Scott Stokdyk
Scott Stokdyk is one of the guys who was responsible for the fantastic special effects on box office hits Oz The Great And Powerful earlier this year.
We caught up with him to chat about his role working on the visual effects, the difficulties they faced and what lies ahead.
- You worked on the visual effects for Oz The Great and Powerful so how did you first get involved with this movie?
I was art a screening and ran across Sam (Raimi) and he was like ‘hey, I am going to be working on this Oz project so why don’t you come in and talk to me?’ I haven’t look back since then (laughs).
I love with Sam Raimi and I am always interested in working with him but I grew up in Kansas and so I have a childhood link with the world of The Wizard of Oz.
- This is a movie were around three quarters of the shots have visual effects in them and you have built an entire world so where was the starting point as you began this process?
In my role as visual effects supervisor I have to work so closely with other departments and I worked very closely with Robert Stromberg, who was the production designer and ran the art department. But I also worked very closely with Peter Deming, who was director of photography.
I feel like a lot of my job over the course of the movie was to really study their work and capture their work and capture the spirit of their work and extract that.
We also had to make sure that the computer graphics work that we created that it has the same design style and sense and that it fitted into what they had done.
- So what did you draw on as inspiration as you were starting out on this movie? And did you every look at the original film as you were developing the look of this new movie?
From the very start it was clear that we were not going to look at the original movie and instead try and do something that was based on Frank Baum’s original fifteen books.
Robert Stromberg came in with a very very clear sense of what the world should be. He had drawn inspiration from a number of different places that I can’t speak entirely to but I get bits of pieces and glimpses into that world.
I took a trip from southern California to northern California a couple of months ago and I realised that Robert had even drawn inspiration from those landscapes when he was designing; he was making that commute ever week when he was in pre-production. I think there are a variety of inspirations from all over the world that Robert can take ideas from.
For myself I was trying to mostly draw from Robert’s work and we hired a painter called Steven Messing who came up with a lot of original ideas as well.
- A lot of film fans will not know much about the visual effects process - they will just see on screen when they see the movie. So what kind of process do you go through as you go from storyboards and ideas to actually starting to build that world and make it look like what we see on screen?
There is a whole team of artists with all different specialties - there are about 370 artists at Image Works along and over five hundred artist who worked on the film overall.
There are artists who try to track the camera from what was shot on stage and then there are artists that just specialise in cloth and are working with the movement of the China Girl and making naturalistic.
Then there are also digital landscapers, modellers and texture painters and they are looking at existing assets of flowers and trees and changing and modifying or building original new ones that work within this world of Oz.
The visual effect process, in a ways, mimics the live action process as you come up with a design and you start building assets for it and build things that you can populate this work with. Then there are different teams that work on all different assets to it.
- You have mentioned Sam Raimi already so how do you find working with him? And how collaborative a process is it with the director?
I feel fortunate that I have gained his trust over the years so I know when I can go and pitch a new idea or when I can go and say ‘I hate to do this but need to add a restriction to what you are doing here’.
I have learned over the years when to keep my mouth shut and when to put forward something that I strongly feel that I need or want to put forward; I can do that without a lot of fear at this point.
I don’t feel afraid to give an idea that might be a bad idea because even if I do give him a bad idea it might spark a better idea. I enjoy the give and take of that process.
- Oz The Great And Powerful is a 3D movie so what challenges does that pose from a visual effects perspective?
Technically it creates a lot of additional work as you are dealing with twice as much data. But it also means that the work has to be much more precise.
When you are matching a camera with just one eye - classic 2D story telling - if you are not perfectly on many times you can get away with it. But when you are working with stereo both eyes have to be precisely on because mistakes show up almost instantly.
And then creatively I just feel that there is a whole extra world of design as you have to look at depth and fill in holes.
Broad gaps in the design of a scene that disappear in a classic 2D movie can become really disconcerting in 3D; you have to be aware of a whole other space and you have to film that space with either practical elements or CG elements. It is an interesting and fun design challenge.
- While 3D does pose some challenges for you how much do you enjoy 3D filmmaking?
I love watching 3D movies. The process of working in 3D is sometimes really hard and frustrating and challenging but it is rewarding at the end of the day when you see the final product.
A film so filled with visual effects like Oz is a big enough challenge of its own but then you add the 3D part it and I think many filmmakers and visual effects people are tempted or forced to because of time to kick that to a whole other team and not deal with those challenges. I feel lucky that we had the chance to embrace all of those challenges.
- Oz The Great and Powerful is one of the biggest movies of the year so far so how have you found the response to the film so far?
I have been very happy with the response and in the visual effects community it has got a very good response. What I am the most happy with is the response to the China Girl as across the board I have got some very favourable feedback about it from young people as well as older people.
We put so much attention to detail and care into that performance of the China Girl that those responses are very rewarding.
- Finally what is next for you?
I don’t know yet, it is too early to say. I am still letting go of the world of Oz that I lived in for so long (laughs) and I am just open to new ideas and new things now.
Oz the Great and Powerful is out on Blu-ray, Digital Download and DVD on 1 July
Tagged in Oz The Great And Powerful