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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST DECEMBER 2018 MARY POPPINS RETURNS musical numbers where Mary and the kids go into these completely fantastical CG worlds," he says. "There's a number where they are traveling through a magical underwater kingdom and that was fun to do because we were literally creating an entire CG ocean. We created sort of a whole new kind of coral system. Every strand of coral is moving and every bit of kelp is moving. Every lit- tle anemone that's popping out of coral is breath- ing and there are fish that are feeding on the little bits of coral and swimming and all kinds of stuff layered into the shots. It's all really huge amounts of CG but it's not just like, 'Hey, look at this amaz- ing CG stuff,' but it's just the environment that Mary and the kids find themselves in." Some of the top animators from Pixar and Walt Disney Animation came out of retirement to be involved with the project. They created the animation/live-action sequence. The decision by Marshall and his team was to employ the hand drawn techniques of classic Disney films. "We were all incredibly excited to bring this unique art form back to life," says Marshall. "Having every single frame hand drawn by great Disney/Pixar artists has been a once in a lifetime thrill for all of us." "The animated sequence is obviously what you think of when you think of Mary Poppins," agrees Johnson. "The carousel, the penguins, we obvi- ously needed to go there, too. We properly went old school and worked with many of the original animators who came out of retirement to work on it. I mean, it's Mary Poppins, so why wouldn't you? We were literally back to animation stands where people were drawing with pencils. It was proper, traditional old school. It was a world that would have been very familiar to Walt Disney, walking through it in the '60s. It was a delight." According to Johnson, Rob Marshall's musi- cal theater and Broadway background lent itself well to how the visual effects played out in the film. "He stages a lot of the big numbers like he's doing a Broadway show. So you will have Mary Poppins and Jack dancing down an animated magical staircase with penguins and everything, and rather than do a three-second take, we're running a full, six-minute production number with four cameras and doing everything in sort of real time. So, 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. So all those things have to be factored in." With Marshall's unique approach to the film, Johnson says that certain things had to be done differently. For instance, "If we wanted to say, 'just film Mary's head and stick her in a CG body and float her along,' that just wasn't going to work in this kind of movie." Instead, the team had to make a lot of extremely elaborate wire works where cast members would be suspended simultaneous- ly. "Everything would be done as if we were mak- ing a live show," explains Johnson, "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." Johnson says what was key for both Marshall and him was that, while they were making a Mary Poppins movie, it was a movie "in the 21 st century and not 1964. The look of Poppins has been an The film was shot at various locations throughout England. VFX super Matt Johnson.