Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536054
PROPERTYMASTERSGUILD.ORG 15 Jamie has been working in the film industry for more than 30 years and has experience on a range of films like The Holiday, The Dark Knight and many of the latest Star Wars films. He is no stranger to the world of fantasy but was thrown into new territory when he found himself on a musical film called Wonka, the 2023 origin story of Willy Wonka. Jamie had just finished the project when the production designer [Nathan Crowley] approached him about an upcoming job. "Nathan came up to me and asked, 'How do you fancy coming to do Wicked?' "At the time, I had not seen the play and had no connection with it whatsoever. I remember Wicked the musical being around on every bus and it was on every time I went to the Underground (London's rapid transit system) for the past 20 years. So I finally went to see the show and the minute I walked out of the theater, I realized what a great and fantastic cultural story I had been missing. It got me really excited to do the film." For a Property Master, working on a subject matter that is unfamiliar to them is often the case. When starting a new project, they are given a short amount of time to become experts on the items they are tasked to create and provide for a film or television show. Jamie utilized all the resources available to him including, the original 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the 2003 Broadway musical and the numerous books that came before to help him prepare. "I had worked with Nathan before and we kind of knew what we were in for. Once we realized what a massive design and build he wanted, we knew our approach wasn't going to be a lot of purchases and finding items that already existed for our props. There was a certain amount of adapting, but it was all designed in a world from the ground up. A lot of our props were based on original sketches from the original Oz books." Jamie and his team were given 22 weeks to prep. At the time, they didn't really know how big the project was going to be. The director [Jon M. Chu] eventually revealed to the crew how his vision was going to be two films in order to tell the story the right way. The script and the scale of the project grew, and Jamie knew his team needed to get started right away. "We started on the broom on day one. However, it is such an important prop to the film and needed to go on a journey through many designs. So, in order to start developing the language of this world, we started smaller and shifted our focus on the balloon that delivers the letter from the Wizard to Shiz University. We ended up leaning into a very classic, very mechanical style for everything associated with the Wizard, so the first design was based more on animatronic metal toys and included a tin rabbit playing a tambourine. John loved it, but he wanted to add more. "John asked if we could add a walrus playing the cymbals, a penguin tapping its foot, and some propellers to the back. I said, 'Sure, we can look into that.' All of a sudden, we're getting this great direction suggesting Swiss wood carving instead of tin animals and my team of sculptors got to work creating those characters. We still had weeks and weeks of animatronic work to do, but hitting the mark on this first prop helped to get us rolling on the rest of our list."