How key scenes in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme were made, including with miniatures!
When visual effects supervisor Dan Schrecker first started working on Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, his initial interactions all stemmed from the director’s detailed storyboards.
“Wes does this meticulous storyboards and sometimes rough animatics to figure out everything,” Schrecker shares with befores & afters. “There isn’t a ton of what you would call standard prep. We’re not building assets. All the design is really done by the production designer Adam Stockhausen and his department.”
For the VFX team, the film’s most involved sequences involved the plane moments with business tycoon Anatole ‘Zsa-Zsa’ Korda (Benicio del Toro) and enhancement of the in-shot dam, railroad and tunnels miniature.
Up in the plane
Several moments called for shots of Korda inside airplanes with various groups of passengers. These scenes were largely realized in-camera in plane mock-ups and LED screens situated for out-the-windows views. Anderson’s vision for outside the plane were very particular moving cloudscapes.
For these, Schrecker engaged FX WRX (overseen by TD/cinematographer Christopher Webb) to build and shoot large scale miniature cloud banks sculpted out of polyfill. These were filmed motion control at FX WRX in order to acquire multiple passes. The resulting footage was then prep’d and played back live on the LED screens.
“The challenge there was getting the speed, getting the layout, getting the lighting and getting the levels on set,” notes Schrecker. “We shot the principal photography on film, so the combination of the digital LED screen with our particular film stock had a certain amount of testing required.”
At one point, Korda’s plane is buzzed by a fighter jet, and we see the cockpits up against each other. “There was a three-quarter exterior cockpit built for the large plane so that we could have that shot at a real scale, against white,” describes Schrecker. “It was the same for the practical fighter jet that comes up alongside. We then added the clouds in comp. On the reverse, when he looks out and he sees the fighter jet and it flies away, that was a miniature puppeted on a stick that was flown out of frame.”
More miniatures
Miniature unit supervisor Simon Weisse was behind several miniatures realized for the film, including ones used for helping to plan out scenes. The largest miniature built by his team was utilized for the moment a grand industrial setting with a dam, railway and tunnels is unveiled. For water being released from the ‘dam’, a combination of miniature work, special effects and visual effects came into play.
“The real miniature was 10 feet wide and was actually on set, but we couldn’t destroy that one,” advises Schrecker. “We thought through how that was going to work with the water and did some tests with dump tanks. Gerd Nefzer was the special effects supervisor. A full-sized proxy dam miniature was built by the art department that didn’t have all the same detail, but was one that we could explode. Plus, by the time the water crashed over it, you obscured it enough that we could get all the real interaction, but without having to build a second hero.”
Visual effects were then used to combine the water from the proxy miniature with the hero miniature. “It was painstaking frame by frame work, getting the edges right,” says Schrecker. “We took care on set to line everything up and get everything squared away so that it was a really good one-to-one match.”
Invisible effects
A majority of the visual effects for The Phoenician Scheme were of the invisible variety, and ranged from clean-up to set extensions. The VFX work was handled by Cadence Effects, Freefolk, Alchemy 24, Red Visual Effects and a team of in-house artists working under associate visual effects supervisor Cameron Smither.
Schrecker marvels at what the production often achieved practically, such as one scene involving quicksand. “They built a real sand pit set and they filled it up with ‘quicksand’. Michael Cera dove right in, it was perfect, and we were done.
Another example is where the characters are about to board a ship. “It’s this big wide shot of the ship with the ladder coming down,” describes Schrecker. “They’re all standing in the foreground. They built this giant ship piece and brought it in. It’s all flat, scenic theater gags. We did clean-up here or there, but it’s really all in-camera. We’re here to support the vision that Wes has, helping where we can.”
