When George Lucas first thought of making Willow, he realized at that time, some ten to twelve years ago, that the special effects technology was nowhere near advanced enough to bring a complex fantasy film like Willow to life. Since that time, filmmakers have tried to capture the flavor and style of high fantasy on film with little and even dismal results. "I think there are a lot of fans out there who would embrace this type of film if it were done successfully," says Associate Producer Joe Johnston. "Recently, it hasn't been done well. It's been tried many times but it's always kind of missed the boat. I think we're going to see a big fan response for Willow." Prior to Willow's release, the teaming of Lucas and Ron Howard brought with it a great deal of excitement and high expectations laced with a certain amount of caution. Would this new entry into the fantasy genre rejuvenate this type of film or cast it into oblivion?

Willow's first encounter with the 9 inch tall Brownies.

With some films, the effects don't have to be perfect or even very good for that matter to be successful at the box office. As long as all the major elements--acting, story and direction--are well done, any flaws in the effects work can be overlooked. But as Dennis Muren, one of the effects supervisors on Willow realized even upon reading the script, the special effects would either make or break the film.

"It looked like an incredibly difficult special effects film," states Muren. "One of the biggest things was the Brownies who are literally throughout the entire film. They're in so many scenes that it becomes quite difficult to try and make them look like they are really in the scenes--and doing them with real people, not dolls or anything like that. I think the Brownies have got to work if the film is going to work because these two characters are special effects all the way through."

Yet how does a director work with two actors who are shot entirely in post-production and never interact with the other actors in the film? Basically, the effects team told Ron Howard to be as free with them as if they were actually there. "In other words," says Muren, "don't feel very much constraint when directing to keep them on one side of the frame and not cross over to where the actors are. Do what you would want to do if they were really there. The technique that was used to put them in the film was something that I developed for the shot in The Empire Strikes Back where you're flying along with the ice fields, you tilt down and see the Tauntaun running across the snow. That was the first time that was used. It's an approach where you photograph the object you want to put in a scene and you photograph it full frame, you don't shoot it real small like it's in the scene. We were shooting the Brownies very big in the frame, full size, while they're walking on treadmills or something and they're reacting to what's going on. But we're not making them real tiny yet. We're making them real big so we have a good image. Then that film is rephotographed. And when it's rephotographed, it's matched to fit into the background scene that was shot in England. That can be done by one person. John Knoll is using that technique on this film. And because the camera's panning or tilting and the Brownies are supposed to be walking on the ground they need to be positioned every single frame of the film to be matched with the ground they're supposed to be walking on. It's a time consuming process, but with just one person doing it, it's not very expensive."

Another technique used to integrate the Brownies more realistically into the action was the greater use of moving plates instead of static plates, which are usually establishing shots. "We tried to do a lot of moving plates," notes Johnston. "Instead of just static backgrounds, which is usually the way it's done, we did a lot of moving plates with panning and dollying. I think the effect will be that the Brownies are really in the scenes instead of just being stuck on. A lot of times in pictures like this, when you're adding an effect in post-production, it always goes into a static plate. And no matter how fast the action sequence is it always kind of slows it down when you have to cut to a plate with an effect in it because you know it gives it away as an effect. We did a lot of camera moves and tried to keep the visual style consistent with the live action."

The actors playing the Brownies were actually filmed against a blue screen and, at times, on extra large sets and then later integrated with the rest of the footage already shot.

Johnston acknowledges this type of work has been done before. "I don't think it's ever been done to quite this degree. I don't know if it's ever been done this ambitiously. It's essentially shooting full-sized people and reducing them to look like little people in a scene. We put them into scenes that are not blocked off, that aren't static. We put them into moving backgrounds."

However, not all the shots of the Brownies were done against a blue screen and carefully matched up with the rest of the film footage. Extra large sets were used in some instances, such as the wagon chase sequence. "That wasn't done very often, but a few times," says Muren. "The Brownies are usually with people and the stuff was designed so most of the time you saw them with people and they were really relating to the people. They weren't just over to the side, they were right there with the person. A normal sized person is maybe picking up a Brownie by the back of the Brownie's coat and putting him in his pocket or the Brownie's in the top of a handbag Willow's carrying with him and the saddlebag of a horse. When a lot of this miniature work is done they sort of keep the miniature people off to the left or to the right and they don't really touch each other very often."

Since Willow is such a different looking film than other movies heavy with effects, how would Muren compare it to the variety of other projects ILM has worked on? "There's no comparison at all. They're entirely different. In this show we're dealing with real settings for the backgrounds and that stuff is always difficult to do. In the Star Wars films a lot of what we did was create the entire environment. So they're two entirely different kinds of effects films."

Willow also incorporates a greater variety of effects than most films: from tried and true matte paintings to state of the art image processing.

At one time, stop-motion animation, the tedious process of shooting a series of single shots of a creature which is moved a small amount between each shot, was cast aside for the newer computer-controlled technique of go-motion, which uses rods attached to the creature to create smoother movements not possible with stop-motion. Once the armature or skeleton for the creature is made and its body sculpted from clay, a mold is made and filled with a flesh-like foam called schram. Then all the trimmings such as eyes and texturing are added to create and breathe life into a two-headed monster unlike anything seen before.

Dennis Muren (far right) working on the fairy forest sequence at ILM.

"We also had talking animals in this," states Muren. "They tried it with puppets, but it didn't work. So we cartooned-in just the mouth and matted that into the real animal. It worked amazingly better than anyone expected. Most of the work was done by a company called Available Light in Los Angeles and they're a real good animation house. We were just too booked up here between Willow and Who Framed Roger Rabbit that we couldn't handle that in our own animation department."

Most of the type of effects work in Willow has been done to some degree before, but there was one sequence which Muren admits has never been done at ILM. "We've got a sequence that's image processed. There's a time in the film where Fin Raziel changes in a span of about thirty seconds from a goat into an ostrich, a peacock, a turtle, a tiger and then into herself. And that's a big thing. We've never done anything like that and I don't think anybody else really has either. It was done in a series of four shots. It wasn't treated like most of the transformations that have been done for other films or done in close-ups. What we did was essentially doing the thing in just four shots and they're pretty much all long shots where you just see the transformation happening."

In addition to the transformations of Fin Raziel, the go-motion of the Eborsisk and the integration of the Brownies with the live action there is another major sequence unlike anything else in this film--Willow's meeting with the Fairy Queen Cherlindrea. "At that point in the story, Willow doesn't know what's going on or how he's related to events happening around him in the movie. So the queen of the fairies comes down and sort of gives him a mission and tells him what he needs to do and that he is a special character in what's going on at the moment. The sequence involves a dream-like, smoke-like fairy queen that floats through the air and talks to Willow and radiates little glowing lights. It's a very magical sequence."

In order to create her glowing translucent and fluid-like appearance, ILM overexposed the film four stops and attached a diffusion filter on the camera lens. Cherlindrea hangs in place, suspended from wires as the camera, mounted on a tulip crane, is pushed in various directions by grips. Then shoot the film at forty-eight rather than the normal twenty-four frames per second and add a few fans and the effect is complete--Cherlindrea.

Willow will undoubtedly be considered one of the most complex two hours of effects work to hit theaters in a long time.