From plucky talking bears to motion-capture apes, from Avatar’s sentient space whales to Toho’s relentless Godzilla, computer generated creatures take center stage in movies more and more often these days. If there’s a big-budget film coming out, you’ll likely find a mountainous sandworm or a sound-hunting alien in it. The growth of visual effects technology has unleashed an entire biosphere of the imaginary, like dinosaurs breaking free of Jurassic World to roam the aisles of our local cineplexes.
The Hollywood film adaptation of the first half of the global sensation Wicked adds a few more memorable characters to the digital menagerie, particularly the scholarly goat professor Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and the Wizard of Oz’s military monkey sergeant Chistery. With so many creatures like these popping up in such tight Hollywood turnover timetables, exactly how VFX teams bring them to life matters more and more. On Wicked, Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman tells Polygon that he used an unusual process, which started well before director Jon M. Chu started sending him footage.
How Wicked did animal VFX differently
“I knew that [Chu] liked to be tactile and that he liked to be organic, so we proposed that we have an ‘animal unit,’” Helman told Polygon in an interview shortly before Wicked’s release. Normally, an animal unit on a film or TV set would consist of live animals and handlers, but in this case, it was a group of “about 15 people” tasked with standing in for digital characters on set and performing alongside actors Cynthia Erivo (as wicked-witch-to-be Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (as her roommate and foil Glinda).
“Everybody had an animal, or a character that was supposed to be a CG character,” Helman says. “I proposed to Jon that he direct those people. It might be that we change [a digital character’s performance or voice] later, but that was going to give him an idea of timing choices.”
That decision relates to Helman’s issue with relying too heavily on green-screen digital replacement technology. (Or blue screens, in Wicked’s case, because of the unique problems caused by Elphaba’s skin tone.)
“I have this idea that when you’re in a blue-screen [environment], or completely blue screen — you don’t have an actor there — the choices that you make as a filmmaker are different than if you have everybody there, because you’re pointing the camera at specific places,” Helman says. “You’re making a choice as to what you want to see in the background. So by having somebody that is playing Chistery or Dillamond or the bear, we have somebody that the other actors interact with and can respond to. That’s when happy accidents happen, when you think of things that are not necessarily in the script, but happen on set.”
Wicked’s animals aren’t mo-cap — which made things complicated
As the ecosystem of CG creatures has grown, so has the conversation around who the industry and the public credits with the success of CG creatures. Take the Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes trilogy and its hero, Caesar, who Serkis performed via motion capture technology. Is Serkis primarily responsible for the performance? Or is it the team of animators working on Caesar’s facial expressions? Is Serkis just a platform for the animators, or are they just translating Serkis’ work? Is it some messy combination of the above, on a case-by-case basis?
On Wicked, the “animal unit” consisted of actors on set as timing references, and to offer a sense of spontaneity, but no motion capture was performed. (Apart from scenes where a real goat was used as a Dillamond reference, says Helman.) So the creatures’ faces were entirely original CG animation, which makes for a far more difficult task than adapting a mo-cap performance. “You don’t want to make [Dillamond] a human figure with a goat face,” Helman explains. “How do we get the feeling of a specific line [of dialogue] without making an animal that doesn’t have muscles in specific parts of the face to say that?”
In response to that problem, the animators essentially became performers. “There was an effort, and we had the animal unit there, but we also had the animators, who are actually the actors that you cast, right?” Helman says. “At times, it’s difficult, because when you cast somebody, you’re charging that actor with giving you something [to work with visually]. And in this case, it’s an animator that will do that.”
‘One of the most difficult things you can do in CG’
Over the course of a nearly 30-year career in effects, including a 27-year collaboration with Steven Spielberg, and major credits spanning from two of the Star Wars prequels to Martin Scorsese’s last three films (Silence, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon), Helman believes he learned the key to making a CG creature work.
“You always want to take a [composited digital] shot, for instance, and you want to stop it right in the middle. Take a look at the frame,” he says. “You always want to see something behind the eyes. There’s a lot about CG that could go wrong. And if you study performances from different actors, you will see that the nuance thing that an actor does — that will give you something that is very difficult to portray, which is ambivalence. That’s a very difficult thing to put in there.”
He points to a pivotal scene toward the end of Wicked, where Elphaba casts a spell on Chistery that causes him to grow wings in a grotesque, distressing manner. “How is he feeling?” Helman asked. “Is he feeling pain or not? How does he mitigate that? There’s a lot of ambiguity right there. And this is one of the most difficult things you can do in CG. So having done that for different projects and different movies, I’m very careful about how we portray [ambiguity], and what kind of tools we give the director to be able to model that in post.”
While some artists may want to leave behind old projects and old philosophies, especially as technology changes, Helman feels as though his new work is cut of the same cloth as when he realized creatures on the likes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and The Spiderwick Chronicles. “Even from those projects, or having done The Irishman, for instance, and working with Al Pacino or Bob De Niro or Joe Pesci, just getting that homework into Wicked was the thing that got me to Wicked.”
In fact, he believes his work on Wicked is a kind of distillation of the lessons he’s learned from observing the great old masters of acting on screen, from truly absorbing what it takes for a human performance to move an audience — and in turn, knowing what it would take for a digital creature to do the same.
“There’s a lot of stuff that you learn from human behavior and what makes something important,” he says. “Like ambiguity, or thoughtfulness, or good thoughts, or not-so-good thoughts, or like, ‘How do you live in the gray of not being white or black?’ There’s a lot of that in the creatures that we have in Wicked. I would say Wicked is about that. It’s about nothing being exactly what it seems. So you need to translate that into those creatures. And I would say all the projects that I have done over the years got me to this point.”