This is the amazing way the dog in The Call of the Wild was created

Cinema holds many secrets. In L’call of the forest, the actors are, for example, not who they appear to be. The main character of Buck, the dog, was created in an amazing way.

A real dog story. This is how one could sum up in a single sentence the work The forest’s call. This story is that of Buck, a dog spoiled by a Californian family before being kidnapped and sold to gold diggers. He then finds himself adopted by a man, Perrault, a mail carrier. He has to cross mountains and live in difficult conditions. Difficult to transmit this animal history to the cinema. And yet, director Chris Sanders and screenwriter Michael Green tried their hand at it, in 2020. Together, they managed to make an entire film about a dog… without playing this animal species for a single minute. You read correctly, all the scenes where Buck appears in The forest’s callavailable on Disney+, were shot with a human stunt double.

The forest’s call on Disney+: A human disguised as a dog

To avoid creating a film entirely from CGI, the film crew hired Terry Notary, actor, stuntman and gymnast, to pose as a dog before being animated in post-production. In an interview with HelloCineproducer Erwin Stoff says he didn’t immediately believe that this idea was going to work. “It was a strange idea to have a dog played by a man. I didn’t know how the actors were going to react, because they were asked to play opposite an adult standing on all fours, wearing a weird gray outfit with fake front legs, who was pretending to be a dog…” Finally, his presence throughout the filming allowed the actors, in particular Omar Sy and Harrison Ford, who played real humans, not to find themselves helpless to play in front of a vacuum.

The special adoption of a canine model

To create a dog faithful to that described in Jack London’s book, crossing a “Gigantic St. Bernard and a purebred Scottish collie bitch”, the animation teams then based themselves on a real dog, adopted by the director’s wife. This abandoned dog was scanned by the teams and then spent his time on set so that they could draw inspiration from it to animate Terry Notary’s movements a posteriori. Obviously, the canine not being a well-trained movie star, he could not take on the role of Buck on his own.

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Article written in collaboration with 6Médias