Darren Aronofsky is an unconventional yet gifted director. His next project is "Noah" the biblical character who builds the Ark in the midst of the Great Flood.

The movie has a star studded cast that includes Russell Crowe, Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Kevin Durand, Martin Csokas, and Mark Margolis.

Perhaps the biggest stars of the film (literally) would be the animals that were transported in the ark. The director shares (through dga.org) the challenges that these entail:

"We had to create an entire animal kingdom. All the animals in the movie are slightly tweaked; I didn't want the clichéd polar bear, elephant, and lion walking onto the Ark; I didn't want the shot of a giraffe's head looking over the rail. I wanted to respect the storyline and think what would have been involved if it all really happened.

We basically went through the animal kingdom and pinpointed the body types we wanted: some pachyderms, some rodents, reptiles, and the bird kingdom. We chose the species and they were brought to life with different furs and colors. We didn't want anything fully recognizable but not completely absurd either."

Aronofsky commends Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects specialists, for nailing his vision of the scene: "It was a nice badge of honor. I don't think it's the most incredible shot, but I think because of all the hair on the animals it was incredibly complicated for them. They said, 'We can only render it two or three more times so make sure those are exactly right because they take so long and are so complex.

I think we've learned from people who have done it before that that's a really bad move. Politically it's not a great thing to work with live animals and that's becoming more apparent to people as time goes by, but also, technically, it would have been extremely difficult. And we've learned from lots of other films how hard it is to bring different kinds of animals together."

Real animals would've been disastrous. Co-stars trying to eat each other is not a lovely sight.