Cinematographer Alice Brooks explains how the team conceived the scene where Ariana Grande’s Glinda sings to herself in a variety of mirrors, in one long shot.

How Wicked: For Good’s most challenging sequence, ‘The Girl in the Bubble,’ turned into the most impactful

Cinematographer Alice Brooks explains how the team conceived the scene where Ariana Grande's Glinda sings to herself in a variety of mirrors, in one long shot.

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of *The Awardist* podcast, and has cohosted EW's live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on *Good Morning America*, *The Talk*, *Access Hollywood*, *Extra!*, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

EW's editorial guidelines

December 5, 2025 2:02 p.m. ET

Leave a Comment

- *Wicked: For Good* cinematographer breaks down how they filmed the mirror-filled musical number, "The Girl in the Bubble."

- The song is one of two new original numbers written for the movie by composer Stephen Schwartz.

- Ariana Grande's Glinda performs the song, reflecting on who she has become.

*Wicked: For Good* required a little magic to pull off what cinematographer Alice Brooks has called the biggest challenge in that or the first movie: "The Girl in the Bubble."

During the musical number, one of two new songs written for the movie by composer Stephen Schwartz, Ariana Grande's Glinda walks through her two-level suite, looking at her reflection in four different mirrors as she confronts her privilege, her part in what has happened in Oz, and how it's time for her to now take a stand against the Wizard and Madame Morrible in their villainization of Elphaba.**

The scene gives the appearance of a "oner," a long scene filmed in one take. In actuality, it's five different takes carefully mapped out as she walks from mirror to mirror in her room: one on each side of the stairs, one on the ceiling, and one at the back of her closet.

"Jon has these incredible ideas and incredible dreams that are so massively huge, but this idea actually didn't start grand," Brooks tells ** of director Jon M. Chu's original vision for the sequence, which simply involved Glinda singing to herself in one mirror. But as they thought more about it...

Ariana Grande performs 'The Girl in the Bubble' in 'Wicked: For Good'.

"The first movie is the fairytale, and Glinda is the fairytale. And then the second movie is when it is messy, and it all falls apart, and Elphaba's the one who creates that mess — she's the one who wakes everybody up," Brooks, who was also Chu's director of photography on *In the Heights* and *Jem and the Holograms*, explains. "So the idea first started with Glinda just looking at herself, but Jon knew we couldn't sustain a whole number where she sings sitting in one reflection. But we've often thought about doing a oner, and the more we looked at this, he was like, 'I feel like this could be a oner.'"

So they did a little research by looking at other mirror scenes in other movies and quickly found their favorites in *Peggy Sue Got Married* and *Contact*. They also had strict orders from stars Grande and Cynthia Erivo not to use body doubles, so Brooks had to figure out how Grande would be in every shot.

The 'Wicked: For Good' visual effects team had a big challenge after seeing 'No Place Like Home' scene

'Wicked: For Good' director tested the film without its songs - here's why

She didn't think much about it again until the day it was time to film. At 2 a.m., she woke up in a panic, worried she didn't know how to pull it off. Thanks to her husband's shaving mirror, her daughters' princess bath toys, two bananas to represent the staircases, three oranges to stand in for the balcony doors, and a dinner plate for the sunken staircase into the suite, she figured it out.

The key was to give the illusion that the camera moved through the mirror, where Glinda's reflection would become the new reality.

She laughs today as she painstakingly, but proudly, walks through each and every shot — which involved a 45-foot crane, wall removals, adjustments to the ceiling height, and more — backtracking to count them all. (You can see some of the process in the exclusive cinematography featurette, above.) On set, they had the help of a special color-coded storyboard, "so we knew when we were in reflection and when we were out, and we can't cheat anything because even though our set is symmetrical, Ariana has a dimple [on just one side of her face], so she's not symmetrical," Brooks says.

The scene also required the help of visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, who came in to do some math — because "mirrors are just math, to make the reflection work," Brooks notes. "We needed to be at a certain distance at a certain point."

Ariana Grande performs 'The Girl in the Bubble' in 'Wicked: For Good'.

While the first frame and last frame of each shot had to be precise, what happened in between was a bit more fluid. "If Ari suddenly wanted to take longer to do something, we changed our lighting cues because they were all pulled live," she says. The same goes for their "insanely precise" steadicam operator. "Everything inside that shot can be slowed down, lengthened, sped up. Her pace determines the pace of how fast the camera moves with her. It determined how our lighting cues would happen because we're shooting 360 degrees."

Years after filming the scene, it continued to evolve. At the end of the song, when Glinda steps out onto the balcony and walks up to her transportation bubble, instead of seeing her own reflection, she sees her younger self, whom we also saw in a flashback earlier in the movie. While the young Glinda was filmed much later, Brooks says she was, in fact, in Winnie Holtzman and Dana Fox's original script.

"Because of budget reasons, it was removed, so we just never shot the little girl," Brooks explains. "And then the power of young Elphaba in the first movie was incredible, so we went back for two or three days of additional photography in May this year and shot the scene that was originally in the script. Nothing changed; it was always there. And then Jon's like, 'And I also want Ari looking at her reflection the same way Cynthia looked at her reflection.' Originally, we shot it as Ariana looking at herself in that last bubble."

And just six weeks before the movie opened, as Brooks was color grading, the sound team was working on its final mix, and Chu was making his final edits, Erivo and Grande asked to watch the movie. Brooks sat in on the screening on the Universal Pictures lot, and much to her surprise, just before Glinda starts singing "The Girl in the Bubble," Schwartz and John Powell's score had been stripped away.

Scarlett Spears as Young Glinda in 'Wicked: For Good'.

Universal Pictures

"They used the sound of her skirt as she was walking. And it sounds sort of clunky. And it was just very different. And suddenly, when there's no sound, your perception of brightness changes because when your head isn't filled with loud noise or any noise, I don't know what happens in the brain, but it appeared brighter," she explains. "So I went back, and I brought all the levels down in those first couple of shots because it was so quiet. I got to play off of what the sound mix was doing; I've never had that opportunity before."

***Check out more from EW's *The Awardist*, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

The movie's biggest challenge for Brooks turned into one of its most rewarding — and one she says she can actually view without picking apart.

"Usually I sit there, and I watch it, and I think about how we were doing things, but it's actually the one number where I have sort of put that all away. It's the number for me that is the most impactful," she says. "I think it is because I can sit there and feel like Glinda and look at myself. You're forced to really think about your own self: Who have you become, and is this the person you wanted to be? And what are the stories we tell ourselves that make us into who we are? So it's actually the one completely invisible number to me, and I'm not usually able to be immersed in a movie that I've shot."**

It helps that Brooks, who was also Lin-Manuel Miranda's cinematographer on *Tick, Tick...Boom!*, loves musicals, "the greatest genre of all time. A single note can tell you more about a character than three pages of dialogue can," she says. "Like each note, I play with the musical instruments I use, whether it's camera, camera movement, lighting cues, lens choices — each of those are the musical notes I get to play within a number... Being in a fairytale, we could explore and experiment in really wonderful ways that challenged each of us."**

- Movie Reviews & Recommendations

- Musical Movies

Original Article on Source

Source: “EW Musical”