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production number with four cameras and doing everything in sort of real time. He continues: "You really have to factor that into your approach when you're planning out the visual effects. You can't completely rely on, 'Oh, don't worry, Rob, we can fix that later in post. There will be a CG person in there.' Rob is very precise… he knows exactly what he wants, from every angle of every dancer's hand, to where their leg is, to where that certain thing is in the frame on that precise musical beat. All those things had to be factored in." With Marshall's unique approach to the film, certain things had to be done differ- ently. For instance, "if we wanted to say, 'Just film Mary's head and stick her in a CG body and float her along,' that wasn't going to work in this kind of movie," John- son says. Instead, the team had to make a lot of extremely elaborate wirework from which cast members would be suspend- ed simultaneously. "Everything would be done as if we were making a live show," explains John- son, "with cameras and actors traveling down on wires and tracks, and everything was choreographed to music. It was like taking old-school techniques and modern techniques and fusing them together." According to Johnson, what was key for both Marshall and him was that, while they were making a Mary Poppins movie, it was a movie "in the 21st century and not 1964." "The look of Poppins has been an interesting kind of balancing act. The film is obviously iconic, so there are many things that people associate with it, like Cherry Tree Lane and the cartoon world. The way we approached it was, in 1964 they were using the absolute latest cut- ting-edge technology that was available to them at that time. It was as up to date as any Marvel blockbuster is today. That solarium yellow lighting, the multi-camera setups. Just the way that things were done was absolutely the pinnacle of 1964 visual effects," says Johnson. In that same vein, "we wanted to make sure that a modern audience, and maybe kids who have never seen the first movie, still would get something out of the new movie. We wanted to pay homage to the work that had been done previously – we are all standing on the shoulders of giants – so we had to make sure that our stuff works in a 21st century context," Johnson adds. "With that said, Cherry Tree Lane had to be more realistic, had to appeal to a more contemporary audience who expects a certain kind of look." And, as it turns out, their approach to combining some of the oldest tech- niques with the new methods worked really well, according to Johnson. "We literally wrote new code to create these kinds of environments. We also needed to make the lighting work because you don't want the lighting to look like traditional CG lighting," he notes. "That was not the look we were going for. It was fascinating and technically a very challenging process to get that blend right so it feels animated and feels like Mary Poppins, but also feels kind of contemporary as well." Old School Goes Contemporary Johnson explains that when Disney first started working on its animated features, they used a multiplane technique, where- by up to four layers of a scene were drawn onto glass and then filmed. "To introduce parallax in the back- ground, they used to put on the layer farthest away from the camera, the skies, then on the next one up, they would put the mountains, then the trees," Johnson says. "By just slightly offsetting how they moved them or the camera – moving the closest one faster and the one farthest away slower, frame by frame – they would achieve an effective parallax. That was the old-school technique. You would typically have four layers on a Disney animated feature film." The modern version of that, which was used for some but not all of the animat- ed sequences in Mary Poppins Returns, was to project animated textures onto different cards. "So, instead of having four sheets of glass that you would with a mul- tiplane camera, you could have 90 indi- vidual cards. So, each tree would be on a different plane, each bit of grass would be on a different plane, and as the camera is moving through, it's imparting a sense of parallax. And Rob would oen shoot the animated sequences with a Steadicam, which is what modern audiences would expect," explains Johnson. MARY POPPINS RETURNS AFTER 54 YEARS!