Harold and the Purple Crayon, from Columbia Pictures, is a feature film adaptation of the beloved children’s classic by author/illustrator Crockett Johnson. Initially published in 1955, “Harold and the Purple Crayon” tells the story of a toddler in footy pajamas, who creates entire worlds with his purple crayon.
Carlos Saldanha (pictured) directed the live-action film, which incorporates both 2D animation and 3D visual effects. Saldanha received Oscar nominations for Ferdinand and his animated short
Gone Nutty. He also directed
Ice Age,
Rio and
Rio 2.
Director Carlos Saldanha
Harold and the Purple Crayon stars Zachary Levi as a now-adult version of Harold. He is joined on his adventure in the real world by Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds). Zooey Deschanel, Alfred Molina and Jemaine Clement also star.
Here, Saldanha reflects on the challenges of bringing the story to the big screen for its August 2nd release.
Hi Carlos! You have a comprehensive background in animation. Is this your biggest live-action film to date?
“Yes it is. It's the first big one. I've done a couple of episodes of series before — some of the stuff that I developed. I shot for, Disney+ in Brazil, and Netflix, and things like that, but never a (theatrical) feature this big. This was the biggest thing I've done. (It was a) big challenge, but was a perfect one for me because I got to do a little animation in the middle, and it has a lot of special effects, which I love, so it was good to be able to do a little bit of this hybrid in that sense.”
What was the shooting schedule? You’re trying to look like Rhode Island, but the credits suggest Georgia, Canada and even Australia for some of the VFX.
“Yeah, it was pretty intense. I think we had, in total, almost like 50 days of shooting. And we shot in Atlanta and had to make Atlanta looks like Rhode Island. We had to go around and find locations and then do a lot of changes. It was the wintertime, and the movie's supposed to be happening in the spring and summer, so we had to do a lot of grass replacement and sky replacement to bring that vibrant (look) life to it. It was pretty intense. I went scouting in Atlanta in the summer. It was a different Atlanta than what we shot. The winter was colder, but it was very good. The crews are amazing. Atlanta has, in a way, been built for shooting, so it was very good. The stages, the location, everything worked out.”
Animation plays an important role, particularly in setting up the beginning of the story. Was the animation and live action being produce concurrently?
“I had an amazing visual effects supervisor, Matt Welford, so he helped me coordinate the effects. And the animation team with [Bent Image Lab] — he had worked with them before, and the animators and animation directors out there were outstanding. We did a lot of back and forth with storyboards and animatics, and were able to coordinate that with the shooting schedule, so that happened almost on a parallel track.”
There were a lot of visual effects companies involved, including Rising Sun Pictures, Folks VFX, Soho VFX and SpinVFX. Can you talk about how that was allocated?
“We divided a bunch of the scenes. We had a scene that required to have a dragon, and then you have the big finale. We did a lot of previs to plan for those. And some people were more involved in the sky replacement, the locations, the adjustment of grass and color, and things like that. Not character effects, like the dragon. So we divided all those things. There's a company that did the helicopter scene. All the transformations, we had to kind of divide and conquer to different vendors. But Matt was the guy that was kind of in the center of quality control, working between all these different studios that were providing special effects for us.”
Was the crayon effect one of the challenges that needed be figured out?
“Yeah. That was the biggest challenge. We knew that this movie, the big star of the movie is also the crayon, and the effects of the crayon in the real world…I wanted the crayon to look three dimensional. I wanted the lines to feel three dimensional. That was key. And then the transformation was a transition that we had to do, because the props were all CGI. Whatever transformed was half CGI and half real props, so we had to blend them perfectly together, and that took a while. I wanted the experience to feel almost like the way you draw with the goggles sometimes, like you draw in three dimensions, and that you can walk through it and see the lines. I wanted that effect.
“Once we had the prototype of the test that we wanted to make, then we disseminated that through the studios that we're doing the lines. There were two different studios that did them, and we kind of had to mind meld to make sure that they looked the same in every shot. And then you have to create the CGI transition and match the real-life transition. For example, the airplane, we had a CGI airplane, but also, we built an airplane, so we had an actual airplane that they were in, and then we had to transition to it. That, for me, was the probably the most challenging effects to do. It's the simplest in concept…but it was very hard to execute, not only for the effects, but also for the actor to visualize. We had to put guides throughout the shoot so that he would be able to follow the guide so the lines would make sense. We had small wireframe versions of the objects — at least the outline of the object — so he could really move and draw on top of it. At least the movement would be in the ballpark of the creation.”
You worked with two editors - Tia Nolan, ACE, and Mark Helfrich, ACE — how did they collaborate?
“Mark came first, and I knew that he had a hard out in September, so he kind of came in and did the first cut, worked out the cuts for the effects. He did like the big muscle work of putting a lot of the scenes together, especially while we were shooting. He was there on the set, looking at some shots and giving suggestions. He was super helpful and it was amazing to just get the ball rolling, but I knew that he had a hard out, so that's when Tia came on-board. She inherited a lot of the scenes. We had already a first cut, but we knew that we had to trim a lot. We had to find some new takes. We had a lot of work still to be done. And then when she came in, she took over from Mark and continued from that point on and shaped the movie to the way the movie ended up being.”
There is a range of animation and visual effects in this film. Is there a sequence that you see as a highlight, where it really pays off?
“For me, I think was the ‘battle of the crayons.’ The battle the crayons for me was the most fun to visualize, to conceptualize and very challenging to create because we didn't shoot against green. It was shot on-location, shot in the park, and the reason why we did that was because we believed that we get a lot more quality and production value having the reality of the park around it, and the transformation would become more fun to see, rather than everything being digital — everything being green.
“It gives that grounded kind of world that we're trying to create. When the lava cracks…we did it all there. People, when they saw what we were doing, (said), ‘How this going to become a lava pit in this kind of stuff?’ And that was the beauty of the special effects. We really made it happen in that place. But the battle of the crayons was very special because you had to be fast and challenging and creative. And at the same time, there wasn’t a lot of time to think of what they're drawing, so we practiced a lot of, like, ‘Draw this! You're drawing the rope!’ And then everything had to match, so there was a fun, quick exercise of drawing. Luckily, that sequence was the last that we shot, so by that time the actors already had a good handle on the crayon drawing. I thought that that was the most fun to do.”
What’s next for you?
“I'm shooting a movie right now in Brazil, a movie very different from this one. It's a biopic of a guy who crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat in 1984, so it's a true story. Lots of special effects as well. Lots of boat in the water and stuff like that, but a very fun project to be a part of.
“I continue to think about stories to tell. I had a great experience telling Harold as a story. It's my second book adaptation. I did Ferdinand the bull for the animation and Harold for live action and animation, and I'm looking forward to what the next project could be. Right now I just have to finish this movie that I'm doing. Hopefully this one will come out next year, and then I keep seeing what's going to come out next.”