A Full CG Fantasy World—Oz: The Great and Powerful

Oz: the Great and Powerful is the prequel of the Wizard of Oz. At the beginning, the movie is showed in non-wide screen, black and white and non-3D way. When Frank comes to Oz, the movie becomes wide-screen, color and 3D. This is a salute to 1939 version The Wizard of Oz. Besides to the magnificent CG environment, the team also creates a CG monkey, a small porcelain doll that can breathe, and the incredibly strong tornado and storm effects. Let’s take a look at the production process of Oz: The Great and Powerful.

 

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The Special Effects of Oz: The Great and Powerful

The talented artists from Imageworks have worked together to bring this classical and dreamlike script to theatre. The mainly challenge for them during the cooperation with other studios, like Evil Eye Pictures, is about the creating of fantasy environment and color. It is not difficult for audience who has watched this movie to find out that the landscape, environment, small creatures and weird animals are quite familiar. That’s because these artists are all the crew members of Alice in Wonderland.

Since the team has worked on Alice in Wonderland and Avatar before, they can sense the structure of Alice in Wonderland from Oz: The Great and Powerful. In early time, the director has decided to create a full CG fantasy land. The team tried to construct sets as many as possible for the main part then merge more scenes into it by using special effects. In the movie Alice in Wonderland, lots of CG scenes were virtualized during post-production due to shooting sets. Yet this time, the team broke out the limits to present the original scenario described in the book.

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The Production of Key Shot

CG production of china girl: a perfect combination of real puppet and special effects

China girl actually is not a typical CG creation. An experienced puppeteer who has performed with puppets for more than 40 years was invited to the spot for the shooting. China girl was hiding behind a desk when she first showed up. And this shot was shot with the real puppet. The post-production needed to work with CG production to make the china girl look real. So on the spot, the puppeteer dressed in blue and carried the puppet in his hands to shoot. In this way actors could have good interaction with china girl, also it offered a perfect vision and lighting reference for special effects department of post-production. The features of real puppet in actions actually inspired the animation supervisor and his team. They produced based on the puppet’s acting. The adding of CG fixed the deficiency of the puppet’s flexibility so that the character can do any actions the director hoped it could do.

Furthermore, the difficulty of producing the puppet is large. To cooperate with CG production, the puppet needed to have its own real clothes which need at least 20 lines to finish the whole process. So it also took lots of efforts to get rid of those lines.

The production of flying monkey—Finley

 

Though the flying monkey Finley was made by CG, but the whole shooting and production process is quite different from china girl. During shooting, the voice actor read lines directly on the spot. The VFX supervisor thought it was necessary to have co-star acting face to face since decisions regarding to key performing were made based on co-star acting. It only needed to have animators adjust CG monkey Finley’s body at post-production.

 

The production of Oz: the Great and Powerful is complicated. So we will elaborate more details later, let’s look forward to it.