Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1062194
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST DECEMBER 2018 MARY POPPINS RETURNS interesting kind of balancing act. The film is ob- viously iconic, and 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 cutting-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 ways that things were done was absolutely the pin- nacle of 1964 visual effects. We wanted to make sure that a modern audience, and maybe kids that 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 21 st century context. 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." Johnson says their approach to combining some of the oldest techniques with the new meth- ods worked really well. "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. That was not the look that 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 MEETS MODERN TECHNIQUES Johnson explains that when Disney first started working on its animated features, they used a mutiplane technique, where there would be up to four layers of a scene drawn onto glass and then filmed. "What they used to do, to introduce paral- lax in the background, was to put on the layer fur- thest away from the camera the skies, then on the next one up, they would put the mountains, then the trees, and by just slightly offsetting how they moved them, or moving the camera — moving the one closest faster and the one furthest away slow- er, frame by frame — they would achieve an effec- tive 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 animated sequences in Mary Poppins Returns, was to project animat- ed textures onto different cards. So, instead of having four sheets of glass that you would with a multiplane camera, you could have 90 individ- ual cards. So, each tree would be on a different plane, each bit of grass would be on a different plane, so as the camera is moving through, it's imparting a sense of parallax. And Rob would often shoot the animated sequences with a Steadicam, which is what modern audiences would expect. "When you see the animated sequence where Mary Poppins and Jack are dancing with the pen- guins, we built a CG music hall, a CG set and ac- tually textured it as you would in technical 3D but textured it with hand drawn artwork, so textured to look like it was a flat drawing. We particularly used it for lighting purposes because Rob had very specific notes about spotlights and fill lights. As mentioned, Rob comes from a theatrical back- ground, so that was a big deal to him to make the lighting work. We were able to do that without making it look like it was completely real. Again, Poppins was shot on Arri Alexa Mini and SXT cameras. Dick Van Dyke returns for the sequel.