General

The production visual effects supervisor discusses the Emerald City, Elphaba in flight, and collaborating with Jon M. Chu.

By Mark Newbold

Based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by American author Gregory Maguire, the Wicked musical has enchanted audiences worldwide, both on the stage and on the big screen. Maguire’s 1995 novel was not only an adult-oriented version of L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it was also the first entry in The Wicked Years book series.

With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, the stage version of Wicked (or to give it its full title, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz) premiered on May 28, 2003 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco and has broken records wherever it has been performed, including over 7,000 performances in London’s West End.

A true phenomenon ripe for further adaptations, director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked landed in cinemas in November 2024. Capturing the imagination of the cinema audience, the final moments of the film promised a sequel, and that promise was kept when Wicked: For Good debuted a year later in November of 2025, continuing the story of Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda Upland (Ariana Grande), Fiyero Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey), the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), and the people of Oz.

Loaded with sequences of dizzying visual complexity, Industrial Light & Magic was tasked with bringing Chu’s vision to vivid, yellow-bricked life. ILM.com had the opportunity to sit down with the production’s four-time Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman to discuss Wicked: For Good and the task of unveiling even more of Munchkinland, Shiz University, and the Emerald City.

“It was a 155-day shoot for a two-part story,” says Helman. “We thought of Wicked and Wicked: For Good as one movie, and we shot it that way.” That meant intense preparation and planning, given the logistical and technical nature of certain sequences in the films.

“Visual effects can often be challenging because you’re asking the director, the editor, and everybody else to think about things that they normally don’t want to think about,” explains Helman. “A director is thinking of the whole story, but we’re asking them to look at specific sequences because we need to turn over a certain number of shots. They don’t like to be presented with choices because they think they’ve already made their choice, so why present another one? That means they have to rethink, and that takes time.” 

Jon Chu was open to the challenge. “Jon takes an organic approach to filmmaking, he loves having choices and different possibilities,” Helman says. “There might be a script and a plan in place, but the process of making a major motion picture still has plenty of fluidity. “Lots of things change throughout the process of filming, and there are lots of choices to make.”

“It’s a Transactional Thing”

Creative choices are one thing, but a production like Wicked: For Good requires a large amount of preparation and resources, and a sizable portion of those resources are given over to visual effects. As production visual effects supervisor, Helman was deeply involved with practical as well as creative duties.

“Part of my role is managing the project in partnership with my effects producer,” Helman explains. “That includes talent, financials, resources, all kinds of things. So if you’re not thinking ahead, you’re not doing your job. Nobody likes to be in dailies and not be able to say, ‘Yes, I can do this,’ and the only reason you say ‘I can do this’ is because you have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C.” 

Those plans require intense work from the team, gathering as much data as they can. “We have LiDAR [a laser system that scans objects and environments to recreate physical objects and sets as digital models], we have high resolution textures, HDRIs for lighting, all the science behind it, so that when we’re in dailies, I can say ‘Yes, we can do this.’” That preparation is integral to the production. “Nobody likes to be surprised or ambushed. You don’t want to get into those situations, and we never did with Jon. He’s a great communicator and a terrific person. There was never a moment when he was annoyed about anything. For four years on a project, that is an accomplishment.”

Art always comes with the cost of tools, be it the canvas, brushes, and oils a painter uses, or the clay and tools of a sculptor. It’s the same for visual effects artists, but as Helman explains, creativity always leads the discussion.

“The creative stuff that we put together as a team comes first, and after that, you have to be conscious of the resources,” Helman says. “I could go to a producer and say, ‘Look, I know that we’re spending a lot more resources in this section, but I promise that when we get here, I’m going to find a way to get back the resources that we’re putting into this.’ It’s a transactional thing, but it’s all about the storytelling. 

“There’s always a way of doing what is needed for the movie,” Helman continues. “You look at the storytelling and the amount of resources and ask, ‘Is it worth it? Is there a payoff?’” Time and money are challenges for every production, no matter the scale, but Helman believes one is more of a problem than the other. “At some point, you run out of resources, but the resource isn’t money; it’s time, which is finite. You can throw all kinds of money at the problem, but it won’t get done, because it needs more time in the oven. Then it’s not my choice, it’s a choice that we make together.”

 “Every Department Brings Something to the Storytelling”

The work of the visual effects team overlaps with many departments, few more than the special effects team, whose focus is on-set effects like steam, smoke, weather elements, and anything the performers physically touch. Helman gives an example of where the seam between the two lies. “Production design can’t build a 79-story building. They can build 55 feet of it, and then visual effects takes that and develops it, all based on what was done on set.” ILM and their fellow effects houses can expand the world of Wicked, but it only works if the departments are on the same page.

“There’s plenty of discussion about special effects, what can and cannot be done in camera, what’s safe and what’s not,” says Helman. “Filmmaking is one of the most collaborative art disciplines because if you don’t collaborate, you end up with something that is flat. Every department brings something to the storytelling and adds nuance in a way that is individual, surprising, interesting, and curious. So it’s a combination of all those things. There were about 1,000 artists and production crew on these films, and I really would like to thank them because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

To the Emerald City

The Emerald City is as much a character in both Wicked films as Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Boq (Ethan Slater, aka the Tin Man), Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and The Cowardly Lion (voiced by Colman Domingo). It is the home of the wonderful wizard and the high society of Oz, as well as the underclasses who have to fight for every scrap. Wicked showed us a vast swathe of the city, and Wicked: For Good not only takes us back there, but it takes us into places we’ve not seen before, a task that fell to Helman and his team.

“There were certain parts of Emerald City that we saw in the first part of the story, and certain parts of that we see in the second, so we built different assets for different parts of the story,” explains Helman. “The first movie was a lot more presentational. Things were being set up, and tonally, the movie was lighter, whereas the second one is a lot darker.” That visual change also mirrors the journey of the characters.

“Every character has a specific arc, so in Wicked: For Good, they deal with the consequences of the choices they made in the first film. Part of production design and visual effects is to accompany the performances with the environment,” Helman continues. “The atmospherics are always thick, and the light direction is purposely very dramatic at times. The sun is low, so there’s less light.” Time is also a factor in the progression of the environment. “It’s a combination of things. The clothes and the creatures get used, and the buildings get worn because they went through a specific experience.” He laughs, as he adds with a wink, “When I started the movie, my hair was brown, and now it’s white.”

“We’re Off to See the Wizard”

At the heart of the Wicked films are Elphaba and Glinda, and the second film gave the production the opportunity to delve deeper into the classic characters of L. Frank Baum’s original novel and add a 2025 spin on the characters. 

“It was really exciting,” says Helman. “I remember the first test that we did with Dorothy, Toto, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow. It’s funny because some of the critics were saying that the chronology of the story didn’t do this or that. Well, you know what? It’s a complicated story, and everybody remembers it differently, so I think this is another point of view of that story.”

Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel, which itself presented the story and characters of Baum’s world in a more mature, complicated light, it gave the filmmakers the chance to overlap parallel stories in ways that didn’t step on each other. “It was fun to think about. One thing is right there in the background, but if I come around and go in front, the story is different. It’s an opportunity.”

“Mitigate the Forces of Gravity”

With plenty of experience in making us believe a human, a superpowered dog, or a battered old Corellian freighter can fly, ILM was charged with taking Elphaba into the skies of Oz, a task that required visual effects know-how and a game performer in Cynthia Erivo.

“The approach was always going to be Cynthia doing the flying,” says Helman. “That meant that she needed to mitigate the forces of gravity, no pun intended. She’s singing while trying to get her body to do very specific actions. Cynthia is very strong, but it takes some effort.” 

A willing actor and all the right equipment don’t necessarily mean the results are what is required by the director or the visual effects team. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes, because of safety and other things, the actors are not fully exerting themselves, but Cynthia did.” That combination meant that when all was said and done, Elphaba looked even more imposing in the air in the sequel than she did in the first film. “In the arc of the story, she’s proficient. She’s gliding and then stopping. She knows what she’s doing and she’s done it before. She takes time to look at the world under her, and that requires some skill.”

Along with flying, there’s another aspect to the illusion: Elphaba’s cape, one of the most striking elements of her appearance as she heads down a dark path. “Elphaba’s cape isn’t in the cast, but it is a character in the movie, and it does a lot, not only when flying but also landing and taking off,” notes Helman. “Its creation required the skills of two visual effects houses. “ILM and Framestore created it because we couldn’t do a 30-foot-long cape physically.” With practical and visual effects work woven together, parts of the performer were also replaced to create the complete shot, but as Helman explains, “we always used Cynthia’s face and performance.”

Creating the physical cape meant crafting clothing that gives the right look and says something about the character, a challenge the designers went to great lengths to achieve. “The cape has different layers of materials and transparency, but we took some liberties with it,” explains Helman. “We know how difficult it is from doing different capes, from the Vader cape to Superman. The cape says who he or she is.” 

As is often the case, trial and error was the path to finding the right blend. “There was a lot of testing, we did simulations and resins, but at the end of the day, we said let’s forget about the science of it because it’s about the content. It might be scientifically correct, but it doesn’t work if it’s not doing what we need it to do and it’s not correct for the story we’re trying to tell.”

Unlimited Together

Just like its smash-hit predecessor, Wicked: For Good brings together an impressive array of on-screen and off-screen talent, all laser-focused on bringing their utmost in service of making the best film they possibly can. On visual epics like Wicked, visual effects, storytelling, and direction need to be in lockstep.

“There’s a four-minute sequence with this beautiful song that Glinda sings at the beginning of the movie called ‘I Couldn’t Be Happier,’” Helman says. “We redressed Munchkintown, we replaced the sky, the tulips, all kinds of things, but when we looked at it, Jon said ‘We’re missing something because this is a very subtle song.’ Jon said, ‘What if, when she starts singing, the confetti stops?’” 

It’s a striking visual as the confetti hangs motionless in the air, but one that entailed more work than one might imagine. “I asked how long are we doing this for, and Jon said the whole scene. That’s four minutes of really resource-intensive particle work that we didn’t know would work or not, but we had to complete it because we needed to know.” That would require Helman’s most valuable resource: time. “Jon understood that if he wanted to see this, it was going to take weeks to get it. It’s important to have that communication with the director, and to have somebody who understands what we’re doing.”

Magic, Glory, and Love

The ultimate combination of visual effects, performance, direction, production design, and numerous other departments is “The Girl In The Bubble,” written by Stephen Lawrence Schwartz and performed by Ariana Grande. Here we find Glinda in her home, inspired to finally take action following the cyclone that killed Elphaba’s favored sister, Nessarose. It’s a sequence brimming with emotion and meaning, and one that took almost the entire production schedule (that’s both films) to complete.

“We started ‘The Girl in the Bubble’ during the first week of filming on the first movie because it was a very complicated sequence, and we knew that it was going to take us two years. It was a four-minute, continuous shot.” A weighty task, and one that needed to pull in all the eyes it could to make it work. “We did a lot of work with [cinematographer] Alice Brooks and used lots of props before we understood what we needed for the previs.”

It’s one thing to dream up a film sequence, but it’s another to make that dream reality. So with previsualisation underway, Helman and his team also needed to work out the real-world technical aspects of the scene.

“Once we had the previs, then we did a techvis, which meant taking a look at the previs and taking a step back,” Helman continues. “For example, let’s say we previsualize where the camera is moving and, BOOM, there’s a wall in the way, but it’s not a wild wall [meaning it can be easily moved and then put back]. On set, the director might say, ‘Well, move the wall,’ but then you’re wasting two hours of time and resources. Techvis will look at the distance between two points, how fast things will move, and where the blocking is. If you don’t prepare before the shoot, we might put the lens on and find we can’t focus because it’s too close or too far, or the camera doesn’t fit in the space and the director has to change the shot.” 

With the techvis in progress, the team moved to the actual set itself. “We went on set to look at what the camera was doing,” says Helman, “and we realized that when she goes up the stairs, the set would have to be stripped because the camera couldn’t get there. We’d need a 50-foot crane. So we’d have to take the wall out and build a CG set as the camera comes around.” As it was for the entire production, planning in advance was key. “You have to figure these things out beforehand. It’s not necessarily something that a director would look at, but the other departments need that techvis information as well.”

While there was a physical set with props, Helman’s visual effects team added a surprising amount of detail afterward. “The railing is created in computer graphics, everything behind Glinda is created in computer graphics, and once she gets to the closet, only half of the closet was built, so we had to build the reverse of that.” There are even different takes of Grande’s performance brought together for the completed sequence, and that meant more delicate work for the team. “We had performances that were morphed, so the reflections had to match those performances. There were morphs in the middle of it that were very, very difficult, so there was the nuance of doing that.”

Even after completing this technical maze of work and collaboration, changes were still required. “Once we were done, Jon and Myron [Kerstein, editor of Wicked: For Good] changed two performances. We had about seven different plates that needed to be stitched into one, but they changed two of them because they thought the performances were better, so we had to redo the layout. We had all the assets, but then you have to resync everything so that it works.”

That meant the team on the ground needed to be extra vigilant and imaginative to keep the pieces where they needed to be. “The on-set video assist was so important because they needed to play it back and flop it [reverse the image],” Helman explains. “The floppiness of it was mind-boggling, and you have to make sure that you have plenty of imagination because there’s a lot of compositing that goes into the sequence that can’t be done on set in real time. You have to do all the thinking before.” 

Nevertheless, the reward is in the work itself. “It took two years to do, but it was really satisfying,” Helman concludes. “It’s one of the reasons why I love visual effects. It’s that satisfaction, and I realize how lucky I am to have a job that is so creative, because a lot of people don’t.”

Read more about ILM’s work on Wicked here on ILM.com.

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Mark Newbold has written for Star Wars Insider magazine since 2006, ILM.com, Skysound.com, and news site FanthaTracks.com, having previously contributed to StarWars.com and StarTrek.com. He is a 4-time Star Wars Celebration Podcast Stage host, podcasting for over 20 years, and has been involved in websites since 1996. You can find this Hoopy frood @Prefect_Timing.

One of ILM’s first visual effects supervisors looks back at the film’s mix of practical methods and revolutionary digital effects 40 years later.

By Amy Richau

“The game is afoot!”

In 1985, director Barry Levinson and writer Chris Columbus brought a new tale centered around a teenage Sherlock Holmes to audiences with Young Sherlock Holmes. The film’s effects team, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, ASC (Star Wars: A New Hope, 1977), that included Kit West (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), John Ellis (The Goonies, 1985), and David Allen (Willow, 1988), was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects the following year. The film holds a unique place in Industrial Light & Magic’s history. It includes an abundance of practical visual effects methods the company had developed and perfected over its first ten years, as well as the first fully digital character ever depicted in a feature film, a stained glass knight.

Young Sherlock Holmes arrived in theaters the same year as The Goonies, Cocoon, Explorers, and Back to the Future, when ILM was increasingly working on more projects outside of Lucasfilm. Muren recently spoke to ILM.com about the making of Holmes and its unique mix of old-school and groundbreaking visual effects.

Many of ILM’s biggest breakthroughs occurred during the making of epic blockbusters like Star Wars, The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), or Jurassic Park (1993). However, because Young Sherlock Holmes was a smaller film, it became the perfect vehicle for testing onscreen photoreal computer graphics (CG) effects. Also key was ILM’s proximity at the time to a smaller group ILM founder George Lucas was running a few hundred feet from their offices – the Lucasfilm Computer Division, a portion of which would later become Pixar Animation Studios.

The Height of Practical Effects

The story of Young Sherlock Holmes follows its teenage namesake (Nicholas Rowe) and newly arrived John Watson (Alan Cox) during a year at a London boarding school. The duo discovers a series of mysterious murders that lead them to a secret cult in Victorian London.

The snow that appears in many sequences of the film, which today might be created with CG effects, was accomplished with practical, old-school methods. Kit West, who was in charge of many of the film’s physical effects, needed the snow to both look real and leave no trace after shooting wrapped. West, who died in 2016, told Cinefex that despite filming on location in the United Kingdom at Eton College, Belvoir Castle, and Oxford University during the winter, all of the snow seen in the film was made by the production.

For snow on the ground, West’s team used 150 tons of dendritic salt. Snow on the buildings was made from over 100 tons of magnesium sulfate that had “a glint to it just as real snow,” said West. High-expansion foam that evaporated after about three hours was used in larger areas to mimic snow, while falling snow was made from a biodegradable insulation material that consisted of finely chopped paper, deployed by agricultural grain blowers.

One of the quirkier characters in the film, retired professor Rupert Waxflatter (Nigel Stock), spends much of his time on-screen trying to perfect his flying machine design. Surprisingly, none of the shots of the flying machine in Young Sherlock Holmes include miniatures. West recounted to Cinefex that an aviation company that worked on the film Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines (1965) built a full-scale flying machine with a 25-foot wingspan, which production then tinkered with to make it functional.

Getting the flying machine in the air included two 120-foot cranes. “They were tower cranes,” West told Cinefex, “like those used for building skyscrapers, one on either end of the flight path. We had a stretch cable between them, and the machine was on runners. We attached all our own runners and rails, as well as the raising and lowering mechanisms.”

A Whole New World

One thing was clear from the beginning with Young Sherlock Holmes: Muren and the creative team behind the film wanted the effects to look as photoreal as possible. A challenge that, in the mid 1980s, even Sherlock Holmes could appreciate.

While many of the Computer Division’s projects at the time were focused on animation, Muren wanted to see if their technology could make the jump to photoreal effects. As Muren tells ILM.com, “I just needed to see if this technology had the controls necessary to make something look 100% real or not.” The sequences in Holmes that needed heavy visual effects were mostly split into discrete sections where characters experienced hallucinations, giving Muren the opportunity to use different methods throughout the film.

CG effects had been used in films by ILM before, most notably the Genesis sequence in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), another collaboration with the Computer Division. But that sequence was intentionally not photoreal, and Muren knew from seeing other tests that in many cases reflections were too high, edges were too sharp, or the shots were missing essential shading and shadows to achieve a more realistic feel.

A CG test done by Triple-I ahead of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) involving five X-wings in flight increased Muren’s desire to play around with this emerging tech. “Triple-I’s test didn’t look photoreal, but they did a camera maneuver with the ship that there’s no way we could have done, and it looked pretty neat,” says Muren. “So it’s another temptation. This thing was out there, and I wanted to get it on a show and figure out how to do it.”

Muren decided to tackle the effects-heavy sequences as a bake-off, doing each one in a different way and seeing if a clear winner emerged. “With the stained glass man, that looks small enough, so let’s try CG, right?” Muren recalls, “If we find out in two months it’s not working, we can back off and do it another way.” For other hallucination sequences, Muren planned to use rod puppets in front of a blue screen and utilize Go-Motion with motion blurs.

Bringing Hallucinations to Life

The hallucinations in the film result from poisonous darts the cult’s leader, Professor Rathe (Anthony Higgins), uses as he seeks revenge against enemies from his past.

In one hallucination sequence that opens the film, an accountant, Bentley Bobster (Patrick Newell), sees his pheasant dinner attack him in a restaurant. After retreating to his home, Bobster sees the serpent handles on his coatrack turn into actual snakes that wrap around him and bite at his face. After the lamps in the room appear to start spitting out fire, Bobster leaps from his window to escape the flames.

In other hallucination sequences later in the film, Professor Waxflatter is attacked by harpy statues in an antique store. His niece, Elizabeth Hardy (Sophie Ward), finds herself fighting off skeletons at the bottom of a grave. Cameraman Michael Owens handled the motion-control programming and lighting for the harpy sequence, and the Go-Motion animation performed by Tom St. Amand.

David Allen supervised the startling hallucination that young Watson experiences in a cemetery, which manages to be equally hilarious and disturbing. After being shot with a toxic dart, the ever-peckish Watson sees a wall of pastries. After he grabs one to eat, it comes to life in his hands and wraps a vine around him, knocking him to the ground. The other pastries soon leap off the shelves and start shoving whipped cream into his mouth.

Muren directed Allen and his crew to use rod puppets to bring these pesky, chaotic, and downright naughty desserts to life. The individual puppets were made of rubber and were approximately eight inches high. Each puppet had rods coming out of their elbows, torsos, heads, and legs with three or four puppeteers moving them in unison. Notes Muren, “Each element was shot in front of a blue screen, so when we combined them, twelve pastries would be in the same shot.” Since each puppet was shot separately, it took two to three days to shoot the eight to twelve pastries that would appear in each shot with Watson.

According to Muren, the pastry sequence in Holmes is a throwback of sorts to the mouse puppet Topo Gigio, who was manipulated by black rods in front of a black background in the early days of television. “It’s all how you angle it,” says Muren, “how you frame the shot. If you shoot the wrong way, you can have a rod go in front of the carrier’s face. So all the performances have to be manipulated to make sure the rods don’t go in front of the figures, or else you’ll see this black thing that will tip off audiences. It’s not using Go-Motion. It was all done by hand and mostly at real speed. I think at times we slowed it down to make it look a little more staccato from what the puppeteers could do. Adding a little more whimsy to it.”

Before sending the shots to the rotoscope department to remove the rods and the puppeteers, they stacked black-and-white footage of the multiple puppets and viewed the scene on a Moviola to make sure the performance had worked out as expected. Shots then went to optical for matting work and printing. “It was complicated. It’s not against black like the spaceships in Star Wars, so it was pretty difficult stuff,” adds Muren.

Six Months for Seven Shots

The Lucasfilm Computer Division, via its graphics group, had previously created a terraforming planet simulation, better known as the “Genesis demo sequence,” for The Wrath of Khan and a CG spinning hologram of the Death Star in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983).

Muren went into the stained glass knight sequence – where a knight jumps out of a stained glass window in a church and walks towards a priest experiencing a hallucination – knowing that creating it digitally may not work. They had to have a backup. And Muren had to sort out how a walking CG character might look. “Should it look like the knight is a walking, full-size, flat glass figure, simply cutout from the window? That didn’t seem very threatening and too literal for a nightmarish hallucination. What if it wasn’t flat but a man-sized three-dimensional glass figure of the knight? Maybe. We also tried some other ideas but nothing really popped.”

The one design that did pop came from Muren’s wife, Zara, who suggested that the knight could jump out of the window in its many individual glass pieces that magically reassemble without touching each other when they land, making something like a hanging mobile but without the strings. Each of the pieces could twist and turn to make up the knight’s figure which could be moved and animated as one menacing figure.

To make the knight even more menacing, Muren asked the visual effects artists to make each piece of glass of an inch thick with sharp jagged edges. Some of the pieces were bowed in the middle, convex pushing out from behind, so they were domed and coming towards the priest, making it appear more aggressive. “Everything in movies is feelings,” notes Muren. “And if I didn’t feel it, and the audience didn’t feel it, then you’re just telling a story, and you might as well be doing it by telephone.”

This was all done before shading and motion blur in CG shots were the norm, and Muren leaned on the fact that the knight was a hallucination, so it didn’t have to be as real-looking as ships flying through space. The seven shots of the knight took about six months to complete and included some of the first digital composites.

“George’s graphics group had been making an input-output scanner as a prototype,” said Muren, “and that was so troublesome because it was so cutting-edge that it would often break down unexpectedly. I think out of every input scan, it was 10 or more times before it would make it through as few as 120 frames.”

The entire knight sequence lasts less than a minute in the finished film. It starts with a wide shot showing the church’s stained glass window bowing a bit before the knight breaks out and lands on the ground. While many traditional matte paintings made with oil paints were used in Young Sherlock Holmes to recreate exteriors of Victorian London and a pyramid temple, for the opening shot of the knight sequence, matte artist Chris Evans created the first CG image used as a film background. “I remember,” says Muren, “it took him a really long time to do it because the tools were so hard to use. The paint program was in existence, but it was very slow to use, to be able to paint and get the brush strokes right.”

After breaking out of the window, the knight’s 100-plus pieces reassemble as he lands on his feet, holding up a large sword. The next few shots depict the knight walking menacingly towards the priest. As the knight walks past the camera, audiences can see through the backside of the knight’s glass.

“It was all shot very traditionally,” explains Muren. “I shot a lot of plate backgrounds of the church.” In addition to footage of the priest, the location also had several candles and mist. When Muren returned from shooting, he still wasn’t sure exactly how they were going to pull this off or if it was going to work at all. “It could all hit a limit where the blacks or the whites never match. There were all sorts of things that could go wrong. I didn’t know what was going to work and what wasn’t. So I shot for any technique we were going to use.”

The next step in the process was getting the digital technicians to constrain their tools to what the eye sees on film. “A lot of what’s made for software manipulation, whether it’s brightness, camera movements, or distance, go to infinity,” said Muren. “So part of the process is constraining it down to what film records. We don’t want to go above or below what film records as black and white, even though the software could go beyond that. When it is constrained to the world of photography, then I can start to understand it again.”

Muren and his team also “cheated” what audiences saw through the glass of the knight at times. “What you see through the glass, let’s say a yellow piece of the knight, is brightening up the color that’s on the glass, not what you would really see if you held up all those color pieces where parts of the background of a yellow piece were blue and yellow. That would appear grey, which would take you out of the drama of the scene. So the whole transmission through the glass, what you see on the other side, is black and white. You can’t tell because it’s got this yellow, but it’s a cheat, just black and white to light it up. We did a lot of that later in The Abyss with the water snake, all the refractions in the rooms, we cheated all the way through.”

All About the Blur

A key element to achieving realism in the stained glass knight sequence was understanding the importance of motion blur, where objects on-screen shot at 24 frames per second appear blurry as they are in motion. The problem was that at the time, ILM had yet to develop the ability to digitally render blurs. “We’re used to what those blurs look like,” says Muren. “They make things look fluid. That’s very important for an effect to look real because the rest of the movie has got that in it. I didn’t want the stained glass knight to look like it came from ILM, that it was stuck onto the background.”

To help achieve the blur effect, every frame in the knight sequence was rendered nine times in slightly different positions. As the render time in 1985 was so long, one primary frame would be rendered at a higher resolution than the rest to save time. The result was a blur made up of a number of static pictures. “So you put them all together, and you’re doing this 24 times a second, and each of these blurs has eight pictures in it that are kind of similar, but some are weaker on the outside, and some are strong in the middle – then it all looks like a normal blur.”

This experience pushed Muren and the Lucasfilm Computer Division to learn more and create the tools to execute their vision for the finished shots. “It was an introduction to them and to me,” explains Muren, “about what you could do. Motion blur, overexposure, underexposure, tracking or hanging the camera around. I hadn’t really thought about how you have to track the camera with the background. For a camera guy like me, who understands filmmaking technically, I could go in there and say, ‘Can we get this tool?’ ‘We need that one too.’ And they would 99% or 100% of the time come up with it in either hours, or they already had it, and they just adjusted something, or they could write something for it, within a few days.”

A Wealth of New Tricks and Tools

It’s almost impossible to list all of the innovations and challenges the Young Sherlock Holmes effects crew faced during postproduction. The film not only includes the first CG character but also broke ground in developing digital matte paintings and digital compositing. In order for ILM artists to match camera movements from the live-action set into a computer’s 3D space, they projected footage shot on location in England with gridlines over it onto a computer screen. A new preview system gave creators the chance to work with a simple black-and-white wireframe of an image, so they didn’t have to wait for an image to be completely rendered to continue working on the shot.

To record the computer animation back to film, a laser scanner was used that could only print approximately one frame a minute, so each second of footage would take 24 minutes to complete. “I don’t think I rendered anything at 4K or even scanned it out because it was just taking too long,” recalls Muren. “We just did everything at either 1 or 2K. At least the tool was able to change and wasn’t locked into 4K, or we’d still be working on the film today.”

Among the most challenging shots to finish in the film was a panning shot of the knight coming toward the audience. “I think John [Lasseter] came up with the idea of panning the camera,” says Muren. “I didn’t even know if we could match the camera’s pan in the computer. When we shot it, I had somebody walk by and the operator followed as a reference. Then they shot the actual plate without the person in there. It took a while to get that, but it wasn’t hard once we figured out we could do it. It was somebody trying to track it manually every frame in 3D space because we didn’t want the stained glass knight to be locked into a candle that’s seven feet farther back. It had to be locked into them, closer to the camera.”

The final shot was a side view of the priest and the knight raising his sword above his head in a threatening way. Muren asked engineer Bill Reeves if they could add a glint of light to the sword blade for a dramatic end to the shot. “They didn’t know how to do that, how to put a light to reflect a certain thing, but they had all of the spatial information.” Muren suggested they track the shot backward, look at where the camera was, the angle of the sword, and then put a digital light there. “No one’s going to know that you cheated that light and it didn’t take a lot of time,” explains Muren. “That’s what we always do in moviemaking. What you care about is what the camera sees.”

Shortly after Holmes hit theaters, the Lucasfilm Computer Division was spun off into two pieces – one half funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as Pixar, the other half as the digital editing company known as DroidWorks. In Young Sherlock Holmes’s 1 hour and 49 minute running time, ILM artists used just about every tool they had access to at the time, including a few newly invented ones. The seeds planted during their effects work would pay off in the ensuing years with a computer-generated water creature in The Abyss, the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the latter directed by one of Holmes’s executive producers, Steven Spielberg.

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Amy Richau is a freelance writer and editor with a background in film preservation. She’s the author of several pop culture reference books including Star Wars Timelines, LEGO Marvel Visual Dictionary, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: A Visual Archive. She is also the founder of the 365 Star Wars Women Project – that includes over 90 interviews with women who have worked on Star Wars productions. Find her on Bluesky or Instagram.

ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, four artists from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and London studios share insights about their work on the 2025 Netflix production, The Eternaut.

Supervising Art Director Fred Palacio

During pre-production, one of the key ideas here was to show how the characters were trapped in the city, isolated from the external world. The snow here is the first lethal weapon that killed most of the population, but something else is happening. A barricade along the Puente Saavedra shows that something else is happening, something more extraordinary. This keyframe shows the character isolated against all the odds, the snow, the loneliness, the urban chaos. 

One of the most important things working on the project was to have the vision of the people who live there when this is happening. The Client and the novelist were from Argentina where the film is played. So the first step for authenticity was to become immersed in the Argentinian world. Diving into memories of the city I visited and merging with an exact location, walking through street views online. Finally, translating the situation into a frame, one by isolating the character, but also using the bridge to undermine his power, the point of view and camera position is determinant to sell the situation of the character. 

The resilience to overcome the giant wall made of all sorts of human-made things to suggest the Alien presence, even the sign in the bridge is a message to the viewer translating “everything has a prelude.” The element here needs to reflect how an ordinary man in an ordinary world resists all the extraordinary events and obstacles. The green bag means a forward action, the red light tells not to go back, the perspective of the bridge points back to the car and another figure hinting to cohesion…all these elements tell something about the story but also about the character’s attitude toward those obstacles.

Art Director Amy Beth Christenson

This is an early study for a specific neighborhood in Buenos Aires, just after the snowfall, where Juan is discovering the aftermath. I worked to position cars and people so that it conveyed a sense that what happened was sudden and unexpected. I researched the original comic quite a bit, and also did a lot of research to make sure that the specific neighborhood was accurate so that it felt very real.

I like the sense of a rosy pre-dawn, almost peacefulness to the scene, which is a contrast to what has happened. Looking at the day-to-day life images of people, and thinking about what it would look like if they were taken mid-stride, gave me ideas, like a woman walking her dog, people carrying groceries, etc., which helped the images feel more eerie.

I was on the project just for the very early initial concepts, specific to the immediate aftermath of the snowfall, and what those moments might look and feel like, and didn’t iterate beyond these. At these early stages, I wanted to get ideas for lighting and composition down early, and worry about details later.

Art Director Tyler Scarlet

This piece depicts alien creatures that are about two feet tall and who can work in a pack. The client really liked the look of microscopic dust mites, so I used that as a starting point and expanded from there. They responded to different elements from my first round, so I worked on combining the hard-shelled version with one that looked similar to a dust mite. The next step was to show it in action. I explored concepts of it attacking people, wrapping bodies in its web, and dragging them away. They are also scavengers so I did an illustration showing that as well. 

For the first pass I wanted to give the client a range of different types of creatures while still fitting the brief of a six-limbed dust mite-like creature. One version was very close to a realistic, large dust mite, another version had a hard shell, jointed legs and claws at the end of its limbs to grip onto its prey, and the third version was more aerodynamic and looked like it was built to move fast. I like how it looks when it’s coiling its web around its victim! [laughs]

This client was one of my favorites I have worked with. They came to every meeting with such excitement, passion, and appreciation. 

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See the complete gallery of concept art from The Eternaut here on ILM.com.

Learn more about the ILM Art Department.