Day 18 on the set of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

On Day 18 of Adamson's epic shoot that began on June 28, the man who made magic with both Shrek films led his cast and crew into Narnia for the very first time as he filmed actress Georgie Henley's (playing Lucy, the youngest of the four Pevensie children) first footsteps into the sprawling, snowy landscape envisioned by production designer Roger Ford on a set that measures approximately 80x50x18 meters (roughly the same size as the massive James Bond stage at Pinewood Studios in London).

Adamson is mounting his first live-action endeavor in sequence, a rarity in Hollywood filmmaking. Meaning, his first 17 days of production depicted the evacuation of the four siblings from their war-torn London home out to the pastures of rural England (the lush, green hills of the Tahekeroa District some 45 km from Auckland) and their relocation into the plush surroundings of the kindly Prof. Kirke's Victorian country home (built on sound stages at Auckland's Henderson Studios), where the youngster Lucy unexpectedly discovers the magical wardrobe while playing hide-and-seek with her family (more on the wardrobe set piece in a later report). Ford even built the interiors of a London train station (patterned after the Paddington station) in an old airplane hangar at the Hobsonville Airbase in West Auckland.