Special Effects in Oz

The hardest scene for Arnold Gillespie in the film was the tornado scene. Gillespie knew that he couldnt just sit around on a kansas farm waiting for one just to suddenly show up. So he created his own by making a tornado out of a wind shape cone sock that they use at airports. The whole tornado was made out of muslyn and was 30+ feet tall. Gillespie then attached the top of the tornado to the top of the sound stage to a gantry way that was across the top of the stage. He attached the bottom part of the tornado to a slit in the ground and then was attached to a car that moved along the length of the stage. Then Gillespie added huge wind fans, smoke , and fullers of earth to make it look like the tornado was throwing everything around.

Dorothy...........Dorothy

Another Special effect that had to be done in the "Wizard of Oz" was the sky writing sequence. The man who performed this sequence was a man by the name of Jack McMaster. He said "I had a glass tank six foot square, the bottom of the tank was glass. The sides were wood. The tank was only three inches deep; and the bottom was covered with an inch and a half of water mixed witgh calla oil. That was supposed to be the sky. The camera was beneath the tank, shooting up. The water and oil mixture was opaque, so it hid me. The miniature Which who did the skywriting was three eiths of an inch high, and the broom she was riding was a hypodermic needle. I filled the hypodermic with a combination of canned mild and nigrosine dye. I wrote SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE upside down and backward in the fluid in the tank, using the needle in place of a pen. I practiced for two months before I did it.

My hand wasn't in the tank, but the Witch and the broom needle were. The skywriting seemed to come out of the tail of the Witch's broom. To give the writing the appearance of smoke that was drifting, I had a fifty-gallon drum of water feeding into the tank. I had tinted the water the same milky color as the liquid in the glass tank. The water current was a stream like an air stream-blowing the letters apart." So now you all know the man behind the making of the sky writing scene, Jack McMaster.

Another special effect that sometimes causes questions or confusion is the bubble that Billie Burke made her apearance and disapearance in. The bubble that the Good Witch traveled in was none other then a 7-8 inch silver ball. It was kind of like a Christmas ornament but bigger. When they were fillming the ball, the ball didnt move at all. Instead the ball was mounted in front of a natural background and the camera moved twards the ball giving it the illusion of it getting bigger. MGM had ploted the course of the ball so that it would land in the right place of munchkin land. Camera men had to tie down the cameras to the floor so that there would be absolutly no movement of the cameras at all. Then they had the camera man shoot the Munchkin Land set under their direction.

Then the camera men double-printed it-put one piece of film over the other-so the ball would look transparent. Then, still with the same tied down cameras they had put in Billie Burke in the proper spot and filmed her. Then they lab- dissolved the ball out and Billie Burke was there. As you can see, the most complex special effects have the simplest explination.

The crystal ball was also equally simple. The crystal ball was a big huge giant glass bowl, it was not a solid ball although it looked like it was solid. They then used a process projector and they projected into the ball from the side with a mirror on a 45 degree angle. When the picture would hit the mirror it came up on a translucent screen. It was a very small translucent screen with the hollow boul placed on top of the screen.

So as you can all see "The Wizard of Oz" had many special effects that seemed to be really hard to make. But in the long run, some of the hardest most complex things have the most simplest explination.

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