High School Musical 3

High School Musical 3 follows on the stupendous success of the first 2 HSM films. HSM 3 takes place in the final year of high school for our familiar cast of characters. The musical number “A Night to Remember” opens in this split tuxedo Shop/Dress Shop theatrical set. The opening moments cut between the green, masculine Tux shop full of insecure boys on the left and the blue dress shop full of girls reveling in the prom preparations on the right before revealing it’s the same space. The shops then recede into the wings and the central element spins around revealing it is a split bathroom.

Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) prepare for their big prom night in their split bathroom set. The bathroom rolls away, and a curtain raises revealing a neighborhood.

The “Neighborhood” sequence from "A Night to Remember". The boys (Zac Efron, Corbin Bleu, Lucas Grabeel & co.) collect their dates (Vanessa Hudgens, Monique Coleman, Olesya Rulin & co.)  and are picked up by a hinged limousine set-piece, the neighborhood facade flies out, then the house interiors split on rolling wagons, revealing a lush garden beyond.

The "Garden Party" sequence from "A Night to Remember". The final sequence was conceived as a New Orleans garden party. 

Troy's (Zac Efron) treehouse. This house location was established in two prior movies, without a tree or treehouse in the backyard. The third movie called for a sizeable treehouse in the yard that had to accommodate choreography for a duet. This necessitated craning three massive trunks over the existing family home, sinking them 8 feet in the ground, then installing our treehouse in them. This treehouse was later relocated to a turntable on a green screen stage for completion of the work on "Right Here, Right Now".

The junkyard set for "The Boy's are Back". Contemporary junkyards are full of awful-looking plastic, modern cars. I drove everyone crazy demanding we find a junkyard full of ancient American muscle cars, and at last we did. Shacks were built and the classic junked cars were arranged in a sort of an amphitheater for choreography.

Another view of our classic car junkyard for “The Boys are Back”, with our junked car amphitheater and the amazing, green car-shredding machine as our backdrop.

Detail of one of the sheds we built in the Junkyard set.

One of Sharpay’s (Ashley Tisdale) many extravagant stage sets.

A view of the "Roof Garden". Established as a humble extension for the school's botany club in the first movie, it greatly expanded into a lush, sprawling roof-top park with huge planter-beds, skylights, trees, etc. to create a verdant and romantic landscape for the waltzing duet "Can I Have This Dance?" for the third film. It took over 40 crane-loads to get all the materiel onto the school roof.

We had a very short window to transform the work-a-day, red and white school cafeteria into a magical backdrop for “I want it all”, the tentpole musical number of the movie.

“I Want it All” begins in a first-class airplane cabin. We conceived of a moment in the song where overly-entitled twins Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) and Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) imagine going on a fabulous trip. I created a vaudeville-style rotating set complete with fabulous 1960's Pan Am style stewardess (Monique Coleman) to accommodate this. Outside the window is a rotating column of blue sky with puffy clouds and little birds.

After an extremely brief flight, the twins arrive in a tiki-themed, tropical, miniature paradise with a not-terribly-threatening volcano throwing a colorful plume skyward.

After a few beats of tropical sun and coconut drinks, they head to the club for an evening of dancing, then dash off the set for the next beats of the song.

Soon we find the twins rolling in a cab down the sparkling streets of New York. We created faceted silver and gold skyscrapers that moved with the music. This was shot in a functioning school cafeteria, which just prior to this work, we had painted the iconic red and white. We had only a few days to totally repaint, add huge amounts of lighting (designed by the masterful Patrick Woodroffe, the Rolling Stones lighting designer) truss, and cable, and lay thousands of square feet of marlite high gloss dance floor.

Soon the cab opens up, revealing it's not a cab at all, but Sharpay's (Ashley Tisdale) Broadway dressing room.

Another great moment during "I Want it All" involved a very Busby Berkeley moment involving dancers rotating custom-built cafeteria tables with a central pivot.

This is the reveal of the final sequence of "I Want it All", the climax of Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) and Sharpay's (Ashley Tisdale) Broadway fantasy.

Here is one of the final moments of the song in all its glory, all in a public school cafeteria.

Troy's (Zach Efron) angsty solo "Scream" required a sort of Fred Astaire moment, but unlike Astaire, his world was turning upside down. We built this chunk of a hallway in a rotating rig, and VFX built the rest.

This is the fantasy Prom Set from the “Can I Have This Dance” reprise. Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is missing prom because she’s away for a preparatory week at Stanford, and Troy (Zac Efron) drives 1,000 miles to dance with her at their “prom”. So we cut from their duet at Stanford and place them for an imagined moment in the prom they were missing with all their friends.

This shows a rig built for an extremely effective in-camera effect for the closing number that allowed the cast to run from graduation on the football field, have the curtain drop behind them, and with a VFX assist magically end up on the auditorium stage.