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The age-old question of who can adapt the beloved Broadway hit Wicked for theaters was finally answered the day Jon M. Chu was brought on board to deliver the wizardly magic behind one of cinema’s most iconic lands, Oz. His world-building vision of this subverted origin story extends to his department heads to craft one all-encompassing saga of female friendship that travels into the psyche of Oz like never before.

Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to Visual Effects Supervisor Pablo Helman about his first collaboration with Jon, the extensive use of VFX with 2200 shots (including blending practical and VFX elements for “Defying Gravity”), and the challenges of capturing animal emotions.

Jillian Chilingerian: I’m excited to talk to you about this film. I’ve seen it about five times now, so I’m excited to dive into it with you.
Pablo Helman: Great.

Jillian Chilingerian: Coming onto this project, because it’s one of those films that you watch and you’re like, I can’t imagine this being created any other way and exactly how you would want wicked to feel. I want to start with what were the initial conversations that you had with Jon M. Chu about what he was imagining what you were imagining and what that collaboration looked like.
Pablo Helman: Well, this is my first collaboration with Jon. I know that Jon works with Alice Brooks, Myron, and Chris Scott. For me, it was kind of like, well, I hope they welcome me into that creative bubble. Jon is a very collaborative person, so from the first interview that I had with him, I cheated a little bit in that. I did a lot of research, and I looked into what he had done, and I looked into the filmic language that he has coverage of a scene, lenses, and some technical stuff about camera movement. I took a look at his approach to character development and the fact that’s what he shoots. He shoots all the emotional moments, the little twists that the audience can perceive the ambiguity of a character, for instance, and once we talked about that, I think we clicked, because he realized that I was getting what he was after. At that moment, I also realized that his process is a little bit different than other directors, and as a visual effect supervisor, you have to get into the head of the director that you’re working with and preemptively offer choices that have to do with that, because that saves a lot of time. His process is very much organic and tactile, and as much in camera as possible, which is great for me, because I do define visual effects as we shoot something, and we in visual effects either shoot elements or shoot miniatures or create something in the computer that has to match into whatever we shot. That was his process and in terms of the shoot, which was 155 days, I was there to consult, and I was there to create methodologies that would allow me to do my job later on, but basically, we did as much as possible in camera and on the rest we completed in terms of what we complete. For instance, the sets were built 25 feet in interiors and up to 50 feet in exteriors. After that, we created extensions for everything. Pretty much every shot is a visual effect shot in the movies, but we had about 2200 visual effects shots, which is pretty much a whole movie. We did either extensions or created creatures, erasing things that were not supposed to be there or putting things back. Mainly, the mandate was to create a beautiful universe.

Jillian Chilingerian: The approach for this is so much about the characters and with a lot of scale, but it feels so intimate. It is like going into different rooms from the musical, but you get to be so in front of the characters and feel everything that they’re feeling.
Pablo Helman: That was the idea that we would go with the emotion of the character. The animals are there to supplement dialog and in a sense, they mimic whatever their partners in the scene do. It was difficult to get the animals to be animals, and then also understand what it is that people are saying, and come up with some smart stuff. There was a lot of it in Dr. Dillamond, and a lot of was Peter Dinklage bringing in the dialog in a specific read so that we could emulate those things. One of the things that Peter Dinklage did was use his hands a lot so how do you translate those kinds of gestural things into a goat? I mean, that was our task, the monkey and the wings and the transformation. All that was not much of a dialog, because they don’t speak much. That means that the face has to say it all, especially in close-up work and Jon had a way to work with the animators, with David Shirk, who was the animation supervisor, and the animators I worked with him on getting that emotion there. The same thing with Dillamond, he worked with Dale Newton, who was the animation supervisor, to get that emotion there.

Jillian Chilingerian: I love the animal plot line and how it’s delivered to us in this version versus the musical, there’s something with an animal, compared to a human dressed up as an animal. Peter Dinklage as Dr. Dillamond feels a bond between him and Elphaba, someone seeing her for the first time, and the things that happened to him and the other animals, like the cub and the ones we see in the Ozdust Ballroom where this is the only place they can like to exist. It just like, makes it way more emotional when you see all these interactions based off of like you’re saying, how well they can receive that emotion through their faces.
Pablo Helman: A lot of it is in the eyes. It’s funny because the goat’s eyes, it’s pretty peculiar and the monkey’s eyes are a little bit more human. In a sense, you’re able to do that. But it’s funny because the design of it is really interesting in that the monkey design, has a different color, but if the proportions were a monkey, as opposed to we could have gone with bigger eyes, but that would have made it not part of this universe. Yeah,

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to talk about the “Defying Gravity” sequence because that’s such a marvel to watch. What was the process behind you have the stunts, you have the live singing Cynthia everywhere, mapping that out when they’re on set, and then keeping all that emotion for when you’re in the post process of nature, and even to go on with the rest of the musical sequences of that integrity of those emotional beats that we hear from these live vocals?
Pablo Helman: Right. Well, a lot of it has to do with the process. Again, if the process is such that the director needs to have everything in front of them, or as much as possible in front of them so that they can emote. Then we’ll just take it from there. I mean, the beginning of it just all starts with a script. In the case of a musical, the script is a song so we need to elicit that from Jon. One of the first things, but I don’t think this is something that he liked very much, and it’s not part of his process. In Jon’s case, we said, well as we prep the sequence to be shot in London, let’s just go into a table, all of us, Alice Brooks, the DP and Myron, the editor, and Jill McLaren, the stunt and production designer Nathan Crowley and let’s put a model of that tower where she launches from on the table. We gave Jon a little stick with a little Elphaba right there at the end. He played the song from his iPhone and made Elphaba do all these different things. We recorded this whole thing and then figured out how to do it. Now, we knew we had one piece of set, but that’s it, and that piece of set was about 70 stories high, and also it’s the facade of it. There’s nothing on the sides that makes sense. So there are a lot of blue screens there, but we mitigated that with the truth that comes from a performer doing her stands and singing at the same time. So sure, there’s a lot of stuff that is not there, but you have the actors, and you have the balcony, and the relationship between the actress and the people that are looking at her and she’s looking at them. That’s something that Cynthia also wanted to do, sing to them because it’s pretty much like she’s defying gravity. But she’s defying gravity, she’s showing them what she can do and it would be different if the people couldn’t see what she could do. So she has an audience there also the cape, which it’s another character, and we couldn’t have it because of the wires. So all that stuff was, was putting visual effects and she was wearing this big belt that allowed her to rotate independently from the wires so we had to take that out. We did replace some of her body, but the face is always there, as somebody who is dealing with gravity forces, meaning that if she’s coming around, you know her face, that’s what it does in terms of physics, and also because she’s trying to sing, she’s also mitigating that, and that’s what makes it so real. We’ve seen flying before and how do we do that so that it doesn’t feel stilted? The way to do it is to have the actress do all that stuff. It’s the same as if you say to an actor act as if you’re falling on a roller coaster and action and the camera doesn’t do anything. All this other stuff that doesn’t mean anything, as opposed to putting in a camera on a roller coaster and then pushing her down and seeing what she does and everything that is there, it’s going to feel a lot more real.
Jillian Chilingerian: I mean, you watch it, and you also feel like you’re flying on the broom with her, and it just evokes so much emotion and how that was all constructed.
Pablo Helman: I have to say that Alice also did a great job in lighting her properly, and moving the camera properly because a lot of what you do when you have such a hard light on you, as you move the light changes, yeah. If the emotion and the lighting are not there, it’s going to be very difficult for me to do my job. The methodology was, correct, and Cynthia was great.

Jillian Chilingerian: I agree. Touching upon there’s so much practicality in this movie and your work to add this height and scope. As the audience, you feel the pressures of what these two women are standing against? For Elphaba, she breaks free so like, you know, being able to step in and figure out where you can continue to extend this world of Oz. It’s in such a way we’ve never seen it before, where I feel like what Jon did was tap into the psyche of Oz, and who the people are. I feel like we’re a part of the culture.
Pablo Helman: Yeah, it’s a combination of extension and producing something practical, that is part of the special visual effects. Special effects are the ones that get done on set while we’re shooting and visual effects, happen in both. However, if special effects and visual effects don’t work together, then you have to mitigate that. So like, for instance, Paul Corbel did this rotating library that was 19 feet high. There were all kinds of physical things and very dangerous things too, because they had to monitor that very much so that the rings wouldn’t be dangerous the to the dancers. Then there were a lot of visual effects in there that we removed, cameras and Plexiglas that were on the ladder so that the actors and the dancers could do their thing. But you can’t tell, because we removed all that. The same thing with the train. It’s a 48-ton train and it could run like up to 15 miles an hour. The interior was full of engines and electrical stuff so we created that in visual effects. The reflections also had to be replaced, because the train was very, very reflective, so you could see all the lights and everything else. You have the physical train that is 12 feet tall and runs towards you so that you have to get out of the way, and you make choices that have to do with how fast you have to run to get into the train. All those kinds of things, they’re important. If you don’t have them, you’re going to have an actor that is just imagining something that might not be real, and it’s not running towards something physical so that’s part of the whole process that Jon has. Well, we planted 9 million tulips. Yeah, we did, but we planted it 100 miles away from the set so the tulips that you see are composited, but they’re real. We use other means to get that stuff, or the tulips at the top of the crest, where Glinda is at the beginning of the movie so all those tulips are visual effects, but we took it from the 100 miles away that they planted those tulips, so that everything was real.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to touch on also the opening sequence, because it’s so like magic and whimsical, and is the perfect transition literally over the rainbow to what we’re about to endure.
Pablo Helman: The monkeys going through the window and flying. That is a very interesting point because I don’t think a lot of people realize that is the whole story. If you take a look at what’s happening right there, what the camera is seeing, you’re seeing all the little traces of a crime scene throughout the whole story, the two movies, that you’re going to go back there and say, Oh, that’s why that’s there. Oh, that’s why that’s there. So there’s a lot of thought, but into, into the whole story and how do you close all the loops.

Jillian Chilingerian: Thank you so much for this time to talk more in-depth on a lot of your work on the film. I enjoyed the film so much and it’s just so amazing what you all pulled off.
Pablo Helman: It’s great from my point of view. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Once I finish a film, I don’t go see it with an audience, or anything like but I have been doing this with this film, because I love the reactions and the applause and I think one of the things that makes it into something so emotional is the music. It’s not just the fact that the actors are incredible and they’re singing incredibly, the singing and the music itself gives it just a little more dimension to it.
Jillian Chilingerian: Yeah, I definitely agree, and I think it’s such a beautiful adaptation of the musical, and just adds in so much color and so much space that I think people were craving and wanting to to enjoy. So I love hearing all of this.
Pablo Helman: Thank you so much.

Wicked is available on demand.
You can find our review of the film here.