Inkheart
Set Visit: Ferrets in Inkheart
"We needed to find something that we could put on them uniformly that would be non toxic to them and wouldn't be a trying thing for us to put on them every day, that would be stress-less work," said Sousa. "So what we came up with was just basic mascara. It's brown mascara so right before his shots, any time we're going to go to shoot, we basically just paint and just put it on. And the good thing about mascara is it's tried and tested, it's not dangerous to the eye for humans. So we know that it’s not going to be dangerous to him. But every couple weeks or so, we'll give him a bath in Johnson's Baby Shampoo because they are like a cat. They like to be clean and this does make their hair sticky so we take care of their needs that way."
But they couldn't just be painted ferrets either. "The marten has horns so we had to figure out a way to put horns on the animal so he could do his behaviors and they wouldn't fall off in the shot. If the animal does the behavior right but a horn fell off, we couldn't use it. So what the art department did is they made us these little horns. What we came up with, we went to costume and makeup, they have toupee or beard glue. So before a shot, if we get enough time to do it, we always ask for about 10 minutes, and we just horn him up. And they've done really well. The good thing about this product is it's water based, so for it to come off, you just basically put a Q-tip with water on it and they come right off."
In the film of Inkheart, Paul Bettany plays Dustfinger, a character from inside a novel, pulled out into the real world. His trusty marten, Gwin, has come with him, so Gwin does a lot of the dirty work for Dustfinger. The trainers used a buzzer to teach one ferret to always follow Bettany. Of course, they can't just be buzzing up the shots.
"Yes, it's really, really difficult for our department because this movie entails a lot of dialogue and not spaced where you can actually talk to your animals. That's been really, really challenging for us and what we basically would do is pattern him like this right now so he's following him. Right before they're going to go to roll, I buzz the buzzer, and then basically he would follow Paul. There's a scene where they actually walk from the Alpine village, walk down, had about a page and a half of dialogue. He had to stay on his feet and then they had to continue on further. The training that we put into it allows him to be able to do that but it is really difficult with sound because you don't want to mess up the sound department but at certain times, you have to for the animals to be able to communicate what their tasks are."
Gwin will also retrieve items and bring them back to Dustfinger, which is another ferret's job. "Basically, the same type of thing. The buzzer's always near the object. You give him a place to put it at the end. It teaches the animal a place to put it and he has basically learned to put it on the plate there. What we would do in a shot if you couldn't have the plate, we'd put the plate there for prep, take the plate away and make another object that plate. They're pretty adaptable. They change pretty well."
Sometimes, a ferret proves to be more adept at other tasks, so they just reassign them. "The other day, we were training one to run up the shoulder and all of a sudden he leaps, flew through the air. It's very difficult to get an animal willingly wanting to jump. We have a scene where Gwin actually attacks Mo and you don't want a shot like that to go basically to all CG. You want to give them the right cuts to make it believable, so we then changed our training session and we taught him to jump, basically from a flat standpoint to leap to. If you taught them to run and jump to a buzzer, they don't really give it but your animal sometimes shows you things and then you just develop the training around that."
Working in such close proximity to animals is bound to end up in some accidental bites, but Sousa said Bettany has escaped unscarred. "No, actually he hasn't been bit. They actually really don't bite. They would nibble if he thought it was a piece of food, so he's never really latched onto him or anything like that. If anything, it was a miscommunication where he thought there was a piece of food and there wasn't. It always is a danger. The last thing you want to do in any film whether it be dog, ferret, cat is have your actor be bit. So there are a lot of precautions that we try and take. At the end of the day, they are animals and things can happen, but the ferrets that we put on a shoulder, an actor has to trust in you as a trainer that you put in the time to make it socialized so it won't be aggressive."
Inkheart movie page coming soon.
More Inkheart set reports coming soon on CanMag.Com.
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