A touch of non-computer magic

A case in point is director Jon Turteltaub's underappreciated film The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which opened last summer and made just $63 million US at the box office. The film, an unabashedly '80s-style adventure-comedy, stars Nicolas Cage as a 1,300-year-old magician named Balthazar Blake who's been looking for a worthy successor since the 8th century.

He thinks he's found one in Dave (Jay Baruchel), a 20-year-old science nerd who likes to play with Tesla coils and Van de Graaff generators in an old subway roundhouse beneath Manhattan. But just as Balthazar starts training his apprentice, Dave gets distracted by fellow student Becky (Teresa Palmer). A whole different kind of sparks fly.

The DVD, which hits stores Tuesday, includes a number of extra features that illustrate the extent to which practical magic was combined with computer trickery to create the unique look of the film. A scene in which a paper dragon comes to life and rages through Chinatown would seem to be the perfect place to use computer graphics, but much of it was, in fact, real.

The crew did on-location filming in Chinatown, employing more than 1,000 local extras, a handful of translators -- although the filmmakers soon learned how to say things like, "Let's do that again," in Mandarin -- and more than a tonne of paper confetti. They then built sets with breakaway walls that could be triggered to implode on cue, and finally topped that off with the dragon itself, which was a computer construct.

Oddly, scenes that appear to have been filmed on location atop the Chrysler Building involved the construction of an exact duplicate of the skyscraper's observation platform. And although computers were used to bring the building's eagle gargoyles to life, Turteltaub also created a fully movable model for the actors to react to and even ride on.

Cage, Baruchel and the rest of the cast clearly appreciated the help, although they admit that, when magical effects are added in post-production, the on-set conjuring can look and feel a little silly.

"I'm trying to conjure things," says Toby Kebbell, who plays a rival sorcerer's dim-witted apprentice, "and I end up looking like I'm doing tai chi in a field." (This more closely describes the psychokinetic characters in the recent flop, The Last Airbender.) "You end up flailing your arms and hoping the visual-effects dudes can make it look like something magic happened."

They did, although, as the DVD shows, some of the flames and flashing lights were visible on the set, as well.

"My favourite stuff growing up -- and my whole life -- has been stuff where guys shoot energy out of their hands," Baruchel says. "And so I was like, 'I have to be in this movie, if nothing else, just to have footage of me shooting energy out of my hands.' That was a deal-closer for me."

The filmmakers also discuss, with appropriate reverence, the inspiration for The Sorcerer's Apprentice; namely, the scene in Walt Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse magics a motley crew of brooms into doing his work, then loses control of them. (That sequence is based on an even older work, Goethe's 1797 poem, Der Zauberlehrling.)

And it can hardly be a coincidence that Tuesday also sees a re-release of Fantasia on DVD and Blu-ray, packaged together with the update, Fantasia 2000. The original is now 70 years old, but remains a wonderful, spellbinding experience for kids and adults alike.