It’s easy to believe that toys in a toy store might come alive, but the store itself? That was the challenge for the visual effects crews who put the magic into writer/director Zach Helm’s fantasy comedy Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. “It was a big challenge to develop how an inanimate object can become a character,” says Kevin Tod Haug, visual effects designer for the Fox-Walden film.

Although effects created by studios in Canada, Paris and Moscow are scattered throughout the film – a fire engine sirens out of a big inventory book with help from Satellite in Calgary, for example – the store gives an emotional performance in two major sequences.

In the first, at the end of act two, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) departs. “He dies, basically,” says Haug. To give that scene an emotional punch, Haug keyed the shot on a paper airplane. “Magorium tosses it and as he goes to sit down, the wake of the airplane draws the room away and it disappears.” Jay Randall of BarXseven animated the paper airplane and Mokko (Montreal) created the curtain wake that disappears the room.

But the finale is the store’s moment to shine, although not at first. Toward the end of the film, the store has become despondent. Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), the new manager, is insecure and not completely convinced that magic is real, and the store turns gray. When it comes back to life – as of course it does – the gray disappears and the room is colorful again. After trying a simple rainbow wipe to remove the gray and fade color back into the room, Haug and Helm decided that wasn’t magical enough for the most fantastical toy store in the world.

“We wanted to have the gray flake off and reveal colors underneath, to have it be as light as ash so if you blow on it, it rises up in the air,” Haug says. “We wanted something that comes off in a magical way.”

Three studios working in parallel created the magic: BUF (Paris) turned the room gray, Frantic Films (Winnipeg) covered the room with pixie dust and lifted it into the air, Dr. Picture (Moscow) animated all the toys that come to life when the room is reborn, and Frantic put the pieces together. “Luckily, the compositing supervisor at Frantic spoke Russian,” Haug says.

At the beginning of the sequence, everything in the room is gray, the toys on the tables, on the floor, and hanging from the ceiling. Molly points to a section of the room. The gray flies off, and twinkly particle dust floats in the air. She points to another, and another, until the store is full of color, and magical particles swirl around her when she moves. And then the toys come alive. “We had over a thousand animated elements in every frame at the end,” says Haug. All moving through the particles. At the end, Molly raises her hands. The toys settle back into their original positions. She lowers her hands, and the pixie dust falls away.

Glenn Neufeld, who was visual effects supervisor at Frantic for Magorium, managed the process. To give Dr. Picture a virtual set and camera, Frantic started at the end of the sequence, removing all the toys from the plates for the final four shots, a 1500-frame sequence of the toys animating in the room. “All of these shots were crane shots with the camera trucking, panning, tilting and zooming,” he says. “In one shot, the camera moved 40 feet from one end of the store to another. So it was quite a task to remove all the toys and reconstruct the set.”

Once the Frantic team had tracked the camera and removed all the toys Dr. Picture would animate, they had to fill the blank areas once hidden by the toys. In one shot, for example, when the camera rises up to focus on dozens of kites, bears, stuffed animals and so forth hanging from the ceiling, you can’t see much behind them. But when the toys spring free and come alive, the background has to be there. Similarly, Frantic had to construct shelves that once held toys after they lifted the toys from the plate.

“So, we match-modeled a large portion of the store in each shot,” says Neufeld. “We essentially built a clean set. When we were done, of the four big clean-up shots, two had only 10 percent of what had been in the plate remaining.” Animators at Dr. Picture used Frantic’s match-move and match models to deliver animated toys locked to the camera move.

To create the magical effect of gray flaking off earlier in the sequence, Frantic used a particle simulation. They began by match modeling all the objects in the plate that would have particles bursting off and then, essentially coated flat planes with particles.

To lift the particles and cause the pixie dust to swirl in reaction to Molly’s movements ‘ and later, the movement of toys animating in the room ‘ the Frantic team used a proprietary simulation program that animated a point cloud based on constraints. Neufeld provides an example: “Molly points at a child’s table. We match moved the table and coated the surface with an initial set of flat planes of particles. Then, we animated four objects inside the match model of the table through the surfaces to give the particles an initial impulse synced with her gestures. That created a pressure wave and vacuum. It gave the particles a push, they fired off the face, and they created a vacuum behind. So, by subtly changing the animation of simple geometric objects, we created eddies, swirls, and splashes on a point cloud that seemed to come off the 3D surface of the model.”

Perfecting that simulation was a trial-and-error process. “We could do endless iterations and every one would be interesting and cool, but it took a while to get the simulation to play like a character,” Neufeld says.

Once the toys started moving, proxies for the flying and rolling objects in the simulation stirred the particles in the air and on the ground. In one shot, for example, a car follows behind Molly as she walks through the room, parting a sea of particles as it rolls. “We ran objects of the car models through one of our sims,” says Neufeld, “and then put that element into a layer.

To turn the particles in the point cloud into flakes, Frantic used Particle Flow and attached tiny models to each point. Flakes that break off the objects are large initially and then quickly shrink to match the ambient particles – the pixie dust – in the air.

Because they didn’t yet have plates from BUF with the final gray treatment, Frantic had faded the color in the color plates and textured the particles to match that color. Later, when they received BUF plates, they corrected the renders for about half the shots, and fixed the others in compositing. “BUF didn’t do a simple color correction,” says Neufeld. “They solarized and softened the mattes and introduced a silver color. It was a completely different look.”

The final shots are composites with, sometimes, as many as 150 layers. “We controlled all the shadowing in the room because most of the objects aren’t there,” says Neufeld. “They’re layers. We also had five layers of particles composited at different depths, and people are walking through the plates. Every person had to be rotoscoped and brought back over the CG replacements. And, we even had 2D scenes on cards outside the windows to replace the street shot on set.”

Figuring out which materials in which layers were dominant sometimes took days, but at the end of the day, Frantic had created the dramatic and kinetic finale Helm had imagined.

“It’s like always with visual effects,” says Neufeld. “You work and work and work, and you know it’s the last five minutes that makes the shot. We were able to spend that last five minutes with Zack [Helm], and I think we were able to make it magic.”