How a Petaluma animator’s mermaid innovations finally made it to the big screen

“It’s been a long, strange, windy road to this moment, that’s for sure,” said Jamy Wheless.|

When the fantasy-adventure film “The King’s Daughter” hits theaters Jan. 21, it will be a significant milestone for Petaluma’s Jamy Wheless, founder of Lightstream Animation Studio, which contributed some key elements to the film. Along with John Helms, the other co-founder of Lightstream – which has a studio upstairs in the Great Petaluma Mill – the company consulted on effects and created some truly astonishing images for the movie.

For one thing, they built a mermaid.

But the movie, it turns out, was never released. “The King’s Daughter” — and the mystical aquatic creature Wheless and Helm conjured up in their studio — all more-or-less disappeared.

That was nearly eight years. And now, out of the murky depths of whatever vault its been waiting in, the movie is about to be released. Among those who are the most delighted, though a bit surprised, is Wheless.

“It’s been a long, strange, windy road to this moment, that’s for sure,” he said last week, just a few days after learning about the movie’s reemergence. “What a crazy business this is.”

Based on the 1997 fantasy book “The Moon and the Sun” by Vonda N. MacIntyre (who won the Nebula Award for her book that year, beating George R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones”), “The King’s Daughter” has been in development since 1999, changing studios, producers and partners several times over the years. The story involves a young woman who learns she is the illegitimate daughter of King Louis XIV, and once brought to the palace of Versailles, discovers an imprisoned mermaid in a secret lagoon under the castle. In addition to finding romance with a handsome noble, the king’s daughter uncovers her father’s true intentions: to kill the mermaid, take her life force, and gain immortality. Early on in the film’s development process, with so much potential for magical storytelling and technical wizardry, Jim Henson Studios became involved, as did Walt Disney Pictures a bit later. At one point, it was even announced that Natalie Portman had been cast in a key role.

Spoiler alert: Natalie Portman is not in this movie.

In 2009, at the recommendation of producer Paul Currie, film executive Bill Mechanic — who’d worked at Paramount and Walt Disney Studios and was CEO at Fox Filmed Entertainment for before starting his own company Pandemonium Films — arranged for a meeting with Wheless and John Helms, to discuss the possibility of Lightstream Animation helping to design the mermaid for the film. Wheless certainly seemed like a logical choice to participate, having worked on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films at Industrial Light and Magic, where he brought eerie realism to the squid-like beard of the deep-sea despot Davy Jones.

“So we talked about this mermaid,” Wheless said, “and then we worked on it a bit, and we did what’s called a proof-of-concept here in Petaluma, in the swimming pool at the Aquatic Center. It was the deepest pool we could find around here, so we rented it out and overnight we shot this proof-of-concept. It was a fun night.”

For the shoot, which resulted in a two-minute mini-movie, an actor played the part of the mermaid as the animation team filmed her from various angles. That footage was then used as a reference to create a digital mermaid, incorporating ideas from digital and physical, fully sculptured designs, including a model designed by Petaluma’s Robert Barnes, formerly of Lucasfilm.

“It was really a home-run,” Wheless said of the finished project. “We had her emote under water, and express herself, and we created a live action and a CG character together, with long, flowing hair. In 2009, that was pretty heady stuff. Only the big studios were doing work like that at the time.”

Based on the Petaluma-made proof-of-concept, Wheless says, Lightstream was invited to join the team and help make the movie. Fast-forward several years, during which the project went through a number of delays, new investors were brought on board, and the script gradually changed and evolved. Eventually the title of the film was changed to “The King’s Daughter.”

Finally, in 2014 – with Pierce Brosnan as King Louis, Kaya Scodelario as his daughter Marie-Josèphe, William Hurt as the king’s adviser Pere La Chaise and Bingbing Fan as the mermaid – shooting began in France.

“We shot at Versailles, and then went to Australia to shoot all the underwater stuff with Fan Bingbing,“ Wheless said. “John, who was more of the visual effects guy, he went to Versailles. I’m more of the performance guy, designing and developing characters, so we both went to Australia.” Sean McNamara, best known as the director of 2011’s “Soul Surfer” and 2018’s “The Miracle Season,” directed the film. “In Australia, they’d built this beautiful underground grotto. It was just gorgeous. So we went there and working with Sean and Paul Currie and the rest, we shot all of the underwater shots with Fan Bingbing. I think we were there about a month.”

It would be several more months, after additional delays and mysterious movie-making twists-and-turns that not even Wheless can explain – “Things just take a long time in Hollywood, sometimes,” he said – the Petaluma studio finally got the go ahead to turn the footage of Bingbing Fan into a mermaid that audiences would believe in, and maybe even fall in love with.

“One of the producers at Kylin Films in China, he came up here to little old Petaluma, sat right here in the studio and we talked it out with him,” Wheless recalled. “We talked about what the scope of the work would look like, and we shook hands and he said, ‘Let’s make this mermaid.’”

By that time, Kylin Films had come on as one of the film’s major investors, investing a reported $20.5 million according to a May, 2014 article in the British cinema magazine Film International. The investment was at the time the largest sum a Chinese company had ever contributed to a movie filmed outside of China. So the pressure was definitely on Wheless and what he calls his “an incredible group of artists” at Lightstream.

“Our main job was to help design and bring to life a beautiful mermaid based on Fan Bingbing’s performance,” he said. “We did a lot of studies of Fan’s face, studying her bone structure and everything. For a small group, we were pretty innovative, I think, doing a handful of shots to make her look fantastic as a mermaid.”

That’s a major, personal passion, Wheless says – to bring those kinds of transformations to life. “That’s the stuff I did with Davy Jones in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies,” he said. “You take an actor, you study them, you pick up all the micro-expressions that are going on, and the psychology of what that all is, and then apply that in a digital character. That’s my love. That’s the kind of thing I love to do.”

After about 10 months, Wheless estimates, the mermaid shots were completed, along with work an additional assignment to create a vision of the underwater kingdom Atlantis, a detail added to the script as the editing and FX process was carried out.

And then, to put it simply, seven more years went by, long enough for two of the actors on the film, Scodelario and Benjamin Walker – who plays her love interest – to have gotten married and had two children. The anticipated release of the film never materialized.

“I don’t know what happened, I really don’t,” Wheless said. “But we all moved on.”

Since completing their work, Lightstream continued to get work, contributing FX shots to a number of other projects, and eventually produced the original 2018 animated short “The Pig on the Hill,” based on a picture book by John Kelly and narrated by King Louis himself, Pierce Brosnan. Helms has since moved on from Lightstream, which is still humming along doing shots on a work-for-hire basis for feature films. In addition to Lightstream, Wheless has recently founded Ignite Animation Studios, which creates original content for clients, including Jean Schulz, who is currently producing Wheless’ next project, an animated short about a puppy.

“Then,” Wheless said, “about a month ago, I got a text from Sean McNamara, saying ‘It’s coming out,’ that it was going to be released in theaters in January of 2022. I couldn’t believe it.”

Wheless admits he hasn’t seen the finished version, which apparently has added Julie Andrews as narrator sometime in the last few years.

“I have no idea what the final edit looks like or what the reaction is going to be from audiences,” he said, adding that he’s probably going to catch a screening as soon as the film opens. “From what I saw all those years ago, Pierce and William Hurt and Kaya and Fan Bingbing all give amazing performances in this. And our mermaid is beautiful, obviously. So yeah, I’m excited. I honestly can’t wait to see it.”

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