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IN DEPTH
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Bringing the Oompas to life involved the
full cooperative effort of all the effects
artists on the film, but it all began with
one man, the Oompa-Loompa prototype: Deep Roy.
If five, six or 20 Oompa-Loompas appear
in a scene, Roy played all of them. In
separate takes, and from different
starting marks, he would act out
each single part on the motion
capture stage, whereby his body and
facial movements were recorded in the
computer. If the scene was one in which the Oompa-Loompas
join to dance and sing a number about the
fate of each wayward child on the tour, the
entire routine would be meticulously
choreographed for months to composer Danny Elfman’s
music. Then Roy would perform the
steps from each individual spot on
the line, subtly adjusting his gestures
and expressions from one to the
next so that when the collection of
images were later joined together onscreen he would have created an entire troupe.
“I think of it as doing nineteen second takes,” offers Roy,
whose extensive training for the roles
included daily pilates sessions and dance
classes. “The most challenging part
was trying to remember my position from
one performance to the next, counting in my head
and remembering at what point to turn
or where to look. It was a lot of rehearsing.”
“This was extremely tricky, partly just
for the volume of shots it created,” says Chas Jarrett,
Visual Effects Supervisor of The Moving Picture Company, one
of the companies that joined the production
team to work on Oompa-Loompa
footage and contributed nearly 500 shots. “Although
effectively the Oompas look alike, we’ve
slightly altered the facial
tones of each. Their hairstyles
may be a little different and each
performance is slightly varied from one character to another.”
What the relatively new
facial-capture process offers
over standard animation, Jarrett believes, “is
subtleties around the eyes and mouth
shapes, the way the jaw moves and the
skin stretches around the nostrils
when he speaks. Those are the kinds of
details that animators find most
difficult to recreate. And here
we get it free, with Deep’s performance.”
As if that wasn’t complicated enough, the Oompa-Loompas
are only two-and-a-half feet
high, so Deep Roy’s virtual image had
to be proportionately reduced. This
wouldn’t be a problem if he played
his scenes solo but the Oompa-Loompas
are in nearly every frame of the film and
interact with all the human characters in various settings.
To illustrate how complicated it was
just keeping track of the scale
issue, Alex McDowell offers an
impromptu checklist that sounds like one
half of an Abbott and Costello routine: “Our
environments had to be in two different
scales. We had to be
constantly aware of Oompa-Loompa
scale, which is 30 inches high. Hand
tools, controls, pathways and
architecture had to conform to
Oompa height. A lot of the
time that’s Deep Roy, who is
actually twice that height. So
there’s Oompa scale and Deep Roy scale. Oompa
scale is sometimes the same as human scale,
with tiny props that stay tiny in human scale but
appear larger in Deep Roy scale. Sometimes you
have Deep sitting in a human chair so you
build a double-size chair for him so he
appears half-size to humans; sometimes
Deep is in the Oompa environment in which
case you build a set for Deep, at his scale,
and a half-size set for Willy Wonka so
that he appears large in the Oompa environment.
The terminology alone is hard to get a handle on.”
Partly to provide a scale reference point in some
scenes as well as a focal point and something
for the actors to react to, the production enlisted
animatronics and prosthetic makeup effects
specialist Neal Scanlan, of Neal Scanlan Studio,
an Oscar winner for his work on Babe.
“Our goal,” says Scanlan, “was to make a photo-realistic Oompa-Loompa.”
He and his team assembled five completely
motorized puppets, one for each room in the
factory. Made from molds taken from an
original sculpted model, the puppets were
covered with painted silicone skin, hair-punched,
and fitted with highly reflective blown-glass eyes.
Their fiberglass skulls accommodated motors to
realistically move their eyes and cheeks.
Remote-controlled rods beneath their chests
turned and moved their heads, necks and limbs.
The creations were so lifelike that even Roy himself was
taken aback upon first seeing them. “I was truly amazed,” the
actor recalls. “They can talk, they can move their
eyes and mouths. I thought, hey, am I going to
lose my job here? Maybe they can just use the puppets.”
Another 15 puppets were designed full-bodied and
pose-able but lacked internal mechanization and
gained their illusion of motion through attachment
to other moving props, such as the motorized oars on the spun-sugar boat.
In his own fantastic yet logical fashion, Wonka
understands that the world’s greatest
experts on the quality of nutmeats are squirrels. No
other creature on earth and certainly no man or
machine could pick out good nuts from bad with such single-minded accuracy and speed.
So, as Wonka’s tour reaches the nut-sorting
room the children see 100 of the captivating
rodents perched on tiny stools, intently
engaged in doing what they do best. Evaluating
each nut by scent and sound, they nimbly
shell the good ones and place the meat
onto a conveyor belt while tossing the bad
ones over their shoulders into a giant trash chute.
Like Wonka, Tim Burton also wanted the real
thing – live, trained squirrels.
“When I found out what was involved, it was a bit overwhelming,”
says Senior Animal Trainer Mike Alexander,
of Birds & Animals Unlimited. Alexander
was happy to re-team with Burton following his
successful stint as a chimpanzee wrangler on Planet of the
Apes, but admits, “squirrels can be very tough, and
training 100 of them was inconceivable.”
Ultimately, the animals on screen were an artful
amalgamation of skillfully crafted animatronics
plus some CG and multiple images along with 40
individual, rambunctious and very real
squirrels to set the standard and lead the animal action.
Alexander’s team of four trainers
(under the watchful eye of a Humane Society rep),
spent 19 weeks with their lively
charges, providing mostly one-on-one attention.
Some of the animals came from private homes
in the UK while the majority were recruited
from local rescue shelters. Once rescued,
squirrels cannot be released to the wild,
by law, for their own protection, so
those that were not returned to their owners
when filming wrapped were adopted by Birds & Animals Unlimited,
where they will be cared for until possibly called for another job.
While undeniably intelligent and, Alexander attests,
“incredibly photogenic,” squirrels are
notoriously difficult to handle.
Independent and unpredictable, “they’re
not necessarily good at doing specific,
intricate things,” he says. “They
don’t like to sit still. They’re
hard to keep in one place. The first
couple of weeks were spent in just
getting the animals to come out
of their crates and sit with us,
nevermind any of the things they were supposed to do.
“We took baby steps,” he continues. “After
they were comfortable sitting with us we
introduced them to the props. We taught
them to pick up a nut and put it into a
metal bowl, which is not what they’d
do in the movie but once they got the
idea of picking the nut up and putting it
into a bowl we could change the bowl to a
conveyer belt. Once they grasped the
basic concepts, they began to learn faster
and things started coming together.”
Each squirrel had a name and
it wasn’t long before individual
personalities and talents emerged.
“All of them are capable of learning, but
some are naturally better at certain things
than others,” says Alexander. “We
found that some of them had no
interest at all in picking up the
nut, while others, once
they had it, refused to
let it go. Those that didn’t lend
themselves to being ‘good nut squirrels’
were moved to a second group, being
trained to run across the floor toward Veruca. Our smartest squirrels do the nut gag.”
There was a limit to what the
real squirrels could do, by their
nature or in deference to the potential
danger of a scene. In those cases,
animatronic or CG troops were called in.
“Tim wanted to use live squirrels
as much as possible,” notes Nick Davis. “But
some actions they are just not physically
able to do, for example, throwing
nuts over their shoulders. Physiologically,
their bodies don’t work that way. Our
job was to make the CGI squirrels
as realistic as possible,
to interact with humans in a
kind of anthropomorphic way
and yet remain absolutely true
to their animal nature. Squirrels
have a unique dynamic energy and that’s what
attracted Tim. He didn’t want to shoot
in high-speed or interfere in any way with
that natural edge, that intensity and
speed that’s utterly charming and can be a bit unnerving.”
Jon Thum, Visual Effects Supervisor for Framestore-CFC,
came aboard to lend his expertise to
the squirrel action, eventually contributing
88 VFX shots to the mix, “multiplying the
real squirrels in about 15 shots as
well as the much harder task of creating
squirrels from scratch for another 64. Some
shots of the squirrels on stools, turning
their heads, had to be CG, and once they
are on the floor they are mostly CG shots.”
Multiplication meant capturing the animals performing on cue,
one at a time, and joining the images to present the
group in unison. For example, where the
squirrels are meant to jump from their stools en
masse and run toward Veruca,
Thum explains, “they could
jump, but not all at the same time. So we
had to shoot each squirrel alone, jumping off
its stool, and then synchronize them into one shot.”
To create the virtual squirrels, Thum’s team “took
loads of reference footage of the real thing.
We had them running, jumping, shelling nuts,
tugging at bits of fabric. Animation
cycles were built based on this
reference to use in all the shots,
then for any ‘hero’ squirrels the
animators would go in and keyframe
that squirrel individually. In some
shots our job was to animate
actions the animals could not do,
like tap Veruca on the head, but
the movements you see them doing
right before and after that are referenced from real squirrels.”
The computer images were then painstakingly
rendered hair by hair to
convey individuality, as Thum describes. “The tricky
part was that many CG shots had to
cut with shots of the real animals
and we found that our close-up
squirrels needed five million
hairs to look authentic.” Fur was
groomed to match the tiniest details of
length, color and direction of growth. Nuances of
movement such as breathing and twitching were added to complete the effect.
Additionally, Scanlan produced 12 animatronic
models, plus some partials attached to
hand-held poles. “In most of the
shots there will be a live
squirrel in the foreground
performing an action and several
animatronics in the background
repeating it,” he says. The advantage of
animatronics is that they don’t mind
doing things endlessly and they don’t
complain; but they’re never going to
appear as real, so mixing and
matching is the way to go.”
Scanlan’s puppet crew were driven by internal
motor packs that enabled a wide range of motion
including moving their heads, holding a nut
and shaking it or listening to it, and
flicking their tails around. “We could
program and control them to do whatever Tim needed.”
When Veruca tries to kidnap a squirrel and is summarily
knocked down by the incensed rodents en masse, a
number of animatronic animals join their
warm-blooded brethren in the fray, designed by Scanlan
“with little hand and mouth springs to grasp onto the fabric of her dress.”
Great care was taken to avoid injuring squirrels that
might dart underneath her or her stunt double as Veruca
hits the ground. In fact, she lands on an
unseen platform just above the ground, with ample
clearance below. Supplementing the animal actors
with animatronics and CGI in this scene created the
striking effect of Veruca
being completely covered in squirrels.
Providing the film’s distinctive score and
putting Roald Dahl’s Oompa-Loopah lyrical
chants to original music for four special
songs is multiple Oscar and Grammy Award nominated composer/musician Danny Elfman.
Although not a musical (no one but the Oompas sing),
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory includes four scenes
in which the Oompa-Loompas recount, in song, the
woeful misadventures of the unruly
children on the factory tour. All the Oompa-Loompa
vocals are performed by Elfman, formerly
lead singer of Oingo Boingo.
Using Dahl’s own words from the book, he
tailored the pieces stylistically to
each child – Violet, Augustus, Veruca and Mike –
whose bad behavior sets
off alarming consequences and illustrates a moral lesson.
“The challenge was to give each song
for each child its own distinct feel,
and have each one go to a completely
different place,” says Elfman.
“Augustus Gloop was inspired by big
brassy Bollywood production pieces. For
Violet, the gum-chewer, I threw back to a
retro 70’s funk feel. For Mike
Teavee, I needed something frenetic
and hyperactive like he is – the
short attention span, video game, rock
kid. Because Veruca goes down the
garbage chute and all the lyrics
were about fish heads and such,
Tim suggested we contrast that
with a really sweet sound,
so we went in a 60-ish kind of
hippie/happy love-psychedelic direction.”
For the song’s lyrics, Elfman
went directly to the book.
“I wanted to stay as true to Roald Dahl’s words as
possible. In the book, they were
written more like extended chants than
songs, but his lyrics already had a
wonderful rhythm to them. In the end,
I had to do a lot of editing, but
I think I was 95% true to the book, with
just a bit of tweaking here and there.”
The creative collaboration between Tim Burton
and the multi-talented Elfman
is one of the longest-running and most
successful director/composer relationships
in the industry, beginning with Burton’s 1985
feature debut, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and
spanning 20 years to include such
memorable titles as Batman,
Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands,
The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow.
Of Elfman’s seven Grammy nominations, four
were for Burton films (Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Planet of the Apes and
Big Fish), with 2003’s Big Fish
also bringing him the most recent of three Oscar nominations.
For Burton, “his music has always been a
guidepost, a way to help define the various
elements of a story and draw it all
together. In a way, he’s like another actor in the film.”
“The great part of working with Tim on the music was
that he kept throwing me off center by suggesting
different styles of music that I wasn’t expecting,
but we had worked together enough times so that
I knew I could do a lot of crazy things without
shocking him,” says Elfman. “Likewise,
his ideas have so many times led me to
places that I wouldn’t have thought of but that
remain my favorites. In particular, on the songs
for Charlie, Tim and I worked very closely together
and I’d have to say, I can’t remember when
I’ve had more fun working at all. It was truly and wonderfully nuts!”
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be released
in IMAX® theatres worldwide, beginning July 15th, 2005. The
film has been digitally re-mastered into the
unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience®
with proprietary IMAX DMR® (Digital Re-mastering) technology.
This is the sixth IMAX DMR release from Warner Bros.
Pictures, following closely on the heels of
Batman Begins: The IMAX Experience, which
opened June 15, 2005. Previous collaborations
include The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience
(the highest grossing IMAX DMR film to date),
in addition to the digitally re-mastered
releases of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
and the last two installments of the Matrix
trilogy, as well as the original production of NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience.
IMAX Theatres deliver images of unsurpassed
clarity and impact, providing audiences an
opportunity to experience the magic,
excitement and wonder of Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory on screens up to eight stories tall
and 120 feet wide, surrounded by up
to 14,000 watts of pure digital sound.
“So much of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is
larger than life,” says Tim Burton.
“The immersive IMAX format adds its own
dimension to the sense of wonder that comes
from stepping inside Willy Wonka’s fantastic world
and realizing the brilliance of Roald Dahl.”
The sheer size of a 15/70 film frame, combined
with the unique IMAX projection technology,
is key to the extraordinary sharpness and
clarity of the images projected in IMAX
theatres. The 15/70 film frame is ten
times larger than a conventional 35mm
frame and three times bigger than a
standard 70mm frame. IMAX
projectors are the most advanced, powerful
and highest-precision projectors in the
world, and the key to their performance
is the proprietary “Rolling Loop” film
movement which advances the film
horizontally in a smooth, wave-like motion.
During projection, each frame is
positioned on fixed registration pins,
and the film is held firmly against
the rear element of the lens by a
vacuum. As a result, the
picture and focus steadiness
are far above normal projection
standards and provide outstanding image clarity.
To fully envelop IMAX
theatre-goers, the presentation
is enhanced by a multi-channel
stereo surround system comprised
of 44 custom designed speakers
that extract up to 14,000 watts
of pure digital surround sound. The IMAX Proportional
Point Source loudspeaker system was
specifically designed for IMAX Theatres
and delivers superb sound quality to
every member of the audience, regardless
of where they may be seated.
IMAX has redefined the
movie-going experience with IMAX DMR, a
patented, revolutionary technology that
allows live-action films to be transformed
into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience.
IMAX DMR starts by converting a 35mm frame
into digital form at a very high resolution, capturing
all the detail from the original. The proprietary
software mathematically analyzes and extracts
the important image elements in each frame from
the original structure to create a pristine copy
of the original photography. This is the most
complex step in IMAX DMR.
The image on a 35mm film frame is
comprised of a fine grain structure
like that of all photographic images. This
grain, when projected onto the IMAX screen,
looks like a TV channel that
isn’t quite tuned to the station. Removing
the grain while preserving the quality of the
underlying image is the basis of IMAX DMR.
To create the brightness and clarity that
audiences have come to expect from The IMAX Experience, IMAX
uses a proprietary computer program. The
digitally re-mastered film is then
transferred onto the world’s largest film
format, 15-perforations 70mm. In addition,
the film’s original soundtrack is
recreated for IMAX’s powerful
multi-speaker sound system, which
further enhances the movie-going
experience and helps put audiences in the
picture.
Crew >> Cast >> DVD Release Date >> Bringing Roald Dahl’s Classic Story to the Screen
>> Casting Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket and the Bucket Family
>> The Four Rotten Children
>> The Oompa-Loompas and Dr. Wonka
>> Building Wonka’s World: Inspired Production Design and State-of-the-Art Practical & Virtual
Effects Combine for an Unparalleled Atmosphere of Wonder
>> The Chocolate River
>>
The Oompa-Loompas
>> The Squirrels
>> Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Marks the 11th Collaboration between
Tim Burton and Acclaimed Composer Danny Elfman >>
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The IMAX Experience
>>
About the Cast >>
About the Filmmakers
IN DEPTH
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| BRIEF NOTES
| OFFICIAL WEBSITE
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