How ILM Created the Magical World of Willow

With the conclusion of principal photography, the wizards of Industrial Light & Magic began their work on WILLOW. The film's first major effects set piece would be the Faerie Forest sequence (chapter 18).

Dennis Muren, effects supervisor: "Near the beginning of the film, Willow and Migosh [sic] are captured and tied up like Gulliver by the Brownies. Just as they're about to pull them into their lair, the Faerie Queen, a vaporous creature, appears, startling the Brownies. She floats down and tells Willow exactly what his mission is and gives him the magic wand that causes him so many misadventures throughout the film."

The background plates of Willow and Migosh [sic] being dragged across the clearing by invisible wires had already been shot on location. On ILM's blue stage. the actors playing the Brownies were carefully choreographed against a painted blue background.

Muren: "The ropes coming off Willow's shoulders and legs are each pulled by five Brownies, so on stage, each of the five Brownie actors held onto a piece of real rope, except the last one, closest to Willow's body, who wasn't holding anything. A computer streak exposure added the matching piece of rope."

The visual appearance of Chirlindrea [sic], the Faerie Queen (Marie Holzoe), was the hardest part of the sequence to create.

Muren: "She had to be a very beautiful, gaseous apparition that appears in the forest at night . . . a lot of nice soft silk fabric pieces [were made] to drape her, and the we shot her on stage against black with filters that gave us a nice fog effect. It was George's idea to overexpose her about four stops and then to pump even more light on her so she looks burned out in the frame . . . .

"[Optical supervisor] Kenneth Smith then took her footage in optical and ran some tests to creat a gaseous trail which the ghost image trails behind her. The glints along the edge of her body, pulled from water reflections, appear to be smaller faeries that are flying around her all the time. It is a great looking image."

As two of the sequence's Brownies--Rool and Franjean--would go on to be featured in over 150 shots, Muren formed a special "Brownie Unit," headed by Mike McAllister.

Muren: "I worked out the techniques at the start as to how we were going to do this and then Mike followed the live action crew around the world shooting background plates for the Brownie sequences--he was actually on set through the whole shoot. Most of our shots are based on the idea of the scene in Bride of Frankenstein where Dr. Pretorius displays his miniature human creations. There's that amount of boldness applied to many of the 150 shots. The camera's always panning around and they are always seen standing on people shoulders and so on, so they look like they're right there--we didn't cheat! The Brownies were either shot live on great big oversized sets we built here, or else they were shot on blue screen and the re-photographed, reduced down and plotted in so that their movements match with the action in the background plate."

For the film's second major effects sequence, the attack of the two-headed, fire-breathing monster (chapter 40), Muren turned to stop-motion master, Phil Tippett (Robocop).

Tippett: "The monster is a cross between a shark, a dinosaur and an elephant. We tried to come up with something that was an amalgam of a lot of elements taken from various animals . . . we wanted to blend the lethal qualities and still retain a comic edge to the creature. It's a very traditional fire breathing dragon, and George insisted early on that it have a reality to it so it would seem like the real creature that gave rise to the mythical idea of dragons.

"We made two puppets for two separate setups. One was the complete creature and the other was two-thirds complete . . . the armatures were pretty conventional stop motion/go motion armatures, except that they were quite large--about three feet. There were about 40 shots altogether in the sequence . . . ."

Surprisingly, because the monster attacked its victims from a fairly stationary position, the animation proved a major challenge.

Tippett: "Basically, it's always standing in one place, so there wasn't a great deal it could do besides bend down to pick people up or blow fire at them. It was a very hard sequence to do because we had trouble finding motivation of his actions. Also, because it was a two-headed monster, we had double the work to do since both heads had to be moving all the time."

The third--and most groundbreaking--major effects set piece was Fin Raziel's transformation from goat to human (chapter 44). It was achieved totally on-camera through a combination of animal rod puppets and a new computer image processing technology known as morphing.

Muren: "It's all three master shots with no close-ups and very few cutting cheats. It's a very elaborate transformation. She changes from goat to ostrich to peacock to turtle to tiger before she finally returns to her human shape . . . it's pretty high tech--from turtle to the tiger will all be one shot, and we don't want it to look like ordinary lap dissolves, so we used the computer to blend each of the different shapes. Image processing means altering an image mathematically--it's the same technology used on computerized weather maps to show changes in temperature and density and so on. The same idea can be used to twist other images around. We're matching the movements and the shapes of two different characters and computing the blend from one to the other to make a continuous synthetic image. We're not generating images with the computer, we're merging two images that exist on film over a period of time . . . the computer decides at each stop of the transformation how one character is going to expand or contract to match the shape of the other . . . it's really like watching a plastic object transform from one shape to a completely different shape. The behavior of each of the animal stages as they undergo this painful metamorphosis makes the whole thing seem very real."

The final major effects sequence was the battle between sorceresses Bavmorda and Fin Raziel (chapters 49 & 52).

Muren: "It's pretty elaborate: one throws a fireball at the other, who counters with a blast of snow from her wand, turning the first one to ice. I was in England while they shot that to handle the on-stage aspects of it. For example, when the other Queen is hit by the fireball, we did a lighting effect on set that will tie into the optical effects we do here. Similarly, when the other Queen is hit by the snow ray, we shot nitrogen gas on stage. There were also physical rain and lightning effects. We shot our plates with the rain starting about eight feet from camera, so everything in the background is rain-soaked and then we added rain in the foreground optically. The optical rain and lightning all has to be synchronized to the on-set rained and lightning so it all looks like it's happening at the same time . . . ."

The confrontation's intricate closing effect was achieved through the use of ILM's newly developed motion control optical printer.

Muren: "When the Evil Queen loses, she turns into a bizarre blood-red smoky mist. We used strak animation to creat the effect. We did strak photography, incorporating a lot of programmable little patterns into our camera moves so the smoke looks like it has a life of its own. The effect is made up of many separate passes, and we were able to change the width and the shape of the streaks in each one. At the end, the Evil Queen turns to smoke and flies up into the grating in the ceiling and disappears."

For their part in creating a wholly believable fantasy world populated by Brownies, two-headed monsters and Faerie Queens, Industrial Light & Magic, like Willow Ufgood himself, received well-deserved recognition in the end--a 1988 Academy Award(R) nomination for Best Visual Effects.

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