics created by Cape Town special effects company Cape Commercial and Cine Effects, or CFX.
“Our challenge wasn’t so much the physical building of the orca, but rather the creation of a character with which viewers can identify and believe in,” says CFX director Rob Carlisle. “Disappointment can cause a whole movie to flop.”
Free Willy 4: Escape from Pirate’s Cove, set for release on DVD in 2010, was shot in Cape Town. The film tells the story of an orphaned Australian girl called Kirra who is sent to live with her grandfather in South Africa. The old man owns a rundown water theme park and when a baby orca, Willy, gets washed ashore, there is conflict over whether the little whale should be kept as an attraction or rehabilitated and sent back to his family.
Bringing the orca to life was one of CFX’s greatest challenges yet, Carlisle says. The company has previously created an animatronic gorilla, anteater, moose, hippo, elephant, hamster and two-metre great white shark – as well as prosthetics, miniatures, costumes, props and gadgets.
Its work has been used in such upscale movies as 10 000 BC – where CFX was head of fabrication and set dressing – as well as Blood Diamond, Lord of War, Last House on the Left, The Poseidon Adventure and Flight of the Phoenix.
The whole CFX crew, except Carlisle, consists of freelancers – a core group of 12, which grows to 40 in peak periods. They have diverse backgrounds. Carlisle studied electronic engineering before joining a film school in Pretoria. He then apprenticed in various film departments across the world before ending up fabrication. He started CFX in 2000 as a fabrication company manufacturing items for the film industry.
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Article by Glenneis Kriel.
