Setting Oz on Fire and Other Details: Making The Wizard of Oz
In the two videos below, we explore the making of three scenes from The Wizard of Oz: Apple Orchard in Oz, The Tin Woodman's Cottage and On the Yellow Brick Road. There's a lot happening in this one part of the forest, with the fight with the apple trees, Dorothy discovering the Tin Man and the arrival of the Wicked Witch. So instead of designing one fixed view, I built the space as a 200 degree arc and moved the camera to three positions, giving each moment in the story its own scene.
From there I talk through building the yellow brick road, where getting the bricks to follow the curve of the road took days, and the cottage itself, where ivy and long grass hint at how long the Tin Man has been rusting there. Off in the distance there's a waterfall with a faint rainbow in its mist, which gave me the chance to add a flock of birds flying over the rainbow.
For the Wicked Witch's entrance, I paid homage to the red smoke effect from the MGM film and pulled all the warmth out of the lighting. Her fireball is built into the projection, so schools and community theatres that can't create one on stage have it ready to go. The script stops at the fireball, but I kept going and set the whole forest on fire, then had to work out how to make it disappear again.
The scenes featured in these videos are available in the StageScape Projections library. Click below to explore each one:
