Movie Beauty And The Beast With Emma Watson

How did the elaborate production turn human actor Dan Stevens into the iconic, bipedal animal-man? Was it the result of elaborate makeup and prosthetics effects? CGI? Who (or what?) did Emma Watson's Belle perform against?

Ultimately, Stevens played a crucial part in bringing the Beast to life via performance capture. Then, specialized body and facial animation from special effects studio Digital Domain created the final character. Here's how Disney pulled it off.

On set, Stevens wore a 'tracking' suit bulked out with padding to represent the size and shape of the Beast. This was similar to the motion capture suit used in

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This fake muscle suit was primarily used for any situation where the Beast needed to interact with Belle, such as the ballroom scene, says Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Kelly Port, who also noted that Stevens occasionally roamed about in springy stilts to achieve the appropriate Beast height.

Stevens' facial expressions were also captured and applied to the Beast's physique. But because the effects team couldn't use his reactions and dialogue readings from set, the actor had to re-perform scenes at a booth of Digital Domain's domain. Not as glamorous as a castle ballroom.

We would take all of these points on Dan's face and re-target them from Dan's facial anatomy onto the Beast's facial anatomy, explains digital effects supervisor Darren Hendler. This used our proprietary Direct Drive system, and it takes Dan's performance and puts it directly onto another creature. So, if Dan smiles, the Beast smiles, but it still

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Samson, another custom tool made by Digital Domain, was used to groom and then simulate the Beast's flowing hair, including all over his face. It enabled visual effects artists to add in the impact of wind, as well as include pieces of debris or dirt when the Beast fights some wolves.

We also had different grooms, notes animation supervisor Steve Preeg, because the Beast goes through what we called 'primping' for a date. And that meant all the muck that was stuck in his fur had to be cleaned out.

If you were to ask a visual effects person, 'What is the absolute most difficult pain-in-the-ass costume that you could possibly think of?' this would be it, jokes Port.

Beauty And The Beast: Emma Watson, Dan Steves

However, Digital Domain was able to work closely with costume designer Jacqueline Durran -- whose team built the cape for real -- in order to provide detailing for the digital version. The final CG cape incorporated a raft of simulated materials, from bones, feathers, silk, string, and extra bits of hair.

Digital Domain's intricate facial and body animation, and its simulation of hair and clothing, came to the fore for what is perhaps the film's most celebrated scene: the ballroom dance with Belle. Watson performed the scene with Stevens in his muscle suit, and the visual effects team was called upon to help sell the highly emotional moment.

We had to make the Beast feel like he's in love, but he's also not sure how to behave, details Preeg. So there's a lot of change happening in the Beast and his facial performance and just his stature and his body movement as that dance plays out.

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Sign up here for our daily email and subscribe here for our YouTube channel to get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.Emma Watson says she has made her Belle ‘the kind of woman I would want to embody as a role model’. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/PR Company Handout

She’s about to star as the heroine of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but post-Potter she has received more plaudits for her activism than her acting

I t may seem strange that one of the most anticipated films of 2017 should be a live-action remake of a Disney cartoon about Stockholm syndrome, but Beauty and the Beast has already built up the kind of fan base that is normally reserved for rebooted sci-fi franchises and adaptations of erotic bestsellers. When the first trailer went online in November, it was viewed a record 127m times in 24 hours, beating the previous leaders in that particular field, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Fifty Shades Darker. Stranger still, 27m of those views were on the Facebook page of the film’s star, Emma Watson.

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That figure might suggest that the 26-year-old who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series is now a bona fide superstar. But Watson’s celebrity status is slightly more complicated. As a Hollywood player, she isn’t going to give Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson sleepless nights, but as an actor-activist she has the kind of influence that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

For proof that Watson isn’t yet an A-lister, you just have to glance at her filmography since she hung up her Gryffindor robes. Broadly speaking, she has taken supporting roles in ensemble projects, such as Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, and above-the-title roles in films that vanished without trace. Alejandro Amenábar’s repressed-memory chiller Regression didn’t recoup its $20m budget, and Colonia (AKA The Colony) pulled in a grand total of £47 in its opening weekend in the UK. Meanwhile, she turned down the title role in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, and accepted then dropped out of La La Land, thus handing Emma Stone the part that may well win her a best actress Oscar. In the years between Harry Potter and Beauty and the Beast, in other words, Watson was better known for films she wasn’t in than for films she was.

‘She is clearly not an activist of the old school’ ... Emma Watson at the Noah film premiere in New York. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Shutterstock

Disney's Live Action Beauty And The Beast Due Out March 2017

In contrast, Kristen Stewart followed her stint in the Twilight series by embracing arthouse cinema and being embraced right back: she was the first American female actor to win a César award for her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria. And Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, has grabbed every possible acting opportunity, from big-budget capers (Now You See Me 2) to indie curios (Swiss Army Man), from television (A Young Doctor’s Casebook) to theatre (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead). Compared to them, Watson is barely trying.

But there is more on her mind than acting. Having stepped away from the business to study for an English degree at Brown University in Rhode Island, she now spends as much time on feminism as she does on films. In 2014, she became a UN Women goodwill ambassador; in 2015, she was named on the Time 100 list of world’s most influential people, and last year she continued to make headlines by, for example, leaving feminist books around the London Underground system.

None of that may appear very remarkable: Watson isn’t the first film star to double as a political activist. But few stars can have been as reassuring or inclusive in their consciousness-raising. When Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio signed up to humanitarian and environmental causes, for instance, they were already untouchably glamorous demigods whose lives seemed a million miles away from their fans’, and whose jet-setting activism seemed almost as distant. Watson is different. She may have flown to Bangladesh, Uruguay and Zambia on behalf of the UN, but she doesn’t come across as if she is lecturing her fans from on high – more as if she is learning alongside them.

Emma Watson In 'beauty And The Beast' First Trailer

The first reason for this is that Watson’s fans feel, with some justification, that they know her. Not only have they watched her growing up onscreen in eight blockbusters, but they have heard her admit that the character she played in those blockbusters was just like her. In an interview with feminist author bell hooks in Paper magazine, she said that when she started reading JK Rowling’s novels, at the age of eight, “the character of Hermione gave me permission to be who I was, ” ie, “the girl in school whose hand shot up to answer the questions”. But when she was cast as Hermione she used her earliest interviews to deny she was that girl: “At first I was really trying to say, ‘I’m not like Hermione. I’m into fashion and I’m much cooler than she is, ’ and then I came to a place of acceptance. Actually, we do have a lot in common. There are obviously differences, but there are a lot of ways that I’m very similar. And I stopped fighting that!”

If Watson-watchers believe she is just as earnest, studious and intelligent as Hermione, then, they have her permission. Whereas so many former child stars have shattered their youthful images, either by going off the rails in their personal lives (eg, Drew Barrymore) or choosing to play edgy, sexualised roles on film (eg, Dakota Fanning), Watson has been brave enough to carry on being the school swot. The youngsters who identified with her when they saw her in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 can feel that she has yet to let them down, nearly 16 years later.

Even her activism is bound up with that swottiness. Rather than manning the barricades, Watson has focused

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