Today, our version of The Wizard of Oz is being released by Chronicle Books! Also, re-releases of Jane Eye, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Oliver Twist are also out today, with brand new covers!
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we created this scene, GREEN, from The Wizard of Oz.
For the Emerald City, we first bought many cheap dollar store tubes for blowing bubbles. We poured the bubble solution into a big container, then washed out the tubes.
Then we carefully glued the tubes together with a hot glue gun.
Next, we slathered ordinary white glue onto the tubes, and then sprinkled green glitter over the tubes. We repeated the process for various dollar store cups as well.
After that, a whole scale model set was created from styrofoam, model grass, plastic sheeting and other materials. The outdoor set had “fake” perspective built in. As you can see, the road gets smaller in real life to create the illusion of distance and perspective.
The largest bricks on the Yellow Brick Road in the foreground are styrofoam bricks painted yellow, the medium distance bricks are molded plastic sheeting, and the road in the distance is textureless, painted vinyl sheeting cut into a winding path.
The foreground grass is heavily textured moss sheets, the mid-range grass is finer-scaled model-train grass, and the grass in the distance is created with a very fine-scaled model grass “powder”.
Here’s a look from the other direction. As you can see, the glittered tubes and cups are set up as the Emerald City.
Lastly, we added a little digital magic. We touched up the sky, and added a digital rainbow, and voilà — we’re off to see the Wizard!