August 3, 2005
Don't touch those nuts!
The BBC has a story about the filming of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (wonderful film BTW!) The scene with the squirrels? They were real. Tim Burton was not happy with the way that CG rendered fur so he had forty squirrels brought in and trained and then spent eight weeks on the set. The BBC News Magazine has the story:How are squirrels trained to act?
Forty squirrels were trained to crack nuts in the new film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How?
Even with sophisticated computer-generated technology available, director Tim Burton refused to take any short cuts with the famous Nut Room scene in Roald Dahl's novel.
It had to be as life-like as possible, Burton decided, which meant squirrels cracking and sorting nuts on a conveyor belt.
In the film, they are seen sitting on stools testing the quality of the nuts until their work is rudely interrupted by one of the humans, in an action they take strong exception to.
Some of the squirrels were hand-reared and required bottled milk on set, and others came from squirrel rescues or private homes.
Steve Vedmore, an animal trainer from Brynmawr, south Wales, worked for eight weeks on the film.
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