How that oner full of mirror shots was achieved for Glinda’s ‘The Girl in the Bubble’ song in ‘Wicked: For Good’. An excerpt from issue #48.
In Wicked: For Good, Glinda sings ‘The Girl in the Bubble’ while reflecting on who she is. The scene—a nearly four-minute long continuous shot—was staged with a range of practical mirror set-pieces and moving sets, with visual effects then helping to add in reflections, remove cameras and operators, and flesh out the environment.
For visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman’s VFX team, the opportunity to provide a range of effects for this sequence further embedded the department in the storytelling of the film. “The whole movie for us,” says Helman, “was about arcs and about character building. With ‘The Girl in the Bubble’, this was about Glinda looking at herself in the mirror and thinking about all kinds of things. Who am I when I look at the mirror, what am I seeing? And this is visual effects, supporting that idea.”
Director of photography Alice Brooks mapped out the planned sequence on an iPhone utilizing her daughter’s bath toys, her husband’s shaving mirror and bananas. “Alice would bring in all kinds of toys and fruits and put it in the middle of the table and get an iPhone and move the camera around and work with Jon on that,” says Helman. “We did a video of that session, and then we went into previs. There were several things we needed to think about. When you’re taking a look at a mirror, you’re flopping the image. You have to shoot it straight, and then flop it, but you need to make sure that the eye-line is in the right ‘flopped’ place. So, we had to do a lot of techvis that solved that.”
Techvis then helped map out the mirror pass-throughs to help inform the shoot. “The whole section of the set on which the mirror was mounted was built on a super smooth rig so that it could be manually moved out of the way for the camera to pass through and seamlessly replaced during the shot,” outlines special effects supervisor Paul Corbould, “as the camera moved around to look back at the mirror.”
The techvis also helped inform eyelines for Grande, notes Helman. “You need to tell the actor where they’re looking and why they’re looking at themselves where they are. Sometimes we would have a bluescreen in front of a mirror with a little window so that she could see herself in there. It’s a lot more interesting when you’re looking at something for real than if you just are looking at bluescreen.”
The idea was that multiple parts of the sequence would be filmed separately and then stitched together. “We needed to shoot the reflections in separate takes, which were filmed just using a Steadicam, and not using motion control,” discusses Helman. “Production design built parts of the set for cameras to go through, and then as the camera came around, the wall would come back in. Sometimes, we’d take parts of the apartment completely out because the crane could not go through it. For example, when Glinda goes up the stairs, all that railing had to be taken out and then put back in CG. There were sometimes editorial changes that involved using different takes, so we would need to morph between takes.”
“When we got inside the closet,” continues Helman, “only half the closet was built. So as the camera pulls back, we had to put all that stuff in as CG and re-sync the foreground Glinda looking at the camera with the background Glinda who is turning around and then leaving. Those kinds of things are very subtle, but they take forever to do. Those are the kinds of things that I enjoy the most because they are about storytelling.”
The final sequence—4,767 frames long at 3 minutes and 18 seconds—was composed of seven plates going through four mirrors (including one invisible morph transition). Framestore generally crafted the backgrounds and some reflections for the balcony portion, with ILM handling the layout and stitches.
“The initial brief from Jon was focused on how the sequence should feel,” relates ILM visual effects supervisor Anthony Smith. “The mirror transitions needed to be subtle. The audience had to be so absorbed in the flow of the shot and Ariana’s performance that they wouldn’t even question or be distracted by the camera going through a mirror until long after it had passed. I absolutely loved the sensibility and nuance of the shot!”
“All of the plates were separately camera-tracked and we used digital Glinda geometry to make sure eyelines would work across mirrors,” adds Smith, “although a CG Glinda was never used in the final shot across any mirror transition. There was extensive paintwork to remove crew and production equipment in mirrors, markers, set seams, and reconstruct the dress. The exterior balcony work was done by Framestore which we ingested and incorporated into our final comp.”
With no motion control employed, each plate had to be manipulated to varying degrees to make sure the connections across the mirrors worked. Says Smith: “The anamorphic lenses meant that we had little leeway around the edges of the frame to move the image around, and we built a CG version of the room to extend and replace entire sections of it where required.”
For the first transition, ILM modified the reflected Glinda’s eyeline to make sure the actress would be looking into her own eyes, and extended the set. “The mirror was over 50% bluescreen and so was completely replaced with dust, smudges, and bevelling effect,” explains Smith. “The ceiling mirror transition required a CG domed ceiling and a completely repositioned reflection to achieve the correct distance. Because of this, only the Glinda area is from the original plate when we first see her from above. The rest is augmented and extended digitally.”
The morph transition occurs at the top of the stairs, where ILM morphed between Glinda takes. This required, details Smith, “a complete retiming of her gait to sync up the two Glindas—and then we move into the closet. During this section, we take over the camera movement to speed it up through the closet and find the next Glinda. To do this, we completely rebuilt the closet interior and all of its props with cleaned LiDAR geometry and projections, and a CG floor to reflect it all into. The mirror seams were intentionally kept very subtle here. The final transition required a full reprojection of the room onto geometry and a 2D reconstruction of the bottom of Glinda’s dress to be able to move the camera through to the final plate.”
