'Tin Man': Art Deco Oz -- Oh, My!

Opportunity really comes down to perspective. Take the case of RHI Ent. and SCI FI Channel's idea of doing a revisionist take of L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful World of Oz. For some, the idea of trying to compete or, heaven forbid, "improve" upon Victor Fleming's 1939 cinematic masterpiece is akin to heresy. But if you're Robert Halmi Sr. and SCI FI President, Bonnie Hammer, that idea is a no-brainer, which led to their successful 2007, three-night miniseries, Tin Man starring Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming, available today in a two-disc Collectors Edition DVD (Rhino Ent., $24.95).

Of course, when embarking on such "crazy" new creative territory, you need the right partners in crime, so RHI and Tin Man's director Nick Willing drafted frequent collaborators, Anthem Visual Effects, in Vancouver, BC, to bring their modernist, Art Deco vision to life. Luckily, Lee Wilson, president and visual effects supervisor for the four-year-old Anthem, jumped at the chance to help put his own spin on the classic images and ideas of Oz. Having already proved themselves with their work on SCI FI's epic miniseries Earthsea and several shows for Halmi, Wilson says it was actually a natural conclusion that they were approached for Tin Man. "The thing that excited me is what excites everyone, and that is that we all grew up with [The Wizard of Oz] and so it was an opportunity to add our contribution to it," Wilson says about what sparked his initial interest in the project. "Creating Oz and taking something we have all seen in one way and now giving it a more adult, darker look was exciting.

And when I grew up watching [The Wizard of Oz], the scene that was the scariest was the flying monkeys. The witch is one thing but the flying monkeys is what you have nightmares about when you are a kid, so right away I was on that," he laughs. "We got a chance to come up with the way they look in this and I was determined at the time that they wouldn't wear little coats. I just couldn't picture them getting dressed for work," he jokes. "So very early on we showed a sketch to Nick and Robert and Matthew and everybody was pretty jazzed about it." Re-dubbed as "mobats" for Tin Man, Wilson explains, "We got started on them early because we knew, from a workload standpoint; it would be fairly intense because we have furred creatures flying around."

Which bring to fore one of the greatest challenges on Tin Man, the issue of getting the most "bang for the buck." Working on a much scaled down visual effects cable budget that needed to be spread over an ambitious, epic-looking six hours, Wilson says Anthem was realistic about just how far they could go from the beginning. "We bought into the project right from the start knowing this would be a show that we couldn't do what we wanted for the kind of budget we had," he admits. "But I have to confess that a large part of it was Anthem's enthusiasm for the project itself. We counteracted the idea of taking more time and money with our artists being so excited about what they were working on with extra effort."

With that swell of enthusiasm, Wilson explains that it really came down to figuring out the best balance of practical vs. CGI, and then creating the most efficient production pipeline to bring the sequences to life. They approached it from the perspective of only building in 3D and projection mattes with some basic geometry if we would see it over the three nights. For example, in the creation of Central City (a.k.a. Emerald City), they built the interior of the palace where the mobats are attacking. That was a gigantic visual effects set with huge pillars that are 20 feet apart and going on for seemingly forever, so that's just not a practical set to build and it shouldn't be built that way, Wilson asserts. Plus, Michael Joyce's designs were beautiful, but the nice thing is that if Nick decided he wanted to make a change at some point, we aren't pulling down lumber and stripping down paint. We are just making some changes [digitally]."

To illustrate his point, Wilson continues, "Les Quinn, who is one of our senior artists and did work for The Da Vinci Code, headed up a number of artists. It's funny because when we first started working, it was on Demilo's truck driving down the street at night through Central City. The script went through a number of changes by the time we went to camera and we had started on that sequence immediately because we weren't dependent on any live-action plates. But Nick looked at it and said, Wow, that's really nice but we won't be doing that shot at night, but we'll probably be doing it in day now. In that case, it really was a matter of building stuff you knew, and then all of a sudden someone wanted it coming in from the West. Well, we didn't build the West! But what ended up happening was that they liked the approach to Central City so much it was used on all three nights with variations. On one pass, we fly past it and go on to Azkadellia's Lair. For another one we go past Azkadellia's Lair and up into the sky to follow some mobats. We kept making variations on it.

"And there were a lot of instances, where we decided that we couldn't build a set because it was way beyond the scope of the show in terms of location," he adds. "We can't have them trudging around in snow storms, and driving trucks down blizzard roads. The Twister Cabaret and all of the exterior and interiors of Central City are all total fabrication and everything is shot with greenscreens. I think you can come up with an otherworldly feel to everything without turning it into a videogame. I'm all for realism first and then taking it out there in design as opposed to making it with garish colors to make it feel like somewhere else. From our standpoint, it was great that the artists could pull it off and make it look beautiful. We are pretty happy with how everything turned out."

Wilson says Anthem's flexibility was key in helping them work around the challenges inherent with a project of this scope. "You set it up in such a way where you have a lot of interior greenscreen and that's usually what's working through the pipeline, so when you get a request for something different or a shot for the next trailer that isn't in the schedule, you have to be versatile to switch gears and then switch back and not lose a lot of time."

Anthem is an all Mac facility using OS10 and OSX. We use Maya for 3D and Shake for compositing. For this show, we had about 35 people working on it. I believe we brought in five artists and the rest were all staffers and I still have that staff. When you put together a really nice team, I like to hang onto them. When we did Earthsea, we had six people. We don't want to get too big. I like to know who everybody is for when the Christmas party rolls around," he chuckles. "So it all ran well and it was a huge learning curve for us in terms of us doing 1,500 shots for six hours of TV. In comparison, for the previous year (2006), we did 1,300 shots for six projects!"

Asked his personal favorite sequences of Tin Man, Wilson says he has a hard time narrowing it down. "The mobat stuff was lots of fun and I'm really happy with the way they turned out. Kathleen Robertson really played the scenes well with Zora. But I have to confess when we are in Central City and going into the Twister Café and enter the palace if you look at the before and after on that it's just a few people standing around an empty green set. I think that world was created quite convincingly. In fact, there are things about it that people may assume it was on a big set somewhere and so it's always fun to see their expressions on their faces when the frame wipes across, and it's three people on a greenscreen.

Tara Bennett is an East coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.