Wicked

With inspiration from the musical stage play, Universal Pictures’ Wicked had a strong debut when the feature film was released on Thanksgiving weekend. Directed by Jon M. Chu ( Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights), Wicked is the first chapter in a two-part tale, with the conclusion scheduled for release next November. The film tells the backstory of the witches of Oz: Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), who is misunderstood because of her green skin, and Glinda (Ariana Grande), the popular and privileged young women who’s yet to discover her true heart.

The two meet as students at Shiz University in the fantastical Land of Oz, where they form an unlikely friendship. Michelle Yeoh stars as the university’s headmistress, Madame Morrible, while Peter Dinklage voices Dr. Dillamond, a talking goat that heads the university’s history department. Jonathan Bailey plays Fiyero, the carefree prince that attracts the witches’ attention, and Jeff Goldblum stars as The Wizard himself.

With more than $100M taken in at the box office its opening week, and strong performances by both Erivo and Grande, the film is well positioned for Oscar consideration. Here, cinematographer Alice Brooks; editor Myron Kerstein, ACE; visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman; and Company 3 colorist Jill Bogdanowicz take a break from their work on the sequel to share insight into the new film’s production and post production. 

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Cinematographer Alice Brooks has known director Jon Chu since their time at USC film school, where they developed a mutual respect and shared a passion for storytelling. She worked on the director’s 2021 feature In the Heights, and once again partnered with him on Wicked.

“When Jon Chu, (production designer) Nathan Crowley, (VFX supervisor) Pablo Helman and I first started talking about this movie, the idea was that we were going to make an ‘old-Hollywood’ movie that would be contemporary and feel our own at the same time,” recalls Brooks. “In making an old-Hollywood movie, we would try to do as much in-camera first as possible, so we shot on 17 stages, where the sets went from fire lane to fire lane, and from the floor to the ceiling.”

The film is loaded with visual effects, she acknowledges, but “it’s different than your Marvel movies, or your Fast and Furious movies, where you’re in a blue world.” 

She points to the film’s production design and its massive sets — some as large as football fields — which allowed her to find detail in all directions. 

“Jon’s vision was, 'We’re not just shooting this movie on blue screen. We are actually going to build the world of Oz,'” she explains. “So, one of the decisions we did make was not to shoot in Imax, but to shoot 2.40:1 aspect ratio, because we had the width of the sets. What we didn’t have was the height, even though some of our sets were 70-feet tall. A lot of our set extension is up — not behind characters’ heads.”

Brooks chose to shoot with the Arri Alexa 65 digital camera, which is similar in size and shape to a 65mm film frame. She also partnered with Panavision to develop a unique set of lenses specifically for this film.

“They’re a set of lenses no one has ever shot on before,” she notes, “and they’re in a closet at Panavision in London. When I knew I was going to do Wicked, Jon kept saying, ‘I want this movie to look unlike any other movie that has existed.’ And I said, ‘Well, then we need lenses that no one else has shot on.’”

Brooks describes the anamorphic lenses as romantic and soft, with a beautiful amber flare. She worked closely with Panavision consultant Dan Sasaki, who provided 35mm, 50mm and 85mm lenses for the 14-month shoot, which represents Wicked and its follow-up release.

“We wanted a very shallow depth of field so that we would really be focused on our actors and the rest of the world would sort of be soft,” Brooks notes. “You even see it in all the artwork,” she says of the signature look. “The posters — that amber color exists everywhere, and marketing took it over.”

Brooks had a large team supporting her, including two camera operators that she would monitor from a tent on-set.

“My monitors are usually set up right next to Jon Chu’s monitors, so we can quickly collaborate in my tent,” she explains. “I have the best of the monitors on-set…Pablo would be in there a lot of the time too.”

Most of the production used two cameras, though on some of the larger sets, like Shiz University and the Emerald City, they would run a third camera.

“We had so many extras and beautiful details that our C-camera would be able to grab little, teeny-tiny details,” she explains. “I don’t know how much of that ended up in the movie, but we ran three cameras on those days.”

Brooks points to two sequences in the film that she found both interesting and challenging from a cinematography standpoint, the first being the Ozdust Ballroom scene, where Elphaba shows up wearing her pointed hat for the first time, garnering a mixed reaction from the party goers, making her very uncomfortable. The sequence is long and involves a 360-degree camera move.

“[Jon] wanted to do the close-up first,” Brooks recalls, “so we pull her down the stairs on a 65mm lens and we do a ten-minute Steadicam shot that is circling her 360 degrees. He always presents me with huge challenges. She’s wearing a huge hat. He wants the camera to go around her. He wants it sometimes to be super close, so we did it, and it ends in this single tear of hers dripping down at the end of the ten minutes. And Ariana, at that moment, just wipes the tear.”

Brooks credits the shot’s success to an extensive rehearsal period, which included working closely with the film’s choreographer, Christopher Scott.

“Cynthia performed it in a dance rehearsal space that we had on one of our stages, and we found that 360-degree shot,” she recalls. “We knew 360-degree shots were going to be part of our camera language. There’s a connection that happens between these two women and those shots create that connection.”

Brooks also points to the “Defying Gravity” sequence near the end of the film, where Elphaba embraces her powers and uniqueness. Shots of Elphaba feature a setting sun, while Glinda’s direction always had a sunrise.

“The last 40 minutes of the movie is all one-long sunset that ends in ‘Defying Gravity,’” Brooks explains. “I had this picture that I found on Week 2 of prep, and every time we talked about ‘Defying Gravity,’ I’m like, ‘This is what the backdrop looks like! This is what the sunset looks like.’ Pablo nailed it! It is exactly right out of my dreams.”

For Brooks, Wicked represents a perfect combination of in-camera and post effects. She says she loves how the VFX department was able to take parts of the frame and add onto it, or make something extra special, like the film’s creatures.

“The animals that Pablo created — each one has its own personality and character,” she states. “I’m just so grateful I get to be part of making a movie that is inspirational and will inspire children…It’s amazing to be part of a movie that entire generations can enjoy together.”

EDITING

Like Alice Brooks, editor Myron Kerstein, ACE, also worked with director Jon Chu on the musical In the Heights. Wicked, however, was much more demanding.

“It’s one thing to go from In the Heights, which is like a $30M to $50M film or (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s) Tick, Tick...Boom!, to something of this scale,” states Kerstein. “But Jon and I said over and over again, ‘We’ve been training for this moment all our lives!’ I had not worked on anything as far as VFX of this scale. I didn’t know previs from postvis. I hadn’t worked with CGI animals or transformation scenes and monkeys. [It] was like a really big learning curve. I tried my best to just use my heart as my beacon to cut these scenes as much as possible. What thrilled me emotionally? What made me cry? What made me laugh? What did I think was the requirement to cut a musical sequence? How did I do it differently with In the Heights or Tick, Tick...Boom!, and use all that skill set to tackle something this big.”

Kerstein has been working on Wicked, and its forthcoming sequel, for two years, much of the time in England at Sky Studios, where he had an edit suite set up just downstairs from The Wizard’s Throne Room.

“I would talk to Alice Brooks, the DP, every day,” he recalls. “I would talk to Jon as much as I could, even though [he’s] running around like a maniac trying to shoot two movies. I built a screening room to watch the dailies every day, just across the hallway. I just tried to cut as quickly as possible the 250 hours of dailies I got over eight months, and I did my best to answer questions for VFX, who needed stuff right away, or if second unit needed to pick-up stuff, to give them some guidance. I was in the trenches for sure with production the whole time.”

Kerstein had an Avid set-up with NEXIS storage on-site. He also had an Avid at his flat in London, and at him home in Los Angeles. The challenge of cutting Wicked came from its enormous number of visual effects, which would be added to his cut later in the process, as well as its numerous musical sequences. 

“Jon isn’t a huge fan of previs,” he notes. “He finds it helpful to sort of know where to put the camera, but for the most part, he likes to be pretty loose on the day.”

For the most part, the VFX team was waiting for him to create an initial cut from which they would gear the visual effects. 

“Then it’s a mad rush for them,” he says of the VFX process. “They don’t have a lot of time. Even with ‘Defying Gravity,’ which, again, came in pretty late — Jon and I were creating shots pretty late in the process — these big wide shots of her flying.”

The choreographed musical sequences added to the editing challenge.

“Jon likes to start and stop songs,” notes the editor. “He likes to stretch songs he likes. They’re very malleable pieces of real estate.” 

While Kerstein didn’t always have final versions of the songs when working on the edit, he often had temp tracks with piano accompaniment, and even live vocals from the shoot.

“I was having to talk [with] Wyatt Smith, who cut The Little Mermaid and Into the Woods,” Kerstein recalls. “And he said it’s twice the pain. And I agree with that because musicals are the hardest things you could ever cut, without a doubt. But then you have the VFX component of it, and trying to balance those two things. It’s a lot of balls in the air, and you’re trying to make it all feel grounded, seamless and emotional.” 

There are a number of sequences that challenged Kerstein editorially. He points to the Ozdust Ballroom scene, where Elphaba makes her uncomfortable entrance, as one that would affect the audience and make them emotionally invest in the characters.

“’Dancing Through Life’ — The Ozdust Ballroom — is my favorite section of the movie,” the editor reveals. “The reason is, is that ‘Dancing Through Life’ starts off as this sort of epic, Hollywood set-piece of a musical, but by the end of it, it’s very emotional. You don’t often get to do both things in a musical, and I’ve watched this thing so many times back, and every single time it makes me cry. And if that scene and that set piece did not work, the rest of the movie wouldn’t work.”

Kerstein says getting a scene like that to work is the greatest satisfaction in filmmaking and storytelling. He also points to Chistery’s transformation into a flying monkey, and the ‘Defying Gravity’ musical sequence, where Elphaba takes to her flying broom and dons her dramatic cape, as intense moments editorially too. What viewers might not realize is that the film’s opening sequence also took considerable thought to put together.

“The opening of the movie really dogged us for a really long time,” he shares. “On paper, you’re just like, ‘She’s telling a story, and then we’re off to the races.’ But there’s a lot of backstory there. We had Glinda, who’s telling us the story, sort of just standing on this pedestal for 20 minutes. How do we condense [this], and how do we make this work so that it feels like the beginning of something bigger?”

Kerstein found inspiration while watching Disney’s Lilo & Stitch with his 11-year-old son at a local art-house.

“We used to have the title for the movie as soon as the monkeys crashed through the glass,” he recalls of the initial edit. But as he was watching the animated Disney feature, he realized they were well into the film before credits appear.

“I’m watching this movie for like ten minutes, and then I realized, it’s one big prolog,” he shares. “So the next day, after I saw the movie, I said to Jon, ‘We have to Lilo & Stitch the opening of Wicked. So that gave us the idea to put the title way (into it)…It gives us permission to sort of (say), everything we’re about to watch is set-up…The movie is about their relationship, but if we treat everything else like a prolog, then that will feel a little bit more acceptable and exciting when you see this title for the first time.”

VISUAL EFFECTS

Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman (The Irishman) has been with Industrial Light & Magic for 28 years and was — as he calls it — “on loan” to Universal for work on Wicked, serving as the film’s head of VFX. Most of the feature’s visual effects were split between ILM and Framestore, collectively amounting to more than 2,200 shots. 

Helman says the overall goal was to create “beautiful” and “completely photorealistic” visuals for a “fantastical film.” ILM and Framestore served as the lead VFX vendors on the feature, with work split almost 50/50. ILM called on teams in San Francisco and Sydney, while Framestore tapped its talent in London and Montreal.

“What happened is, we didn’t really break it down by specific environments,” he says of the studios’ workloads. 

ILM handled the birth of Elphaba at the beginning of the film, which included the wolf and bear characters, and turned the live-action baby green in color. The studio also handled Glinda and Elphaba going to Emerald City, the wide shots of the city, the monkey transformation and the climactic 'Defying Gravity' sequence.

Framestore, he says, did the majority of the work at the beginning of the movie, including Dr. Dillamond, the bespectacled goat, voiced by Peter Dinklage, who teaches at Shiz University, as well as the other animals.

Compared to some of the other films he’s worked on, Wicked had its own unique challenges.

“Well, for one thing, we had a lot of crowd replication, so we had a new approach to volume capture,” he explains. “That’s a brand-new thing that is happening for crowds…This movie’s more about making all the work that we do kind of delightful and completely photorealistic.”

Helman adds that the film has a significant special-effects component, where enhancements were made to imagery captured in-camera. For example, the train that takes Elphaba and Glinda to The Emerald City was a massive prop that was then replicated digitally by the VFX team and combined with live-action footage. He also points to the rotating library, the water in front of Shiz University and the animatronic of The Wizard’s head.

“Yeah, there was a lot of practical. The same thing with production design,” he explains. “Up to 25-feet, it was built, and from then on, we kind of took over. That’s how we end up with every shot in the movie as a visual effect.”

For the Shiz Library, which plays a pivotal role in introducing Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), giant, rotating bookshelves were built and then the scene was further augmented through digital effects.

“There (are) a lot of visual effects because all the backgrounds had to be put in there, and also, all the floors needed to be cleaned up,” he recalls. Similarly, the Ozdust Ballroom’s floors were completely replaced with digital elements.

Not surprisingly, the 'Defying Gravity' sequence was also a challenge.

“It took a long time to do,” he recalls of the climactic sequence. “We started with Jon Chu and a model in the middle of the production office in London. We gave him a little stick with a little Elphaba model, and he would play this song and would do everything that he thought (she) was going to do. Then we did a little bit of previs.”

Cynthia Erivo wanted to perform her character’s stunts and was suspended on wires, but without Elphaba’s cape, which would have interfered with the cables.

“All that cape is completely CG,” he notes. “That idea of the cape growing was not there when we shot at the beginning. It was an idea that was developed in post production.”

That sequence came together over six or seven months, he recalls, requiring the VFX team at ILM to create all the backgrounds.

“Basically, the only thing that we had there was a blue screen of Cynthia doing the stunt work,” he reveals. “We had to complete her and all the background. And then we had to sneak in this idea that came from the play — that this cape was growing.”

COLOR GRADE

In the case of the color grade for Wicked, it was a mutual admiration of each other’s work that brought cinematographer Alice Brooks and Company 3 colorist Jill Bogdanowicz together. 

“She actually called me, and she is a fan of my work,” says Bogdanowicz, who is based out of Company 3’s Santa Monica, CA, location. “She loves the kind of color separation that I can get, which also is very filmic. That’s kind of what I’m known for.”

Wicked, she notes, has a strong color story and production value. 

“I think she really wanted somebody who is used to working with really rich, rich colors, but not make it feel artificial. Not make it feel too garish in any way,” says the colorist, pointing to past credits that include Joker (and the more recent Joker: Folie à Deux), John Wick (Chapters 3 & 4) and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel — all films where color strongly supports the story.

Brooks, she says, had a vision of Wicked being a great love story between two friends, with one represented in pink and the other in green, but both playing well together. 

“We really want to make sure we don’t take away from that,” Bogdanowicz explains. “We play that up, and we keep that theme going, but in an elegant way, and in a way that keeps the magic. If you go too high contrast, or you go too heavy with a look, it kind of takes away from the softness of the glowing and the magic. I was very excited to be able to have that opportunity to work with Alice, (who) I have not worked with before.”

She also points to successful past collaborations with Wicked editor Myron Kerstein.

“Myron is a great person, and I’ve worked with him before,” she reveals. “He really put a great word in for me on this movie because I think it’s one where (we’re) dealing with a lot of heavy visual effects. I have a lot of experience with that because (of the) Marvel movies and all of my experience with big movies that have a lot of visual effects, so they wanted my experience of visual effects, and dealing with all the color and being super collaborative. We tried a lot of different ideas, and I think we settled on something really that supports the story.”

The film was shot with a look-up table that closely represented what was coming out of the camera. 

“It’s very…technically pure and clean, which helps them with their visual effects,” she explains. “We definitely played that up later on.”

Bogdanowicz came on-board a little over a year before the film‘s release. She was just finishing up work on Joker: Folie à Deux, and she recalls there being a little overlap.

“I had time to be able to watch the movie,” she recalls. “I went and I sat with Alice, Myron and Jon, and I actually got to see an early version of the movie.”

How dramatically she affected the color of the film in the grade varied from scene to scene. 

“Alice did such an amazing job lighting it,” says Bogdanowicz of the footage. “There are musical scenes where she uses colored lighting. There is pink lighting that she actually incorporates. So basically, (I) follow the photography. If there is some pink lighting, we want to make it go stronger. We can do that.”

She also, on occasion, contrasted the stronger colors with some of the film’s cooler colors, like the blue skies, or played up the warm, rich look of, say, the yellow brick road.

Bogdanowicz worked out of Company 3’s large grading theater, which features projection and a 30-foot screen, making it very comparable to the way the film would be exhibited. She uses Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve and says the grade can be applied across an entire scene or more selectively to specific areas of the frame, likening it to the dodging and burning techniques used in traditional photography.

“We do a lot of evening out, making it all flow,” she adds. 

Working on a musical wasn’t entirely new for Bogdanowicz, who color graded 2004’s Ray, which had a heavy musical component. 

“I’ve done it throughout my career,” she says of the genre. “And I think that it can give a little bit more freedom, in the musical pieces, to be able to be a little bit more creative with the color. You’re creating a world with the music and the sound that we can support with the color.”

At press time, Bogdanowicz was working on A Minecraft Movie, as well as on the John Wick spin-off Ballerina. She was also grading Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial effort The Bride, which will star Jake Gyllenhaal, Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley and Julianne Hough. The project reunites her with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Lawrence Sher ( Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, The Hangover Part II).  

Credit: Behind the scenes photos, courtesy of Alice Brooks and Myron Kerstein.