Practical Perspective Tricks in WILLOW
Or, Having Fun With Size!
Willow (2022) uses a lot of puppets and practical effects along with CGI, often all together.
The following scenes from 1.05 “Wildwood,” involve a lot of practical and digital tricks, and happen in broad daylight which adds a degree of difficulty, but more importantly says “LOOK how fun this is!”
Let’s break down some perspective techniques to use, from trickier shots like handing objects from one character to another, to using ‘regular’ shots around the trick-perspective shots to seamlessly stitch the whole thing together.
Establish Things! Including Relative Size
The scene begins with a POV shot which makes Willow loom large as though he’s peeking into a mouse hole; setting us up to expect someone/thing small. Making a board with holes to shoot through: piece a’ cake.
The next shot focuses on Ganush and the house, with Willow in 1/3 of frame close the the camera.
Followed by what would usually be an establishing shot, a wide showing everyone in relation to each other.
These could be done a few different ways, pending your resources: you could shoot everything except Rool and Ganush practically, and comp those two in; you could shoot many pieces separately in the same space and composite or ‘stitch’ them as needed; you could shoot some elements / characters in one space and others against a green screen and put them together.
Pending the relative size of your characters, you could do what Lord of the Rings did for many many shots, and go practical, essentially “put these people near the camera and those far away.” From overhead, the setups would look something like this:
Lensing, Lighting, Eyelines
The house being practical and shot with and Willow and Graydon makes a lot of sense, and then the size of the house would depend how much trickery is needed.
The real tricks for shots like this are:
Choosing the right lens. Long lenses are often used to ‘compress’ middle ground and make far-away objects seem closer to people in the foreground, like this shot from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or this one from Stand By Me.
Lighting everyone to seem they’re sharing the same space.
Cheating all the eyelines properly, so the characters seem to look at each other even though the actors are staring at a tennis ball.
But a scene is more than perspective shots; you want to create a whole feel so the conversation can flow, and the audience just accept the ‘givens’ of characters; here Rool and Galush.
Angles and Composites
Those shots in this scene (below) involve some high-angle shots of Rool and Galush looking small, closeups of Willow filling the screen, shrunk-down over-the-shoulders of Ganush composited over a medium shot of Willow (note that Ganush is out-of-focus, as we would expect her to be if the camera was looking at an in-focus Willow from behind a real 6-inch person), and a couple shots of Willow and Graydon with more forest behind them to create the illusion they’re really in that space and not standing in the middle of a large stage with tiny prop houses and probably a few green-screened elements (more on that in a sec).
Other little touches all add to the feel; note how Rool’s and Ganush’s voices are pitched higher, and Willow looks towards the other house when there’s a disturbance and the curtain in the doorway sways; all this adds to the feel (as do leaves, as mentioned in the comment section).
In case you’re thinking this seems easy enough, with the right lighting and CGI artists) Willow ups the ante with a handoff!
Now, for something Really Tricky
How could you accomplish this? Using two shots helps it seem more realistic because the audience thinks ‘two angles!’, but also means you have a cut to help you ‘cheat.’
Note each setup is really two setups; one for Willow, one for Rool.
In a setup similar to Diagram 1: Willow reaches forward. Against a green screen, Rool walks carrying a giant (relative to him) leaf prop, then stands nice and still; that’s comped in against the house. Digital manipulation erases Willow’s fingers behind where the leaf ends up.
In a setup similar to Diagram 2: Rool stands in front of a green screen, holding nothing, keeping his arms VERY STILL. In the master shot, Willow picks up a smaller-sized version of the leaf prop.
The prop can be held up by a wire or tiny stand on the same plane as Willow
Digital tweaking around the leaf / Rool’s arms make the edges of the leaf disappear where it should be behind his arms from our perspective, so it seems he’s holding it.
Rool puts his arms down, and that shot is comped into Willow’s wide, with the timing matching the moment Willow takes the leaf from its stand / wires
The stand / wires get digitally erased
The two shots are cut together, then
The cut to a medium shot of Willow closely looking at the leaf is crucial. A real prop being manipulated finishes ‘selling’ that Willow really grabbed this from Rool.
Something Like That
My other ShotZero half Stu Willis did a “Making Of” for one of his music videos where he talks about using props and humans in unusual perspectives to each other; the really relevant bit starts at 3:53
Willow’s team would have used a wide combination of VFX, practical builds, lensing and lighting, green screen and comping, and more. You could partially or entirely green-screen in Rool’s house as well as the neighbours’ and have Warwick Davis looking at orange tape, but much of the background looks like models. You could use a wholly practical set and comp Ganush and Rule in. You could green-screen only the door and a few other key aspects of the practical set.
‘Back in the day’ we’d probably get a whole 10-minute BTS on this scene, or at least director’s commentary talking about the details of deciding how to shoot it. Nowadays you can’t even watch Willow on any platform, let alone get these kinds of bonus features.
It’s still fun to back-engineer ways we could make tricky or magical shots, and how we’d choose to shoot depending on set, props, time, and budget available.
It's a small thing, but I think part of the genius of this scene is that there are *leaves* behind, ad touching, Ganush's house: they give us a clear sense of scale *and* help the house feel integrated into the environment.