Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/119349
■ ■ ■ ■ VFX•Stereo 3D efore the wizard of Oz became wonderful, he, too, needed to leave black-and-white Kansas, follow a yellow brick road, determine who was good and evil, and discover greatness within himself. In Oz the Great and Powerful, an imagined prequel to the Wizard of Oz, the would-be wizard is a cunning magician, Oscar Diggs (played by James Franco), in a small-time circus. A tornado (of course) sucks his hot-air balloon inside, and he emerges from the vortex in the colorful but threatened Land of Oz. Can he save it from the wicked witch? Or, is his magic only an illusion? The biggest illusions in the film, however, are the Land of Oz itself and Oz's traveling companions: the monkey Finley voiced by Zach Braff, and a tiny China Girl voiced by Joey King. Sam Raimi, known for Darkman and the Spider-Man trilogy, directed the Walt Disney Pictures production. A crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks provided a majority of the visual effects, as they had done for Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and, perhaps more akin to this film, Alice in Wonderland. Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Stokdyk, who won an Oscar for the visual effects in Spider-Man 2 and Oscar nominations for Spider-Man and Hollow Man, was overall supervisor for the film's approximately 1,500 shots. Imageworks took on between 1,000 and 1,100 shots, including the main digital characters and most of the environments. Artists at Luma created the tornado and a flying action scene between two witches at the end. Digiscope, Evil Eye, and Method artists handled much of the 2D compositing work. Artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks created all the fantastical landscapes for Oz the Great and Powerful as well as China Girl (top) and the monkey Finley (not pictured). 10 CGW0313-Ozpfin.indd 10 March/April 2013 3/14/13 12:11 PM