OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL Production ... - Visual Hollywood

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (2013)
PRODUCTION NOTES
formance had to come from the monkey's ears and tail. Plus, it's a flying monkey as well. So, it's not
like we could take Zach, equip him with a set of wings, and throw him off a 6-foot platform."
Director Raimi wanted to get the best possible performances between the on-set actors and the virtual
characters (Braff as the CGI monkey and teen actress Joey King as the other key CGI character,
China Girl), "Sam, in early discussions, was very concerned with really getting the feel of two actors
working together," Stokdyk says. "Traditionally, for heavily CGI movies with animated characters,
you'll shoot a bunch of empty plates with the actor playing and reacting to a tennis ball on a
stick.
"Several months later, you'll go back in a recording session and the actor will record all the dialogue
and ADR it," the VFX veteran continues about the normal process used to marry real and virtual
characters in the final product. "At the start of this project, Sam was very concerned about getting
good performances. What we chose to do early on was have the actors on set or in proximity. If
you've got an actor playing a 3-foot-tall monkey, you can basically put the actor in place, paint them
out and replace them with a CG monkey.
"We realized we also had an 18-inch porcelain doll [China Girl], and, at that size, it was hard to get
the actor down to that eye line," Stokdyk goes on to say. "That, combined with a 3-foot tall flying
monkey, caused us to come up with a new idea--have the actors in a performance booth, which we
dubbed the 'puppet-cam booth'. A soundproof booth in a trailer right outside the working stage,
wired with video and audio into the set.
"On set was a representation of the actor in the booth via a fixed monitor on a (pole)," he further
explains about the groundbreaking process devised to help maximize the actors' performance on the
working set. "And, the heart of the puppet-cam system was a puppeteer (KNB's Dave Wogh) holding
a 10-foot rod with a monitor attached on the end. The puppeteer would place this puppet-cam
monitor out in the correct eye line for the actor, to which they could then interact and perform.
"What the actor on set saw was a picture of the (voice) actor in the booth," Stokdyk continues, "in
realtime. Conversely, the actor in the booth sees the actor on set through the camera attached to that
monitor. So, it's almost in a way like a virtual videoconference, but it's realtime, which is important
for the timing of the performance. And, the actors could then feel like they were actually talking to
each other even though the actor can't be 18 inches or flying up 10 feet in the air. They could still
have that intimacy."
The same technique applied to those scenes showcasing the 18-inch porcelain character, China Girl,
voiced by teen actress Joey King ("Ramona and Beezus"), who describes her role by saying, "I play
China Girl, who's in the Baum book. In the beginning of the story, my character loses her family.
Her parents have died because the Wicked Witch came into her village and destroyed the town. So,
Oz comes around and picks her up along the way. At the end of the movie, he kind of becomes her
adopted father."
China Girl's journey from design to execution began when Raimi commissioned production designer
Stromberg (working from costume designer Michael Kutsche's concept illustration) to build a
life-size (18-inch) puppet to manipulate on the set opposite his live cast (Franco in particular) to
maximize the performance. In response, Greg Nictoero and Howard Berger's crew at KNB built an
immovable porcelain doll for reference that, in turn, served as a prototype for a working marionette
to animate alongside Franco "live" before the cameras.
© 2013 Walt Disney Pictures
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