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Charlie and the chocolate factory merged practical and digital effects so seamlessly that even though the film is nearly 20 years old, it's often difficult to tell which is which,
The things you thought were real... were done using CGI
What you thought was CGI... was done using animatronics and what you thought was animatronic... was actually done for real!
The Nut Sorting Room is one of those scenes that looks 100% real but deep down you know that it can't possibly be so!
I mean, squirrels are fast and wild and there is no way you're going to be able to get them all to sit still on little stools!
And at least in part, this is true, but the squirrels you see in this scene are actually real, and they are actually acting!
40 real squirrels went through an intense three-month training camp in order to train them to do what was required for each shot,
Training started by first getting them just to run out of their cage, across a room, and then into a tube.
This then transitioned into running from their cage across to the little stool they would use on set
Then they trained them to sit still whilst interacting with a nut. Next, they were trained to open the shell, remove the nut, and place it in a bowl, but obviously, the squirrel's first instinct is to eat the nut, so, in order to stop them from doing this, the nuts they used were actually made from plastic and dental acrylic.
And on average, to get each squirrel to successfully open and remove the nut, without trying to eat it, took at least 2000 repetitions!
But now, even though they could get the squirrels to sit on a stool, remove the nut, put it in a bowl, and so test the nut for freshness (with the help of a nut stuck to a blue stick)
It was still impossible to get all the squirrels to do it at the same time.
So they made 12 animatronic squirrels with a whole range of movements, and these squirrels, alongside some CG ones, were used in the backgrounds of the shots.
As you can see right here, with this guy!
For obvious reasons, the attack scene had to use digital squirrels if only just so that they could properly choreograph the action, but that doesn't mean that all the squirrels in the sequence were CGI.
Real squirrels were also trained to run up Veruca and then jump off her shoulders and head
However, a squirrel's claws are incredibly sharp, so in order to protect the actress playing Veruca, a stunt woman was used, but, because of the framing of the shot, Veruca's face would be visible, so the stuntwoman wore a latex mask sculpted using photos of Veruca for reference.
These real squirrels were then composited with the photo-real CGI squirrels to complete the final shot. As you'd probably expect, the Chocolate room itself was an actual physical set built on Pinewood studios' "007 stage", and the chocolate lake and chocolate waterfall were also real, in fact, months were spent trying to achieve the correct color and consistency for the liquid chocolate before making a total of 1.25 million liters at a cost of around 32 cents a liter!
That's like 100 concrete trucks full of the stuff and a total cost of close to half a million dollars!
Unfortunately, because the practical set was mainly built from styrofoam blocks on wooden platforms, it wasn't really a very practical set and certain places couldn't be stepped on or they'd break. This meant that shooting could only take place in very limited areas of the set, so for this part of the Chocolate Room Song scene where the Oompa Loompas walk all over the set, all the Oompa Loompas were actually CGI, in fact, every Oompa Loompa that appears at any time during the film that is under a quarter of the screen size is CGI. Earlier on in this scene, Augustus falls into the chocolate lake, and even though the chocolate lake and Augustus's fall were both done practically
The mixing machine and the tube that sucked him up are CGI and Augustus was filmed in front of a bluescreen and then composited into the shot
(...)
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