“In the anime, they give it color. So we leaned into the image of an F-22 engine, the heat distortion that it produces,” visual effects supervisor Marion Spates said in a new installment of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Netflix. “And then our last ingredient was whatever environment Aang is in, let’s just pull the material from there. So he’s pulling up sand, if he’s on a deck of a ship he’s pulling water from the ship.”

One of the hardest elements to nail down was water.

“In Episode 103 there’s a Katara character arc that is based on bending with the water whip. I find that water is something we all understand as humans and when water doesn’t obey the rules and laws of physics, it starts to break visually,” executive producer, director and VFX supervisor Jabbar Raisani said. “So I found it the most challenging, to take something that was water-bending-based to a fully realized version of that event.”

But before the visual effects come in, it starts with what’s captured in camera. For supervising stunt coordinator Jeffrey Aro, that meant pulling from kung fu movies.

“What was fun about ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ is that this is an homage to kung cinema. Water and earth are heavy in weight, Tai Chi is soft and fluid like water,” he explained. “Hung Ga, Wing Chun — these are southern style martial arts and we leaned on those because they’re hard and powerful, which reflects earth. Fire and air, they’re light and they move quickly so we went to the northern style of kung fu from China. Fire is explosive and sharp so we used Bajiquan, and to contrast that with air which is Baguazhang, it’s circular and unpredictable.”

Aro noted that he grew up on kung fu cinema, “so to be able to have something that my four and two-year-olds can start watching that they’ll grow up with, I’m really excited to be able to give them something that I think is timeless.”

Raisani said he came to the live-action series as a fan first.

“The first question I asked myself as a fan is, ‘Why are we making this into live action?’ And it was really to bring this to an audience that has never seen it before,” he said. “And for those of us that had seen it, to get to see it again through new eyes, that’s really what we sought to do is to widen the scope of people who were fans of ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender.'”

Spates reiterated that through the entire process, the original animated series was the north star.

“The most important thing was being true to the animated series and making sure that when anyone was watching the show, they felt like that was in that world.”

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” is now streaming on Netflix and has been renewed for two additional seasons.

The post ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Filmmakers Explain How They Visualized Bending for Live-Action | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“We’re really trying to hone in on the DNA of that style of musical that Oliver Putnam would create, given all of his various Broadway outings. It also has to exist in the context of the show ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ and each song has to play in a parallel track,” Pasek explained in a new installment of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Hulu.

“Even ‘Pickwick,’ can the character unwind and untwist his nervousness and performance anxiety and everything going on in his personal life to perform it?,” Paul added.

Pasek said working on the song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” was a “roller coaster of insanity.” It’s performed by Steve Martin and described as his character’s White Whale, and Pasek and Paul teamed up with legendary music duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”) to tackle the pitter-patter, alliteration-fueled song.

“We’d never written with them before but we got in the room with them and just had the most enjoyable time trying to come up with the most insane, complex [song] full of plosives, full of alliteration. Something that could be from ‘The Music Man’ but also meshed with the world of Oliver Putnam,” Pasek said.

Paul continued, “So we got in the room and it was sort of like, ‘Everybody let’s find as many couplets [as possible.] What’s the Venn diagram of infants and baby terminology with crime terminology?’”

Pasek said the four of them wrote the song in a Google Doc, and when it came time to shoot the big number they only had a couple of hours for Martin to land the difficult track.

“There are a lot of shots of the ensemble and much more of it is not acting than you think because a lot of it is them genuinely [bracing for Steve to nail it],” Paul said.

The joyful nature of this musical season extended to the score as well, and composer Siddhartha Khosla said the music he composed for the moment in which Martin’s character goes to “the white room” while rehearsing the “Pickwick” song was one of the hardest he’s composed for the series.

“I’ve never spent longer on a piece of music in this show,” he said. “I think I did like 10 versions of this thing. It was so euphoric and happy and French poppy. There’s fish bubbles coming through, there’s this percussion happening, I’m beatboxing in it and then at one point [showrunner John Hoffman] called me and he’s like, ‘Can you do raspberries on it?’ and I’m like, ‘John, what are you talking about?’ I put a microphone on a doorstop and my son would flick the doorstop. The kitchen sink was in this.”

Pasek summed up his time on “Only Murders in the Building” this way: “It’s an experience that I hope we get to do again but I don’t know if anything will reach that level of just pure, pure joy.”

The post ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Composer and Songwriters on the ‘Pure Joy’ of Crafting Season 3’s Big Musical Numbers | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“We were working on that look for more than a year and we did a lot of tests with different noses and eyebrows,” director and executive producer Andrés Baiz told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Netflix. “It was very, very hard and difficult to find. Sophia and I, we didn’t feel it until very late in the process.”

One of the keys to the transformation came in the form of make-up artist Todd McIntosh, who didn’t join the production until days before filming began when the prosthetics and teeth had already been designed.

“My job was to jump in, figure out how to make all of that work and then add in the beauty makeup and the actual character makeup,” McIntosh said.

Baiz said from the very beginning, the team wanted Vergara to look different but they didn’t want to “take it too far into the real Griselda.” Finding that balance was paramount to making the limited series work.

“As we move through the story and she is aging, we made a very conscious decision not to make her decrepit or aged,” McIntosh explained. “It was a little bit of stipple around the eyes, a neck waddle which is the first thing that starts to age. She looked haggard rather than old, which I think is the right look.”

Authenticity was also key to “Griselda,” not only in casting Vergara – who is bilingual – but also in the look and feel of the series as it captures Miami in the 1970s and 80s.

“Part of it is creating our own version of kind of a ‘70s film stock, very aggressive in the lighting at times, very gentle at other times” director of photography Armando Sales said. “Sophia is in the vast majority of the shots of the show. When she’s in her element, whether it’s because she’s using her wit and cunning to move forward or even the threat of violence, they’re generally powerful, centered frames where all the architecture is parallel lines and placing the background artists and the other actors in relation to her on like a power scale.”

Watch the full episode of How I Did It in the video above.

“Griselda” is streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Griselda’ Filmmakers Spent a Year Designing Sofia Vergara’s Transformed Look | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers enlisted help from Letters to Cleo bandmates turned television composers Kay Hanley (“Doc McStuffins”) and Tom Polce (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) to craft the music for the episode.

“I was a staff composer and producer for Paramount so I’ve done a lot of musical situations that fell outside the scope of just normal score,” Polce told TheWrap during a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Paramount+.

“Initially they called me to just sort of discuss what would a musical in ‘Strange New Worlds’ be, and logistically what do we need to know? In five weeks, there’s no way I can do this alone so I called my sister Kay Hanley.”

“We’ve known each other since our early 20s,” Hanley added. “I’ve written for television but I’ve never had to write lyrics or melodies for characters that have such historical depth. Working with Tom, I was able to, as a lyricist especially, really dig deep because I trust him.”

Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura in the series, originally thought the pitch to do a musical episode was a joke.

“I thought it would be cool in theory – we have a lot of musical people, myself and Chrissy (Christina Chong) who plays La’an,” she said. “Then when I found out it was going to be an actual thing, it wasn’t just a joke anymore, I got really nervous.”

Gooding said each member of the cast met with Polce to find their individual vocal range, and from there the songs grew.

“We just wanted to share with him what our voices sound like,” she said. “I remember starting where I feel very comfortable which is in my lower register, and then we just kept singing higher and higher and higher and higher. We sort of found out what my range was so they sort of built the songs to live in that world.”

What began as only five or six songs soon blossomed into a nine-song episode.

Uhura’s big musical moment “Keep Us Connected” was the culmination of her entire arc up to that point in the series, according to Gooding, and even Hanley felt it.

“I’ve never cried writing a song in my life and I cried the entire time,” Hanley said of putting the number together. “In the shower, coming up with lyrics bawling. Writing that song for her was just one of the most powerful experiences in my life as a songwriter.”

While all those songs posed their unique challenges, Hanley said it was the finale “We Are One” that nearly killed them.

“This one broke my brain,” Polce said.

“Everyone needs to sing but what are they saying and why are they saying it?” Hanley said of the challenge in putting it together.

“At one point I was like ‘I need to know what this song is about’ and I said, ‘So is this just we’re all in this together, we need to work as one?’ Akiva was like that’s exactly what this is about,” Polce added.

“Rehearsing ‘We Are One’ with the cast on weekends was probably my favorite part of the musical episode,” Gooding said. “I love being able to try new things, get to see everybody and be silly and funny.”

Gooding said shooting the musical episode was a completely new bonding moment for the cast during Season 2.

“I feel like there’s something intimate and special about singing in harmony with someone else,” she said. “It just creates a bond that is pretty unbreakable and so the fact that we got this moment together as a cast family we’re bonded in a way that I don’t know if many other ‘Trek’ families are truthfully.”

Seasons 1 and 2 of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” are currently streaming on Paramount+.

The post ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Star and Songwriters Break Down the Emotional Heart of That Musical Episode | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“We’re digging into the worlds of the Yakuza, the worlds of the police force and the worlds of the Meicho Shimbun, so it’s not just that we need to follow the Japan of the moment, but we have to become experts of those subcultures at that time,” Rogers explained in the latest episode of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Max, discussing Season 2 of the series.

“I’ve always had a passion for trying to present a more understandable and authentic vision of Japan and its culture and its thought process to American audiences,” Poul added, noting that two early films he worked on in his career were “Mishima” and “Black Rain.”

“Subsequently, I was offered a film that I saw once again was going to be this sort of whitewashed version of what the Japanese are and I quit,” he continued. “And I closed the door on Japan for what ended up being like 30 years, but now people are really interested to get into other cultures. So I went to Max and said, ‘This is only going to work if it works for the Japanese audience.’”

That authenticity extended to star Ansel Elgort, who plays American investigative journalist Jake Adelstein in the show that follows his character’s deep-dive into the world of the Yakuza.

Elgort began taking Japanese classes in 2019 and is now fluent in the language, but Rogers said he developed very rigid rules for who speaks Japanese and English and when in the show.

“There are rules I designed — and Alan and I talked about this a lot — if this is going to be a show that’s very fluid in the back and forth, the world or scenes or characters obviously could only be in Japanese and certain moments are only going to be in English. Who, in a very hierarchical society, who is bilingual gets to choose when we’re making the shift?”

The show’s accuracy even extended to a very tense scene in the seventh episode of Season 2 in which Ken Watanabe’s character Katagiri fires his gun into the air – a moment lifted directly from the law at the time.

“We don’t know if anyone’s dead yet but Katagiri runs out and pulls out his gun and he shoots it in the air, and then he lowers his gun and by then the motorcycles are around the corner, away,” Rogers said. “That’s because in 1999, 2000 in the police force in Tokyo, it is verboten to ever shoot a gun if there’s anyone around until you’ve first fired it in the air to let everybody know that you’re gonna fire your gun.”

Poul, whose credits range from “Six Feet Under” to “Rome,” said the series has tremendous “emotional importance” to him.

“When I see the Japanese audience responding enthusiastically to the show, then I feel like we’ve really done our job.”

“Tokyo Vice” is now streaming on Max.

The post In ‘Tokyo Vice,’ Historical and Cultural Accuracy Drove the Show’s Portrayal of 1990s Japan | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“The prep for the overall show was huge. We worked in the ‘20s through the 1960s,” hair department head Teressa Hill said in the latest installment of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Apple TV+. “LA’s a bit of a character in the show as well. It was always about the period, the realism in the show and the characters involved,” production designer Cat Smith added.

One of the biggest challenges of making the series, which is based on the bestselling book by Bonnie Garmus and follows a chemist who creates a popular 1960s cooking show, was switching between time periods throughout the shoot – sometimes in the same day.

“We would get a shoot schedule and we would be doing maybe three decades within one day, so we had several wigs that we would actually put on one background artist then we’d switch her over to another look, and we had to do the same thing for Brie,” Hill explained.

The makeup for Larson’s character also evolved owing to her character’s journey throughout the series.

“She lost the big love of her life, went through such a hardship, and to become a TV show host was like the moment she kind of discovered herself again,” makeup department head Miho Suzuki said. “It was like the money afforded her the opportunity to be able to do that,” Hill added. “She created her own separate persona on ‘Supper at Six.’”

When it came to designing the sets – in particular the labs that play a key role throughout the series – set decorator Lori Mazuer said she and her team put a lot of work into finding labs that were as accurate to the period as possible. “And if we didn’t find it, we just ended up making it,” she revealed.

Another key set was the kitchen set for “Supper at Six,” the cooking show that Larson’s character hosts.

“The window treatments were very difficult because they were all from the ‘50s so everything had to be fabricated,” Mazuer said. “I used a form of architecture at the time, Hollywood Regency style, where everything was kind of exaggerated and then I exaggerated it more because TV does that.”

Watch the full installment of TheWrap’s How I Did It in the video above.

“Lessons in Chemistry” is currently streaming on Apple TV+.

The post ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ Team Had to Craft 3 Different Decades of Sets, Hair and Makeup: ‘It Was Always About Realism’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Set during a time when indigenous peoples in the area were tremendously wealthy owing to oil discovered on their land, “Killers of the Flower Moon” chronicles the horrendous series of murders that were designed to transfer ownership of the land back to white people, all told through the eyes of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio).

“History is fascinating, and you can’t begin to design a film until you know about the people and their backgrounds,” production designer Jack Fisk said in TheWrap’s latest installment of How I Did It, presented by Apple Original Films.

Fisk, whose filmography includes “There Will Be Blood,” “Days of Heaven” and “The Revenant,” said his first order of business was designing Mollie’s house, which plays a central role in the film.

“I needed to know what her house was like to understand her family,” he said. “When I read David Grann’s book, he suspected what her house might’ve looked like, but he never found it. I found what I think was the house in Gray Horse but it was too small to shoot in. But I picked an Osage house that had outside porches so I could put beds on it for sleeping, and in every bedroom we put two or three beds because the Osage would gather for dances and parties and they would just come and stay with their family and friends.”

Jacqueline West, the film’s costume designer, took particular interest in the blankets that adorned the Osage characters.

“Julie, my Osage consultant, she calls it the Osage mink coat because they were treasured,” West — whose expertise ranges from “Dune: Part Two” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — said of the designs. “But I always thought of it as armor. When Mollie would put it on to go into this town, it was us the Osage against you in your suits and ties.”

When it came to putting together the costumes for DiCaprio’s Ernest, West took inspiration from Tom Mix, Hollywood’s first Western star and actor in over 200 films from the early days of cinema. “I felt he would identify as a quasi-cowboy because of his uncle’s cattle ranch,” she added.

While the production set up shop in northeast Oklahoma where the events depicted actually took place, movie magic was needed to transform the landscape back to 1921. Some existing structures could be reworked, but Fisk couldn’t find a train station that fit for the film’s big opening sequence – so he built one.

“It was fun creating a train station because we couldn’t find one that looked like that,” he said. “And that was with the same plans of the train station in Fairfax.”

In casting the extras that populated each scene, Scorsese and his team found real descendants of those depicted in the film – many of whom wore pieces of clothing from their family members.

“Marty sort of gave us marching orders, he wanted it as real and natural as possible and as true to the Osage story,” Fisk said of the overall theme of the production. “That was great because I would like to approach it almost like a documentary, so I think it became our personal challenge to tell their story correctly.”

The post ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Design Team Felt a ‘Personal Challenge’ to Tell the Osage’s Story Correctly | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

As Greenwood said, fans may feel they had a Barbie Dreamhouse exactly like the one Margot Robbie’s Barbie lives in within the movie, but that’s not possible because of how Greenwood and Spencer mixed and matched elements from the Mattel toyline’s past. It’s really a cherry-picking of all the various eras of the famous doll.

“She [Gerwig] wanted a place that wasn’t full of disappointment. You open the present and it’s exactly what you want,” said set decorator Katie Spencer. “It is that idealized version of a remembered past.”

The team had the entire history of Barbie to work with and, as costume designer Jacqueline Durran has spoken about before, that required everyone to explore that history through a child’s lens.

“I wanted to make it multidimensional so that you could look at it [as a] child; the child would just enjoy it from a point of view of colors, but there was something else going on if you wanted to look at it [deeper],” Durran said while adding that the entire concept of “Barbie” was “very funny because I had no idea where it would lead us.”

The only narrative rule that was set came from how one plays with a doll, according to Spencer. It’s a sentiment echoed by Greenwood. “What is it to be a doll,” the production designer said. “That was the first big conversation … the philosophy of being toys.”

In the dance sequence that opens the movie, all the Barbies and Kens are dressed the same or are making similar choices, said Durran. That was coupled with some of Gerwig’s own favorite looks and all of that needed to be blended to create a cogent vibe between all the characters. “It had to have a real atmosphere and cohesion,” said Greenwood.

For the big dance sequence set to “Dance the Night Away,” Durran settled on white and gold and worked with Gerwig to nail down the specific colors of the costumes, then had to figure out how to make the variety of costumes work together. “I just had to work out a way to bring that cohesion back to the dance so that when you looked at it, it looked like a whole thing, not lots of individuals.”

Durran also stressed the importance of working closely with Greenwood, Spencer and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to ensure that the bold aesthetic choices would cohere.

Because of that hive mind in Barbieland, the colors had to be similar, but not identical. “The pinks behave so differently against other colors,” said Spencer. The team started with hundreds of different shades of pink before eventually whittling it down to 12 and 13.

“It was like an amazing firework,” Spencer said of the experience making the film.

Watch the full “How I Did It” in the video above.

The post ‘Barbie’ Designers Created a Dream House That Was an ‘Idealized Version of a Remembered Past’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“Society of the Snow” chronicles the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that went down in the heart of the Andes in 1972, killing 16 passengers and leaving the other 29 to band together and survive under harsh conditions.

“We were trusted with this story to tell that was a true story that happened to these people, that happened to their friends,” Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino said. “I like to say I put myself in the character and how would they feel? That’s OK if it’s Captain Kirk or Spider-Man. In this film in particular, it was a very uncomfortable question to ask yourself on a daily basis.”

Bayona and his team knew the plane crash would be central to the story, but bringing that to life necessitated a meticulous handle on the entire sequence that leaned on sound effects over score.

“We were scared of playing a lot of music in that moment,” the “A Monster Calls” director explained. “We didn’t want to make the audience feel like we were pushing them. You can get to the end of the film and the audience is so exhausted that they don’t feel anymore.”

“The engine was very, very high pitched and penetrating,” sound designer and supervising sound editor Oriol Tarragó said of the chilling sounds that populate the sequence.

When putting it all together, Bayona said he drew inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, specifically the shower scene in “Psycho.”

“It’s kind of like a suspense scene. There’s a long sense of anticipation, but at the very end, the survivors will tell you the worst moment is once we finally crashed against the snow and all the seats crushed like an accordion,” he said. “Suspense is all about the anticipation and then the shock.”

Bayona and Giacchino became friends over a decade ago, and through that time Bayona would show Giacchino his films to get the composer and director’s feedback. Giacchino, whose composing work ranges from “Up” to “Spider-Man: Homecoming” to Bayona’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” wrote the first piece of music for “Society of the Snow” the day after he saw the movie.

“I loved the movie so much I just immediately got right into it,” the composer said. “The next morning, after he left my house, I woke up and I wrote a piece of music and I sent it to him I was like, ‘Here, throw this into the cut.’”

That piece is music is still in the film nearly unchanged, and Giacchino sparked to the restraint of the music in the film that allowed the emotion of the characters – and their friendship – to shine through.

“The most important thing was to create that real friendship,” Bayona said of the film. “That bond that was created in the mountain, that society, that is what the film is about.”

“Society of the Snow” has been selected by Spain as its official entry for the Best International Film category at the Oscars. The film is in select theaters on Dec. 22 and on Netflix on Jan. 4, 2024.

The post ‘Society of the Snow’ Director J.A. Bayona and His Team of Artisans on Their Unique Approach to Telling the Emotional Story | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“One of the biggest challenges with this film, as with any music-based film, is trying to make the transitions from production dialogue to ADR dialogue to the characters singing in a studio, seem as though they’re natural,” said re-recording mixer Paul Massey in the latest episode of TheWrap’s How I Did It, presented by Warner Bros.

“As a re-recording mixer I’m joining the project quite late,” Massey said. “We have a mixture of so many different varieties of song: gospel, jazz, some of the big band numbers. The brass section must have had a hoot recording this cause you don’t get to play that that often.”

“Our movie oscillates between the crazy, ostentatious, rambunctious madness, but the heart of the film lives in all its intimate moments,” said director Blitz Bazawule.

For Bazawule, he wanted to create an established reason for why the characters are singing in this version, and that started with the very first shot. “One thing that’s gonna set this musical apart is that our music is gonna have a source,” he said. “Our first shot, when you hear those horses hooves and they start to build a cadence, you hear the girls clap, you hear the banjo, and then you hear [composer Kris Bowers] come in with that ‘whoa!’….the audience goes, ‘I buy that. It started somewhere.'”

“You don’t feel like you’re stopping a dialogue scene and starting a music scene,” said Poll.

Kris Bowers is no stranger to working with unique musical stylings, whether it’s rearranging classical compositions with “Chevalier” or creating a naturalistic story for this film. In the case of a dramatic scene like Celie (Fantasia Barrino) and Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) celebrating the color purple, the score had to complement, not overpower. “It’s a quiet conversation,” he said. “It’s a very simple conversation. The score should be intimate and personal. We recorded it with close mics and a slightly smaller ensemble.”

“When it’s quiet, that’s the hard work,” said Bazawule. “When it’s expansive and people are flying all over the place … no problems, because we can always make up for the error.” But there was absolutely no room for that with the scene of Shug and Celie. “Everything came down to that scene,” he said. “It’s about identifying the rare elements and the rare birds, honoring those rare things parallel to Celie’s life. Celie was the rare bird. She was the one no one paid attention to. She was that purple flower.”

“The Color Purple” opens in theaters on Dec. 25.

The post ‘The Color Purple’ Filmmaking Team on the Delicate Balance of Musical Sequences and Dramatic Scenes | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.