Teleportation in Wizards of Waverly Place: Turning a Con into a Pro
Visual effects are not a cure or save all for videography. It is always best to have a mix of visual and practical effects in a shot, and when it came to mid 2008, the Wizards of Waverly Place didn’t have the largest budget dedicated to their VFX team. Sure, near the end of the show, they had a larger budget and were able to be a bit more flashy with their spells, even adding some Morpheus-esque type gaseous effects when teleporting over large distances.
However, teleporting from one location to another is a relatively easy task for a VFX artist to do. Simply cut to an empty shot when leaving location #1, then show an empty shot of location #2, followed by a cut to a shot on location #2 with your characters mid-jump, making it look as if they teleported.
What is much more difficult is teleporting in the same shot, especially with other characters being in said shot. Why? Well, think about what’s really going on when this happens. They pause and move the teleporting character to another spot. (or if there’s a bit more budget, the teleporting characters are rotoscoped and put into the shot when appropriate, but even this is time consuming as you can see in this shot of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix where Fred and George apparate behind their mother to scare her. However, even here, there are less than 10 frames before the shot changes so that they don’t have to waste more time than they need cutting the twins out. ) But how can the other people in the shot stay perfectly in the same position and stance after they cut to the other character has teleported?
You can’t really, especially in Wizard’s of Waverly place. You can’t spend the time and money to have your characters be rotoscoped for a one-off joke, but that’s where being creative comes in handy.
In Season 2, Episode 4, titled, Racing, there is a side plot-line where Max and Justin, brothers, are discussing Max’s issue of ordering third-rate magical items off an old comic book type ad that are always ripoffs. This is when the item of discussion is brought up: The Amazing Transport Stick. This incredible item can transport you anywhere, as long as it’s less than 36 inches away. (Which, on its own, is already a funny joke.) But how do you have the other characters not ruin the effect by popping into a new position?
Easy. The Amazing Transport Stick makes anyone around the person teleporting passout.
This seems like just another funny addition to show how jank the magical items are, but in reality, it allows the teleportation to look much more legitimate. By having everyone else in the shot pass out, they either get out of the shot by falling out of frame, or they simply lie on the ground, making it much easier to stay in the same spot and position as the teleporting character moves to another spot less than 36 inches away.
It just goes to show that constraints and problems are not some obstacle to worry about and try to get around, but to somehow use those constraints to your own benefit. You turn a problem into an advantage. This was how we got such amazing shots that hold the test of time such as the T.rex at night in Jurassic Park and why some people say that VFX nowadays aren’t as good, because modern movies have the budget to go crazy with some shots, they don’t stop to think if they should just because they can.
