How ‘Wicked: For Good’ Rebuilt Oz, from Yellow Brick Road to Dorothy’s House

It's an old Hollywood trick.

We hand paint all the backings with scenic painters,

much as they did in the past in the '39 film,

The Wizard of Oz.

So if you look here, everything this side is real set,

everything this side is painted backing.

So we very much looked at the golden age of Hollywood

in the '30s and really took cues from that era.

Hi, I'm Nathan Crowley, the Production Designer

for Wicked for Good, and I'm here today

to talk to you about the building of Oz.

[upbeat music]

Here we have the map of Oz.

So in the first film, we mainly center on Shiz University,

which sits up in Gilligan country, quite north.

And we travel between here and the Emerald City.

And then we also travel between the Munchkin Village

and the Emerald City.

And the only other place we sort of feature

is Elphaba singing The Wizard and I

and looking over the impassable desert.

And the journey that leads us during film two

exists from the Emerald City

when she leaves in Defying Gravity

through the forest, the great forests of Oz,

where she builds her really temporary sanctuary,

a hiding place, and eventually ends up at Kiamo Ko,

which is an ancient seat of Oz,

once owned by Fiyero's family.

And now in Kiamo Ko, we understand the creation

of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Glinda's journey south Emerald City

eventually becomes her journey

into being the Good Witch of the North

and we start identifying those main characters.

Nessarose becomes a Wicked Witch of the East.

We get to understand the creation of the Tin Man,

the creation of the Lion, the creation of the Scarecrow,

and eventually they come together for good.

The other defining connective tissue in this film

is the Yellow Brick Road.

The story demands that we now start to see

what that Yellow Brick Road signifies to the story.

Here we have Elphaba trying to free the animals

that are enslaved to build this yellow brick road.

So what we're actually seeing here is,

this is on location, this is all real road,

and this is CGI trees,

but we've photographed them at the studio

'cause we made them for the forest,

so the VFX have the information they need.

And Elphaba's actually on wires here,

and we are landing her with big cranes onto the road.

You'll see piles of bricks in the background here.

These come from Munchkin land,

and Munchkins are tasked with only using

and planting yellow tulips,

which provides the colors for the bricks.

Mark Eves, our farmer who grew all the nine million tulips,

he also planted a million yellow tulips.

And we need to see these tulips being cut down,

the yellow dye used, taken to Munchkin land

and made into bricks.

Behind this camera, a few fields away,

all the colorful tulips we grew for film one.

Farmer who grew all those nine million tulips,

we actually get to see them in the second film.

And at the end of this sequence,

you'll see one of the guards run across

our 9 million tulips from the first film, high shot

into the Munchkin village.

Really in film one, all the colored tulips

were this joy and delight,

and really showed the colorfulness of Oz

and the freedom and the lifestyle of the Munchkins.

These yellow tulips represent quite the opposite,

oppression, the turning of Oz

into a place that the wizard is controlling.

So these are not good.

Here we have the Yellow Brick Road pushing west

through the forest, and these are made out of plasters,

and then we have to paint it yellow,

and that's where it actually gets a bit tricky

because yellow under different lighting

becomes very difficult so once we found the yellow we like,

we then use a series of different glazes.

So under different lighting conditions,

it will fill the same color and this was a set build

on quite a large stage in Sky Studios north of London

and you can start to see the fact that we weave it

and it goes down here and up here to create

these sort of undulating hills.

So you may wonder why it's always winding and undulating,

especially in the 39 film.

It's really taken on how they did the first film.

Because they went straight into backings

and you have to create a transfer gap

between real set and backing.

So you have to feel like there's another gentle rolling hill

before you hit the backings.

So this is an old trick from the original film

where you literally go down and you come back up

and you create a little hump.

So you feel like it goes down here

and back up into the backing.

We put a canvas up around the entire stage,

as high as the 35 feet,

and we hand paint the backing with scenic painters.

And then we light that.

Oddly, if it's photographically sharp,

it looks flat and fake.

Whereas a painter,

the fact that you get a slight diffusion through paint

that allows the human imagination to push that backing away.

Okay, so here we have a stage plan,

which is a top view looking down the forest

and the yellow brick road.

So here is the yellow brick road with undulating ramping

and it finishes here.

So we're at high points here we're probably

at plus six plus six and we go down

to plus one in the center and then probably plus two there

so you can really feel the undulation.

Around this whole stage this is the painted backing,

the whole lot.

Now, we can't really paint this until we understand

all the placements of the trees

so we can start to understand what views we need

and how the perspective works into the backing.

So the perspective on this side is not hard

because we know the yellow brick road is going to wind in

and it's surrounded by trees.

So we know kind of these two sides,

it's these two sides in terms of a painted backing

that we really have to be careful with

because we don't want a big tree too close

to the backing and if we have a big tree there,

we're going to need to put perspectives

of trees getting smaller at the right scale

into that backing.

So it's very important that it happens as one journey

for the scenics, for the set construction,

for the greens department.

And we paint it for night,

and then if there's areas we need,

we can paint it for day two.

Okay, so the other place the Yellow Brick Road

exists is in Munchkin Land in the village.

So here we have the collision of the Wizard of Oz

and Wicked.

We're looking at the Yellow Brick Road as it comes in,

and it curls.

This spiral is the actual collision of the two stories.

So this is the story of Dorothy

on her journey to the Emerald City.

And it's a journey that's really been created by the wizard.

She's now being used by the wizard

as a witch hunter to chase Elphaba.

We have the tornado that drops the house

on the Wicked Witch of the East.

We have Nessarose's journey down towards that tragic moment.

This is also the moment

where Glinda and Elphaba confront each other.

There's a very intense emotional moment.

We have a lot of story ideas colliding

and that needs a lot of visual ideas.

So here we have the crashed house.

That's the start of Dorothy's story

and it's the start of The Wizard of Oz

clashing with Wicked.

So how do we do a crashed house in Munchkin Land?

We've also doing a lot of filming here without the house.

Practically, we need to create this house somewhere else

and we need to design it, make it, fabricate it

so we can move it into place.

So this image shows us constructing the crashed house

outside the set.

We actually built it about 300 feet behind the set

and we sculpted it and built it

and then figured out how to move it

and crane it into position for these shots

and then take it out for the filming that happened after it.

These are all prop warehouses.

Actually, we're growing tulips in this one.

And so behind here is the actual set.

So this looks like a house from the outside,

but inside it's just a series of bracing and structure.

So we can pick it up and crane it onto set

as a sort of overnight changeover.

So the inside is just a series of cross bracing,

except where we'd have to put window dressing

and actually some pieces of furniture or wall hangings

for any view we might see through a window.

So you'll notice how these windows are notoriously small.

And that really is to constrict the view

because we've got to lift this thing onto set.

So we have to make sure that the structure is safe.

This is the most famous house in a fairy tale.

It's most certainly an American fairy tale.

So it really has to be a slice of Americana.

There's a painter called Andrew Wyeth

who described a lot of this type of farmhouse

in his paintings.

So we really have to connect with the feeling

that those paintings give you

alongside something you're very familiar with.

We spent a lot of time looking at this house

and deciding how this collapsed, how roof tiles collapsed,

how wall might collapse, how window might collapse,

remembering we have to leave an area

for the shoes to exist,

which is actually one of the most important pieces

of this design.

One of the most important sets

in the second film is Kiamo Ko.

It's actually where we hinted it in the first film

in the opening shot,

but it really exists in the second film as a new set,

it's a very important place.

It's really what we know as the castle

of the Wicked Witch of the West.

This is as far west as Oz goes.

This is being held onto the land of Oz

by a very small bridge,

and it's pushing west into the impassable desert.

And this is a reminder of where our story ends.

There's two sets I needed.

I needed this area for No Good Deed.

So I needed this arch area here to play a whole scene.

And then I needed the battlements at the top For Good.

For Good being a very emotional song,

and the connection of these two friends.

Could I then design it in a way

that it felt like it belonged to Elphaba

when she finally becomes a Wicked Witch of the West?

And here I saw the opportunity to start bringing in

the time that belongs to the Grimmerie.

Could I make a castle that felt like

the top half was floating?

So how do we make a floating castle?

So some time ago I thought,

Well, if you have arches that sit on the ground,

you know, wouldn't that be great?

But what if they didn't sit on the ground and they floated?

So the magic in a floating arch, which is great,

but that would mean there's really a very small gap

between the arch and the floor.

But what if the castle had a mirrored arch in it?

So then suddenly you get these arches

that feel like they are floating.

So from a distance, we start to see views and light

through all these arches, but they don't connect.

So the whole top half of the castle here

feels like it is floating.

Here we have the No Good Deeds set,

and you'll notice here's the floating columns,

here's the gap, here's the arches which connect

to allow the castle to float,

if this is the upper bit of the castle.

This place is also a network of stairs,

trap doors for the monkey, hidden passages.

These trap doors and these staircases

play a very important part in the final scenes of film two,

a Wicked For Good, and you'll find out why.

This was the planned idea of what we might build

on a soundstage.

Here's the problem.

We would need to hang this entire top half of the set

'cause it doesn't connect to the bottom half from the grid,

and then we'd need to put this lower half on the floor

with its upside down arches,

which ultimately wouldn't allow the camera

to make the moves it needed within the set.

And so there was a lot of complexity in here.

We knew that we could only build the moments

where Elphaba needed to travel for a No Good Deed.

And so within this set, we just picked certain parts of it

and built those bits only on a soundstage,

still leaving the correct distances.

So it was a strange set.

It looked kind of half built.

So Visual Effects could take this 3D model

and then recreate the bits in between

and they wouldn't get in the way of the camera

and also allow us to put in the flying monkeys

where we needed and the rest of the castle.

Kiamo Ko also houses the battlements,

which is the top portion of the floating section

of the castle.

And that's where we stage For Good,

one of the main songs of the second film.

Came up with this design of the battlements

that really was in keeping with passageways,

spacious staircases and rooftops.

So we have walkways, caps, all leading the large turret,

which is where we house the scene

where Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West.

And all of this is pushing West.

So the Impassable Desert's down here.

So it really feels like it's a wave of architecture

at the front of Kiamo Ko.

This is the set we constructed at the play, For Good.

When we sing For Good,

they are looking out West into the Impassable Desert,

knowing the journey that is coming.

And we've got these flying buttresses,

which give us shape and form.

We sculpted these two fallen angels,

which really play into the story of these two great friends.

So then there's key story points here,

which is the buckets and the water pump

for the witch hunters when they arrive.

Rather than just the stone castle we see a lot,

I ended up putting in these glazed brick steps

that work all the way through this castle,

just to really push the blue

or maybe make it a bit more Ozian.

Here's the only bit we saw in the first film

with the flying monkeys crashing out through the window.

And that's how we opened the first film.

But the entire film concludes here

in the Wicked Witches of West chamber.

But the reason there's a big window here

is this faces the impassable desert.

You'll see the stepping brick, the glazed blue brick

that collides with the floor.

These stepping glazed brick pilasters

are sort of inspired in a sort of modern art deco

kind of form with the stepping down.

Behind the tapestries are hidden doors,

and that's important for when Glinda witnesses the events

that happen in this room.

Let's talk about where Elphaba goes

directly after the first film.

She leaves the Emerald City

and she heads towards the forest.

And this is where she makes a hiding place.

And the idea here was to build a hiding place

in what I consider the mother tree of the forest.

So what does that look like in terms of design?

So now we need to build this set on a soundstage.

Talking to the greens department,

they felt that if we gave them a rough structure,

they could actually weave this out of found branches

and materials from the forest.

We were sort of excited

to sculpt out of natural materials a whole set.

So we knew we were gonna weave this

with our greens department,

and we knew that the steel department

had to provide some kind of framework

because the other thing that really enhances this design

is we know Ozian trees are circular

and they curve upwards and the branch weaves together.

So how do we do it?

You can see the structure.

You can see some of the tubes, the steel tube here.

And here you see our greens department, or one person.

Here you see our greens department with their materials.

And then they slowly start to weave this into a nest.

We had the construction riggers

give them structure as they went.

We started with the entrance door here

and we weaved as many branches as we could.

and we needed to flow them around this area.

And once we got that structure

and then we could turn those branches

into windows and openings,

we could then find a way to go down into the bedroom

and out onto the balcony.

So this was very much a sculptural job.

It was a piece of art.

It's probably about 30, 40 feet in circumference.

Our size of our greens department was quite large.

It had at least 40 people.

That's because we were doing landscapes,

we were doing Munchkin Land,

we were dealing with the flowers and the thatching.

We had about three or four people

from the greens department working on this

and really it needed to be less

because it was a weaving job.

We needed particular people who would slowly look at this

and make it, it couldn't be hit en masse.

Here's the finished set

and looking from the doorway out to the balcony here.

And you can see everything is natural

from the greens department, apart from this tree,

which is sculpted by our construction department.

And you can see it splays out

to allow us to create this roof of branches.

So how do we get light into here?

Well, we can't leave it open

because you'll see the stage ceiling.

So we don't want to put blue screen up here.

So then the plaster said, we think we out of resin,

we can make these giant leaves out of translucent material.

And if we layered those up, it would look like the canopy

of a forest in translucent materials.

And so we laid those on top of this canopy

and that allowed us to hide any lights.

And then the lighting department would take away the leaves

where they were pushing light through.

And so you can see the windows.

These are woven branches.

Here's a woven window from the outside.

So you can see how they wove these windows.

So if we needed to get a shot from the outside in,

we could then frame that area.

You can see some sort of dense wicker fencing here.

This was used to kill any light leaks from the outside.

So the greens department foraged

for a very particular type of branch

that had some flexibility

and then we could actually weave with.

We kind of designed this as we went,

with the help of all our department

because it was a piece of sculpture.

So while Elphaba is heading west to Kiamo Ko,

we find Glinda in the Emerald City.

And now we get to describe

the three towers of the Emerald City.

So we have the Wizard's Tower,

where Elphaba in Defying Gravity departed from.

We have Madame Morrible's Tower,

where the propaganda room is in film two,

and that's her domain.

And then we now have Glinda's tower,

which is slightly more elegant.

And now we get to describe all these new places

in the Emerald City that exist higher up.

And you can start to see a transition

from more solid materials,

which exist on our backlog set,

up into the light, more translucent materials

that form the three towers of Emerald City.

One of the reasons we do this kind of conceptual drawing

and three-dimensional drawing in the art department,

We need to design every inch of Oz

and every piece of architecture, every landscape.

So in post-production visual effects

know what everything looks like.

And they know that from our 3D model,

if you're at Glinda's looking out here,

you're looking across at this view here.

So it's very important during production

that the art department not only build the sets down here

with construction and set deck, even though it's digital,

we have to keep designing the whole of the Emerald City.

So we know exactly what each view is,

and it all starts to make sense.

So in Glinda's tower, we have Glinda's apartment.

So in film two, in Elphaba's journey out of the Emerald City

was her realization that she has to become

the villain that Oz needs, not the hero they deserve.

And she has to become the Wicked Witch of the West.

Glinda's journey centers on the Emerald City,

and she has to give up privilege

to become the Good Witch of the North.

And we needed to create an interior that suited Glinda,

but still kind of clung onto the Emerald City.

So we very much looked at the golden age of Hollywood

in the 30s and really took cues from that era.

One of the reasons I liked that idea

was because the designer, Cedric Gibbons,

of the original Wizard of Oz,

his favorite architecture was art deco.

So I really felt that it belonged to Glinda,

belonged to the Wizard of Oz, belonged to Wicked,

and we could now introduce it to Glinda.

We'd have to change a few things.

We'd have to put luscious silk fabric panels everywhere.

We had to soften it

with this wonderful sunken seating area.

The reason why we employed symmetry

for the girl in the bubble,

because a girl in the bubble is the moment

after Glinda sees the witch hunters leave

to go and kill her best friend.

She doesn't like her reflection anymore.

This is a turning point for Glinda.

So that number has to divide itself

into reflection and the real Glinda

and leave the reflection behind

as who she was and who she has become.

Reflective Glinda, real Glinda,

the new Glinda, the old Glinda.

How do we do that in a song?

Jon Chu and Alice Brooks, the cinematographer,

wanted to push from reflection to real Glinda,

which means crossing a mirror line in a set.

It's an old Hollywood trick.

It's an old illusionist trick.

So how do we do that?

First of all, the set has to be symmetrical.

This half of the set here has to match that half.

So when she comes in from the witch hunters,

she comes in through these double doors

and she heads towards a mirror.

The camera's here and we see her in the reflection

onto the reflected side of the room.

So I know that sounds complicated,

but the easiest way to explain it

is if we were building two sets,

it would be a lot simpler.

This is this reflected here.

So it'd be very easy here to come around

with Glinda looking at each other,

but we're not able to build mirror sets and light them.

We only can build one set, light one set.

So we have to shoot the whole scene on this set.

And now we do the whole reflected set from this.

We just cut up here.

So now we're opening this wall

and the camera comes around here

and pushes away with reflected Glinda.

So we're now in the reflection side of Glinda

and she moves across here.

And there's about five of these sort of crossovers

between reflections and real Glinda.

We come here and we push up to a mirror in the ceiling

and that reflection is actually a camera move down.

And so now we're back into real Glinda.

Then we follow up the stairs

and we eventually come to this corridor

and this corridor, the reflection of that corridor is this.

So that's the mirror version of that side of the set.

So now we're back in reflected Glinda and we're here

and we're gonna go down the stairs.

So what does that mean in terms of the real set?

What it means is we are going down this staircase,

which is that one over to the north side.

As we come down and reflected Glinda moves here,

our camera pushes into this reflection,

which means that we're back with real Glinda

and then we hinge this wall back and our camera is here.

We've lost reflected Glinda

and we push with real Glinda to the center door,

then out to the bubble.

Here's the bubble, and this is where she looks

at her distorted reflection in the bubble,

knowing that she is now changed,

and the old Glinda doesn't exist anymore.

The second film, for myself and my art department,

really depending on us being able to build enough,

to design enough, to explain enough,

so the audience could feel like they were touching it.

And we really had to continue that into the landscape,

unlike the first film.

That was very important to me and my team

that we touched Oz and we touched the '39 film

and we embraced a little art deco,

a little bit of art moderne,

and a little bit of something new.

And we gave a nostalgia that belongs to this story.