Anthem Visual Effects single-handedly completed 1,500 effects shots for RHI Ent.’s ambitious miniseries Tin Man, a re-imagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that kicks off on SCI FI Channel this Sunday, Dec. 2. We recently spoke with visual effects supervisor Lee Wilson, who tells us this trip down the famed yellow brick road is unlike anything we’ve seen in previous adaptation’s of Baum’s classic work of fiction.
Tin Man stars Zooey Deschanel as DG, a young girl who is plucked from her boring existence and thrust into the frightening and wondrous realm of The Outer Zone (a.k.a. the O.Z.). There, she meets Glitch (Alan Cumming), an odd man missing half his brain; Raw (Raoul Trujillo), a quietly powerful wolverine-like creature longing for inner courage; and Cain (Neal McDonough), a heroic former policeman seeking vengeance for his scarred heart. Together they must fight the evil sorceress Azkadellia (Kathleen Robertson) and seek the one thing each of them needs. The cast also includes Richard Dreyfuss.
The miniseries was shot in Vancouver, B.C. by director Nick Willing, whose credits include Hallmark’s TV treatments of Jason and the Argonauts and Alice in Wonderland. Fellow Hallmark veterans Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr. of RHI Ent. served as exec producers and were responsible for bringing on Anthem, which previously created effects for their TV productions Legend of Earthsea and Marco Polo.
Lee Wilson get his start in visual effects with director David Cronenberg’s 1983 thriller, Videodrome, for which he experimented with computerized rotoscoping. Computers at the time weren’t quite ready to handle that sort of work in a photorealistic way, but today he’s using them to create fantastic visuals and revisit images that left an indelible mark on his psyche when he was a child.
‘When I was a kid, the scariest thing in the original Wizard of Oz wasn’t the witch, it was the flying monkeys,’ Wilson recalls. ‘Though ours don’t wear little fezes and jackets. I just couldn’t picture Zora, the lead ‘mobat,’ getting dressed every morning to go out and do a job. So our flying monkeys don’t have any clothes. They’re 100% CG and they’re much nastier. Zora is even nastier than her cohorts because she has a backstory that kind of bought her place as the go-to mobat, so we put some cataracts and scarring in the face to suggest a few past battles. [The mobats] are pretty prominent in the show and we’re very happy with them.’
Other creatures created by Anthem for the show include Papei Runners, insect-like beings the size of large dogs that patrol the papei fields that D.G. and her traveling companions get caught up in. The O.Z. environment also becomes a character of sorts, and required a lot of set extension work. ‘All exteriors of Central City and a place called Twister Caf’ are all entirely green-screen shots with everything built by us in CG,’ Wilson says. ‘There’s a big scene with our heroes and the mobats in Azkadellia’s palace that is completely CG, so our actors were running around and trusting us with their lives.’
In addition to obvious effects, Anthem created visual elements that Wilson says will probably fool viewers. ‘There are all these winter scenes though we were nowhere near anything remotely cold or snowy,’ he remarks, adding that rotoscoping was largely favored over green-screen work. ‘When you’re doing television shows with fairly tight turnaround or really ambitious shooting schedules, you don’t have time on set to perfect that green screen or get those interactive elements, so a lot of the time the guys are just fabricating interactivity. I hate doing location green screen and blue screen. I’ll volunteer the roto guy before I make the grips pull out that screen because it slows you down and limits where you can put your lights. It’s a pain in the ass.’
Wilson admits that vfx artists are often pleased with their work on a particular show, but are ultimately disappointed with the general quality of the production. He notes, however, that Tin Man delivers on all levels. ‘I went to the New York premiere a week ago and it just got a great audience reaction. The show looks good, it’s fun and has a sense of humor, but at the same time it has scary bits and lots of action. I hope and think that the effects are always propelling the story forward and there’s never a moment where the whole thing just grinds to a halt while you watch a cool effect.’
The core crew working on Tin Man at Anthem consisted of about 37 artists, including five or six freelancers. For up-and-coming effects wizards hoping to land a job on his team or with any other vfx shop, Wilson offers these words of advice: ‘If you want to work in live-action, go out and photograph something. Take a still or use your video camera or whatever, then create something and comp it into that shot and make the viewer believe it’s real and it’s there in that shot. It sounds simplistic, but there are reels I get from people where they’re trying to make an entire film. That’s ambitious and everything, but if I saw one shot of a creature walking down the sidewalk, attacking somebody on the street, smashing a building or whatever it is, and it’s believable, this is somebody I’d want to give a job to.’
Anthem has also lent its talents to the Hallmark epic telepic Son of the Dragon, which is set to air in 2008, and has again teamed with RHI to make an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and a creature feature titled Vipers. Other recent credits include the first two seasons of Starz Media’s Masters of Horror series for Showtime, and The Mother of Tears, the third installment in Italian horror icon Dario Argento’s feature film trilogy.
