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