In 1917, a 12-year-old girl named Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths rocked England when they revealed photographs of fairies. Photographs they had taken themselves. Photographs that experts said were real!
Once word got out, hundreds of ordinary people flocked to the woods near the Wrights’ home, hoping to see the magic of fairies for themselves. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) and one of his friends, illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini, traveled to meet Elsie and Frances, hoping to unravel the mystery.
When director Charles Sturridge (the man who brought us the Emmy Award-winning TV special “Gulliver’s Travels”) decided to make the story of Elsie and Frances into a movie, he knew he’d have to make a little magic of his own.
“When you watch a magician, particularly Houdini, who was a miraculously good magician,” Sturridge says, “you see things and you cannot imagine how they’re done. Your brain says, `It’s a trick.’ But there is another bit of you that admits you’ve just seen something astonishing.”
Sturridge wanted “Fairy Tale: A True Story” to appeal to both sides of human nature. To do that, he needed special-effects wizard Tim Webber. “We wanted to make the fairies totally believable as creatures,” Webber says, “but much more real.”
These fairies are an amazing mix of live-action actors dressed as fairies and computer animation. Webber’s biggest challenge was helping the fairies take flight.
“We tried to get them flying right, different from anything you’ve ever seen fly before,” Webber says. But there was nothing like a fairy to study and duplicate. Even the laws of gravity might affect a tiny fairy differently from any other flying creature. “The movements we tried to achieve were basically completely new.”
So Webber and the rest of the computer animation team at London’s Framestore digital-effects facility looked to nature for clues. “We wanted to give them a sort of darty, almost insectlike feel,” he says. “So we settled on a cross between a dragonfly and a hummingbird.”
After feeding details of motion from these creatures into the computer, Framestore blended the movements with human features.
Director Sturridge says: “One of the things that distinguishes this story from any other remotely connected story is that basically, it’s true. We wanted to find a way of presenting fairies just as real.”
You’ll have to decide whether “Fairy Tale: A True Story” hits the mark. The movie, rated PG, opens Friday.
