Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
DIRECTOR : Zach Helm
PRODUCTION : Fox Searchlight Pictures, Walden Media
VFX SUPERVISOR : Pierre Buffin / Isabelle Perin-Leduc
VFX PRODUCER : Simon Vanesse
MAKING OF : Charles Labriet
MUSIC : Various Italian Composers - World at Work
NUMBER OF SHOTS : 140
Gallery
Production notes
The magical Emporium run by the eccentric Mr. Magorium is left to the unsure manager, Molly Mahoney, after his death. The store physically manifests its grief and anger at Magorium's death and takes it out on the customers and it's up to Molly and her young friend Eric, to restore the magical boutique to its happy self.
BUF's challenge on Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium was to incarnate on the screen the range of feelings the Emporium building goes through after losing Mr. Magorium. This work was divided in two parts: the transformation sequence of the walls when the store becomes sad and angry, and as second sequence transforming the store into an extinct and "depressed" location.
THE TRANSFORMATION
For this sequence, the store reacts as a human being expressing its sorrow and anger before fading when Marogium passes away. The challenge was to express these human feeling on various walls.
Through a long design research period we were able to propose many ideas to visually translate the psychological deterioration of the store through its walls, specifically on how the walls and the structure decay with grief. After research in the Parisian subway system and in many books and other sources dealing with abandoned places, we decided to create a superficial blister effect on the wall paint. Once the look of the effect was defined, BUF built a scale to represent this psychological evolution shot-by-shot, the scale representing the progression of the store's emotions via the intensity of the deterioration effect. A slow-moving and staccato-animated discoloration enabled us to build the first phase of the building's emotions. The effect is progressive, becoming more and more pronounced until the paint cracks. Blisters first appear in the corner and move across the wall, the paint blistering and cracking to the point that we can see into the wall and how it is decaying. This event underlines the force of the Emporium's feelings when it is either sad or angry.
THE EXTINCT STORE
The biggest challenge in this work came in fact after the shoot. It was only after the completion of principal photography that production decided it wanted the Emporium building to physically evolve in demonstrating it's emotions at Mr. Magorium's death. The actual shoot had the set walls painted in black during this specific sequence. To achieve the desired look BUF had to recreate red walls in 3D and have them evolve from red to dark gray. In the concluding shots of the sequence blinking lights were also added to dramatize this transformation. We also recreated in 3D the rocket on the podium, it's lift-off and the smoke escaping which represent the climax of the Emporium's nervous breakdown.
These shots required very precise alterations. The characters needed to remain as they were filmed during principal photography. This required us to find a very specific balance between the intensity of the treatment on the physical structure of the store and on the actors as they were originally filmed in the unaltered environments. A significant research period was necessary to arrive at a convincing range of color treatments we could apply. The actual treatment was done in four steps: preserve the colors of the characters, highly desaturate the set while preserving the warm-light sources, completely render the red wall in gray and lastly to harmonize and preserve the coherence of the entire sequence.