UGUIDE: Unlike other CGI movies that are set in modern urban environments, the landscapes and settings in Oz are such pure fantasy. How do you imagine such beautiful scenes? Where do you even start?

Scott: We were very fortunate to have Robert Stromberg as production designer. Basically, he had this vision for the world. It started out from real sets that his team built. First, the team at Imageworks and I studied what he had done and studied how his team put rocks and clusters of plants around set features.

And then when we went into postproduction, we actually hired artists to do what we call paint-overs. We take a frame of the film with a bunch of blue screen in it and then we just paint in what the background would be. So that background was a guide for what the visual effects team would do.

UGUIDE: As visual effects artists, do you have creative input into what the final thing looks like or do you more or less produce what is already there?

Scott: Sam Raimi (director) is such a collaborator that he loves listening to different voices in the process. So there is a whole pre-vis team that’s coming up with ideas — and there are storyboard artists that are coming up with ideas, and the art department as well.

So our job to some extent is to kind of pick and choose and combine all these ideas together under Sam’s guidance. In some cases, Sam fell in love with this and we produced it exactly. And in some cases, it’s like these pieces don’t all work, so can you come up with something unique?

UGUIDE: We get the impression that this is a somewhat unique process in terms of mixing the marionette, CGI, and the live action, or the live set and the blue screen. Was it unique?

Scott: I’m always hesitant to say it’s the first time we’ve done anything, because I’ve certainly heard other people say that, and you know, there always ends up being some other example. What I would say is that we had a unique recipe of how we did it. And it was very, very tailored and suited to the tone that Sam wanted to set for this movie. We had a certain mixture of on-set versus blue screen, and a certain mixture of interactive things with the actors that we had to paint out. But we tried to find that balance based on what this story called for.

Certain times it’s actually more difficult to integrate live action pieces into the visual effects than to actually go completely computer generated. So I think one of my challenges as a supervisor is to figure out how to, in an interesting way, combine real photographed pieces, whether it’s a set piece or an actor. It may be a harder burden on the Imageworks team to execute that, but I think it does elevate the work and brings it to a different realm.

UGUIDE: I understand a big part of the on-set acting for China Girl was the use of a marionette to capture movements and give actors and animators a reference point. Can you explain how that worked? Where did that idea come from?

Scott: I think it was born more out of the necessity of what this movie called for. I think there has been a great trend in computer graphics that if you have a CG construct, you put an actor in there. If you can put somebody the same size there, you do. And our challenge was, there is nobody 18 inches tall. And I think we wanted a real performance and that’s where the idea of a marionette came out. What can be 18 inches tall but still have a performance you can interact with?

Carolyn: Yeah, it’s really helpful when you start a shot and you have the marionette reference to look at, and you have Phil Huber’s (puppeteer) performance. And they are just fantastic. Then you can build on top of that as you need to, to make her really feel grounded and real. A lot of the acting choices were great, and sometimes we could even use those. But it was really helpful for the movement that we had to create in the actual CG character.

So in the wobble scene, for example, she walks a certain kind of way. There’s a limited amount you can move her hands and the eyebrows, things like that. You set those up in the first frame in your shot, and you only change them in a big movement or in very small ways to keep her looking like a doll.

UGUIDE: People might have a general idea of what CGI animation is, but what is the actual process to bring all this to life on the big screen?

Michael: There are a bunch of steps at the beginning before you actually start animating anything. In general, you look at your shot. You’re trying to figure out what type of performance you’re going to be looking for in the shot. And mentally, you start to plan for the shot. You’ll also look at any reference that is provided. For example, for China Girl, it was the marionette performance. If it’s Finley, we’d be looking at more monkey-type performances.

After that, you basically do a blocking pass of your shot, where you go in and do key poses describing the main action that your character would be doing in the scene. And from there, it goes through an approval process, where you would show the animation director. He’ll give you any notes that he has, you make any adjustments, and then you start sliding out the shot — which is giving it the much smoother motion that you would expect to see in the final film. Then you put the spit and polish on it, make it nice and clean. And there you go.

And of course, you could wind up getting into a bunch of different problems, where all of a sudden someone says, “Oh, we changed the dialogue in this shot, you have to go back.” But in general, that’s the gist of it.

UGUIDE: You mentioned that every single scene is designed right down to the pixel. What exactly do you mean by that?

Scott: There is a conscious choice made for every detail in the film. You know, on set you’ve got a fence post and somebody on set went and put grass around where that meets the yellow brick road. And then the visual effects team looks at that and says, “OK, when we have this tree, this virtual tree that’s 20 feet behind, that we’re putting into the blue screen area, how do we cluster grass around that?” We want to complement the style that was done on set. So basically, there was a choice by an artist on everything you see in the frame.