DESTINATIONS
Robison and his artisans built several stage sets representing the interiors of The Dawn Treader, including Caspian's handsome state room, the captain's map room, and an oar room (or "aft hold"), where the crew propels the boat to its various island expeditions. (The stage sets were built on several sound stages at the Warner Roadshow facility in Queensland.)
Robison had inherited a mighty responsibility -- to continue the vision of C.S. Lewis' fantastical world, based on both the author's scant book descriptions, while honoring the visuals created in the first two films. At the same time, Robison would apply his own design signature to the ongoing movie series. "Narnia is a magical world," Robison states. "Michael Apted and I felt that we could bring something special to the movie franchise."  Adds Douglas Gresham: "The sets we built on this movie, I have to say, are the best we've ever done. We did some amazing sets for the first and second films, but I think the sets on this movie top everything we've ever done."
For the "Magician's Garden" set, home to the Dufflepuds, who are maniacal gardeners, Robison used his theatrical background, he says, "to really pump up the volume because the garden is a comical environment.  In New Zealand, we found a beautiful beach with this gorgeous rolling landscape whose roly-poly hills mirror the Dufflepuds' rotund physiognomy."  Adding to the set's fantastic nature were the incorrigible Dufflepuds themselves - odd, one-legged dwarves who are, at first, invisible in the Magician Coriakin's garden before a spell turns them visible again.
Cultivating that unique look of the Dufflepuds fell to another kind of magician -- Oscar-winning prosthetics makeup artist Howard Berger, who took home the coveted statue (along with colleague Tami Lane) for his creations in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," including actor James McAvoy's memorable Faun, Mr. Tumnus.  "Since the Dufflepuds walk on one leg, the actors portraying them wore blue-screen suits from the waist down so the film's CG artists could superimpose a single appendage for the finished film," Berger explains.
After her encounter with the Dufflepuds in the garden, Lucy is told to find the Magician's Library and locate his book of spells -- another of the film's impressive props. "With the Magician's Library, we wanted to get away from the fantastical nature of the Dufflepuds and give it a much more learned, bookish kind of gravitas," notes Apted.
Once Coriakin explains the true nature of the voyagers' quest, The Dawn Treader sets sail for the  island Goldwater, where Caspian finds the remains of two of the missing Lords -- one in a pool inside a cave where everything that touches the water turns to gold; the other in a rock-strewn valley littered with a treasure of jewels.  "We took a different direction with Goldwater Island from the book," says Robison. "In the book, they come across a pond.  It was producer Philip Steuer's idea to set it in the underground grotto."
The Dawn Treader's next stop in the story is Ramandu's Island, a colossal set built at the studio's Stage 5. For this set, Robison retained motifs he had included in the Magician's Library, but gave them a spooky twist.  "Michael Apted wanted the island set to be rough, windswept, and ancient," Robison states. "It's a bit scary. This is where we placed Aslan's Table."
The story's island locales meant a lot of shooting in and under water.  To create the effect of the wall painting flooding Eustace's bedroom, the mechanical SFX crew duplicated the "dry" soundstage bedroom set on an elevated platform which was then lowered, or dunked, into the smaller of two exterior studio water tanks. Georgie, Skandar and Will swam out of the bedroom to the surface, which, when spliced together with footage filmed in the larger tank, makes it appear as if they are afloat in the ocean. "The moment of entering Narnia from our world is always key," notes Apted. "The previous two films had set the bar high, so we had to show our stuff, especially as this was the first action sequence in the movie.  C.S. Lewis had conceived of the moment but we had to pull it off and not only was it difficult but a little dangerous for the actors. It needed to be totally believable, and I shot it in a way that put the audience in the moment.  They weren't just watching the scene; they were in it with the characters."
The dry set was made of timber, plaster and other materials you would find in a bedroom.  For the wet set, fiberglass and other composite materials were used. "The effect feels as though the water is coming out of the painting and rising to the ceiling," says Robison.  "But what we were actually doing was taking the set down into the water."
Water also played a prominent role in sequences depicting a violent storm that rocks the ship on the open seas, and its attack by a monstrous sea serpent.  Both scenes took place on the deck of The Dawn Treader, which was enveloped in a bluescreen environment on Stage 5, where the ship was first pieced together before being transported to Cleveland Point.
The visual effects team numbered 380 CG artists alone for the character of Reepicheep, the Eustace/Dragon creature, and the sea serpent sequence. When filming concluded in late November, work began on the hundreds of effects shots that would bring these characters to life.  The post-production period also encompassed editing, scoring, re-recording and mixing sound, and working on the extensive 3D work. The 3D in NARNIA: VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is state-of-the-art quality, created during the two years of shooting and completing the film.  The filmmakers worked with the world's leading stereoscopic and VFX companies, in a lengthy process surpassing even that of the recent hit "Alice in Wonderland." 
The vast number of computer generated shots and the all-CGI characters (including the beloved Reepicheep) were rendered from the beginning in 3D and delivered directly to the film as left eye / right eye pairs.  This involved not only the real world 3D geometry of The Dawn Treader and other environments in the film (and all associated VFX manipulation of same), but over 10,000 unique pieces of photography and computer generated imagery.  As such, there are no 2D "cutouts" in Narnia. The dimensionality of the film matches that of the characters, culminating in a brilliant 3D experience for THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.
As the end of the journey approached for the cast and crew, producer Adamson, who helped give birth to the movie franchise, noted, "Of the three films so far, the first film for me was really about the birth of Narnia. The children brought hope into this land ravaged by cold, under siege of the White Witch. That movie was all about color and magic and brightness and this whole new world opening up. The second movie presented a darker world, which the Pevensies helped bring back to life. "THE CHRONCILES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is more like the first film, because we are again opening up a new world. The magic is back."

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