Just a quick post about the bonus features on the War Horse BluRay before I go out & feed my beasties for the night.
I watched nearly all of the extras tonight (there's one on the dvd in the set that I'm going to watch tomorrow) and I think it's well worth getting the "fancy" four disc set to have them all. I could have wished for a little more focus on the horses they used, where did they get them all, where did they go when the film was done, etc, but it's a minor complaint. They did, obviously, spend a fair amount of time talking about the horses and what it was like filming and preparing for certain scenes, like the cavalry charge. A number of the actors talked about the excitement of working with the horses -- Emily Watson (Rosie, Albert's mother) had a cute story about getting upstaged by "Joey", and Benedict Cumberbatch (Major Stewart) talked about how intense and emotional it was to do the cavalry charge.
There was some behind the scenes footage of the horses and people being trained and practicing certain movements, which is always fun. (And can I just take a moment to say how freaking adorable Benedict Cumberbatch was in his velvet hunt cap in those practice scenes? It was just like the one I had as a kid and it made me want to hug him.) They also had a bit with the horses' makeup artists, which is just funny to think about needing makeup artists for your horses. The bit with the sound designer talking about picking vocalisations for the horses was really interesting, too.
It became quite clear that there were a number of horse-people working on this film and, fabulously, that a number of the people on it who didn't start out as horse-people, were horse-people by the time they were done with the film. That just really made me smile.
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