CG Society has a production focus on the making of John Carter.
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Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, who most recently directed the animated feature Wall-E, for which he won an Oscar, helmed the film, his first live-action movie, borrowing Pixar’s general manager Jim Morris and producer Lindsey Collins to act as his producers, and writer Mark Andrews to work with Stanton and Michael Chabon on the script. “We also brought in a couple people from Pixar at key times as consultants,” Stanton says. “But that was it. This is a Disney film; it isn’t Pixar’s first live action film. We had to keep the lines clean.”
Filmed in the Utah desert and on sound stages in London, the film brings to life Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic novel 'A Princess of Mars,' one of the first science fiction stories to send an American onto another planet, and one of the first interplanetary romances. The time is soon after America’s civil war. John Carter [Taylor Kitsch], a dispirited veteran, finds himself teleported to Mars, a planet with two warring tribes of people that look something like him, the Zodangans and Heliumites played by actors, and more alien-looking, four-armed, noseless green-skinned humanoids called Tharks, which are always CG characters based on actors’ performances.