Is this fountain real or CGI in the Wonderfalls show intro?
May 7, 2018 11:29 AM   Subscribe

I was watching the intro to Wonderfalls on Youtube for episode 1 and I saw this fountain. However I cannot find any other evidence that this fountain of the Indian woman in the canoe/maid of the mist is actually real. The video is too low resolution for me to tell if it is CGI or not. Does it exist?
posted by clockworkjoe to Media & Arts (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I doubt it's CGI; props are cheaper for something like that, or at least were cheaper to do convincingly in 2004.

This site indicates that the plaza with the fountain is actually the courtyard of the Liberty Grand, in Toronto.
posted by jackbishop at 11:55 AM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The statue in the fountain is based on a painting of the maid of the mist that was often used on tourist postcards from Niagara Falls. Examples here, here, and here.

I'm pretty sure it isn't a "real" fountain that exists in the real world just because it is the type of thing that would have millions of tourist photographs of it, and it doesn't seem to have any.

It's definitely not in the Liberty Grand Courtyard in Toronto--see photos here.

If I were guessing, it's prop they've made up for the show--or maybe a series of props used in different situations--so it's real in that sense (not CGI) but not real in the sense of an actual fountain existing somewhere in the world. It is part of the courtyard area outside of the gift shop in the show, which is a set of some kind (even if a real location it is fixed up with a few props to better fit its fictional location, or maybe things like the fountain are added in), and then the shots from that set are composited somehow with the river/Niagara Falls shots to make it appear that the courtyard appears just on the bank of the river near Niagara Falls as in this shot or this shot. If you look at various shots of the fountain in different contexts, they don't all really add up--ie, the surroundings vary between subtly and wildly different--which makes me think they have used all the various tricks of the trade to make it appear in various scenes.

Just for example, the scene in the intro to s1e1 showing a pan from the statue to the courtyard with the gift shop is actually a whip cut between a shot of the fountain and another completely separate and different shot of the courtyard made to appear that the two belong together and you are panning from one to the other. But in reality they are just two separate shots, joined together by the whip cut. You can verify this by watching in slow motion.
posted by flug at 1:27 PM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


If I'm recalling this episode correctly, the fountain later talks to Jaye (the schtick of the show) so it is most definitely CGI.

This is not unusual--most sci-fi shows had been using almost or wholly exclusively CGI for almost 10 years by 2004. Star Trek: Voyager, for instance, a show first aired in 1995, never built a physical model of the hero ship.
posted by Automocar at 1:48 PM on May 7, 2018


A friend of mine was the VFX producer for that series, so I asked him, and he says that it was built for the show.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:14 PM on May 7, 2018 [14 favorites]


5_13_23_42_69_666: Built as a physical prop, or built as a CGI prop?
posted by clawsoon at 4:59 PM on May 7, 2018


Physical
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:05 PM on May 7, 2018 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Thanks for the great answers! This has been very informative.
posted by clockworkjoe at 11:23 AM on May 9, 2018


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