Wicked: For Good

Wicked: For Good revisits Production Designer Nathan Crowley’s intricately crafted sets from the first film, most notably the Emerald City, Munchkinland, and Shiz University. The visual effects team at Framestore digitally dressed the Emerald City with propaganda from the Wizard, villainising Elphaba and glorifying Glinda as Glinda the Good. Working closely with our Art Department, the team came up with concepts for the look and feel of the additions to the set, fixing banners to float in the breeze, and adding smaller touches like ribbons and balloons in Glinda’s signature pink. 

The story takes viewers to new parts of the Emerald City, tasking the teams to fit these spaces inside the existing layout of the environment. “We knew we’d need these new shots and angles for Wicked: For Good when we were making plans for the first film, so we built out the city with them in mind,” explains Visual Effects Supervisor Jonathan Fawkner. “For example, in part one the balcony in the background of one of the city shots transpires to be Glinda’s apartment in part two. Filming both parts back to back was really beneficial as we could leave ourselves room in the cityscape for those details that we’ll need later.” 

In that same vein, the combined pre-production process for both chapters of the story allowed Framestore Pre-production Services (FPS) to plan out all of the necessary camera angles in the different locations in previs and techvis, ensuring that the double feature shoot was as efficient as possible. 

The film’s opening number “Everyday More Wicked” presented an intricate paint and rotoscoping task for the teams, as thousands of propaganda-style leaflets are scattered from a tall tower in the Emerald City. “The citizens have to pluck them from the sky on the beat of the song,” comments Fawkner, “and so the extras had real pamphlets in their hands that they whipped up as if catching them from the sky. In post production, we had to paint out the real props from their lowered hands, and align the falling digital ones with the real ones as they flutter down, to ensure a seamless transition from falling CG pamphlet to practical prop.”

Now a public figure, Glinda visits Munchkinland as part of her press tour marking the opening of the yellow brick road. Framestore deployed volumetric crowd capture techniques to simulate the large crowds of munchkins, digitally extending the sets and adding the rolling hills of tulips. 

Returning once again to Munchkinland when they hear of Nessa–Rose’s unfortunate fate, Glinda and Elphaba come to blows. Elphaba floats and hovers, having mastered her levitation spell. In order to get the perfect flowing motion of her cape, the VFX teams replicated the practical garment digitally, replacing the costume with a more dramatic flutter. “We adopted a CARBON set up for the cape simulation,” details VFX Supervisor Ben Magana. “There was a lot of complexity in blending the realistic fabric layers with CG capes and managing the aesthetic balance between magical and photographic realism.”

Elphaba’s flashback to Shiz during ‘No Good Deed’ required a complete digital build of the set, to echo the practical build from the first film. “We shot a lot of these sequences later on, once the set had been broken down, so we had to rebuild it digitally based on scans and the digital augmentation from Part One,” comments Jonathan Fawkner. 

Existing in exile, Elphaba attempts to stop the animals from fleeing Oz. Singing the new addition to the soundtrack “No Place Like Home”, she tries to rally the remaining animals to protect their homeland. The sequence was particularly complex in its animation, requiring 107 different kinds of CGI animals. “We had multiple groom and lookdev variants to creature family groupings, and then we had to factor in other layers like clothes or backpacks,” explains Animation Supervisor Dale Newton. “We had to plan which creatures would feature in the hero shots, if they’d remove their backpack or set down an item, and ensure that we had variation so it didn’t seem repetitive. On top of that, there’s the interaction with the photographed set and the CG vegetation, which adds another layer of complexity.”

The Environments team also had their work cut out for them digitally augmenting and relighting the detailed woodland set. “The mood really shifts in the song - Oz feels like a dark place for the animals, but Elphaba inspires some hope,” adds VFX Supervisor Jonathan Fawkner. “So we added some glowing sunlight, the poppies, more foliage, and retouched the yellow brick road to make it really pop against the green woodland. Alice Brookes, the Cinematographer, really trusted us by holding back on the set lighting to give us more control over the lighting in post-production, helping us to integrate the CG animals in a more natural way.”

Elphaba finds the captured animals locked away in the Wizard’s palace, in a prison-like vault filled with cages. The Environments team created the prison in CG, painting over the plate photography to expand the set, adding more cages, to make the full impact of the Wizard’s atrocities even more apparent to the audience. 

Elphaba confronts the Wizard and sets the animals free, causing a stampede through the middle of Glinda’s wedding to Fiyero. The scene was planned carefully in previs, establishing the flow of creatures and finding the opportunities for comedy. “When you have a large CG component, like all of the animals in the stampede, it’s important to plan each of those movements to get the right footage. We had to make sure we captured all of the chaos with the crowd and principle cast, while figuring out how the animals will weave between them, trampling them, and knocking over objects,” says Previsualisation Supervisor Chris McDonald. 

The previs and postvis laid a solid foundation for the Animation teams to begin their mammoth task - producing an Ozian menagerie interacting with each other, the actors, and the set as they stampeded through the wedding. “We did a lot of planning to be able to present Jon Chu and the film’s editor, Myron Kerstein, with a holistic view of the scene to ensure our pacing matched their vision for the edit,” adds VFX Supervisor Ben Magana. “We had to very carefully consider each animal and the effect of them knocking into each other. It’s a very chaotic scene, and so being able to show that without it becoming confusing or disorientating for the audience was a big challenge for us. Fortunately, everyone was on the same page and we got amazing feedback from the filmmakers.” 

Wicked: For Good demanded a lot of creatures to fill Oz with animals, but perhaps the most prominent of Framstore’s magical menagerie is the evolution of the lion cub from part one. In creating the Cowardly Lion, the Animation team drew inspiration from more than the big cat family - searching for the right mournful eyes and finding them in the wide-eyed gaze of a dog. “It seems counterintuitive, building a big cat around the eyes of a dog, but the structure and expressiveness was just right,” says Animation Supervisor Dale Newton. 

The team studied a library of reference footage of real lions, matching walk cycles and ear flicks, to produce a realistic CG lion. From there, it was less about the creature and more about the character, refining his movements to appear more nervous. “We looked at William Wallace Denslow’s illustrations from the first edition of the Wizard of Oz, and other interpretations of the cowardly lion, before adding some of our own ideas to the mix,” explains Newton. “We added smaller mannerisms, like how his tail wraps around his body in a kind of self-soothing gesture instead of hanging loosely behind him. He very much uses it as a prop, we had him wipe a tear with it in homage to Bert Lahr’s performance in the 1939 film.”