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In the new Warner Bros. movie Wonka, director Paul King (Paddington) offers an origin story for the eccentric chocolatier introduced in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The whimsical feature stars Timothée Chalamet as the younger version of the enigmatic character played by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp in previous movie adaptations of the property. Chalamet gets to perform some musical numbers and trade barbs with a cast that includes Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Tom Davis, Olivia Colman and Hugh Grant.
To achieve the appropriate cinematic scope and magical elements, King turned to Graham Page (The Midnight Sky) to lead a visual team featuring Framestore, Goldcrest VFX, Host VFX and Outpost VFX to create 1,163 shots, ranging from a CG giraffe running rampant to a mischievous Oompa Loompa (Grant) to a fully digital environment for a rooftop dance.
A Tall Order
One of the film’s most exciting sequences features a giraffe in the London Zoo, which was created by photographing a real one named Molly. The footage was then copied, scanned and used as an entirely digital actor. As Page explains, “We found these clips of real giraffes and used them to fit into the story for that moment where the giraffe comes up over the pulpit and is licking its lips. We built a full-scale puppet, which was not realistic but the right size for framing and to get reactions from the actors. We would do one version of each take where it would have the puppeteers running through St. Paul’s Cathedral chasing after Rowan Atkinson (playing a choco-holic priest) to get an idea of how big it is and where the eyelines would be. That was fantastic fun with the giraffe puppet.”
The giraffe tests conducted by the animation team at Framestore Montreal and supervised by Meena Ibrahim took into account that the world of Wonka exists within a heightened reality. “Paul King loves animation, and he would guide us through what he wanted for the giraffe to do by acting out the motions,” notes Page. “We would interpret that and look at real giraffe references as well, which helped us get the right timing and deliver the comedy. Sometimes we would try to push the animation quite far in a caricature way and then pull it back to get a more subtle performance.”
Actor Hugh Grant proved to be the perfect actor to play the pint-size, sardonic Oompa Loompa known as Lofty. “Hugh Grant has to be this tiny creature and also younger than he is in real life, so he is fully CG,” reveals Page. “We tried to work out how to shrink him down and what his body would be like, because he is a creature not human. The neck proportions are slightly different, which feeds into the animation [supervised by Dale Newton at Framestore London]. How something moves and gets through a human-sized space when they’re that small. There is a lot of character in it and [it] is driven by marks and timing to get across jokes, but we’re always trying to be realistic and subtle.”
‘Paul King loves animation, and he would guide us through what he wanted for the giraffe to do by acting out the motions. We would interpret that and look at real giraffe references as well, to get the right timing and deliver the comedy.’
— VFX supervisor Graham Page
A Lofty puppet was used on set for framing and eyelines. “For the scene where Wonka captures Lofty in the jar, Timothée Chalamet had an earphone and Hugh was in booth with witness cameras just off the set so both could hear and react to each other,” recalls the VFX supervisor. “Some of those lines ended up being improvised on the day. We did little workshops with Hugh, motion-captured Chris Gattelli [choreographer] for some of the dance moves and took references of Paul King and the animators themselves. To get the nuances of the body performance correctly, the animators would do a rough first version, and Paul would refine little things.”
The VFX and production design teams had a wide variety of inspiration for the setting of the film, which is a nondescript European city. “The center point of the grand city is the Gallery Gourmet, a shopping arcade where Wonka dreams of going to when he’s a kid,” remarks Page. “On top of the Gallery Gourmet is the glass dome, which is loosely based on Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. We looked at street layouts around these real-world galleries and put our quirky Prague structures into those spaces. We worked out a harbor area with slightly smaller buildings and that goes up into a cliff edge which becomes your bigger town square buildings. Then, you would have an area based on Oxford with a bit of Bath thrown in, and there is the castle, which was inspired by Bodiam Castle in Kent.”
Page says the goal was to boil down all these European points of reference into one giant, cohesive backdrop. “This is a fantasy city, so it’s not like you’re trying to re-create New York City, Paris or London,” he adds. “You’re trying to create a world that feels like those places but doesn’t have their actual street layouts.”
A sequence involving Willy Wonka and Noodle (played by Calah Lane) dancing on rooftops required extensive previsualization work. “We worked with Paul to create a previz based on storyboards and that was used as a blueprint to do a rehearsal shoot, which meant they could work out, ‘We need these wires in that position and this flight path for the characters.’”
The only practical elements were a raised walkway, a flag pole and a proxy for the dome. “It was shot fairly traditionally with bluescreen,” he recalls. “Below them was supposed to be Gallery Gourmet with the bright lights, so we made sure to have these soft boxes underneath to get a nice up lighting. Essentially, it was about the balloons and trying to make sure that their performance looked natural. There were no balloons on the day because Timothée Chalamet and Calah Lane were on wire rigs and that would have caused them to get tangled up. What we did do [was] film a version of the sequence with the dance team on the floor level holding a whole bunch of balloons, so you could see that when someone does a twist what happens to the balloons. Later on, we had the city layout built up and had the characters we were going to put on top of the roof; then we had to body track them to get reflections in the glass and attach the balloons to the hands.”
Among the film’s other charming points of interest is Willy Wonka’s compact, portable workshop. “The travel factory was an amazing, intricately made prop with moving parts,” says Page. “The conceit is within the case is childhood footage of him and his mom. In 3D, we re-created a mutoscope with the pages turning; that was an homage to early cinema.”
Bunnies, Flamingos and Rainbows
One of the film’s most challenging tasks was the opening shot featuring Wonka traveling by boat. Page explains, “It was one of the first shots I started working on in previs and certainly one of the last shots to be finished because of its length. It’s a fully CG shot with water, digital doubles and CG birds.”
The musical numbers throughout Wonka also added to the complexity. “In the past when I’ve done transitions, you’re just thinking about the positions of the people and camera. But in this movie, the timing of the singing and the footsteps to the music have to be the same. You can’t slightly re-speed things or offset timings because then the timing won’t be right for the music.”
Overall, the film’s mandate was to make things as fun and funny as possible. “When we were in Wonka’s chocolate shop, we added little bunnies that come out of a tree, as well as a rainbow made of sweets,” says Page. “The flamingos also became a significant thing. Lots of kids love flamingos. … All of these things were trying to brighten up the environment to make it seem more fun; that was very important for Paul.”
Wonka opened on December 14 in the U.S. and is currently playing in theaters worldwide.
