Director: Patty Jenkins
Production Designer: Aline Bonetto
Studio: Warner Bros.
Starring: Gal Gadot & Chris Pine
Locations: London, Italy & China
Location Brief: Paradise landscapes and VFX plate photography across rural China

In 2015, I was sent across China scouting Wonder Woman China locations and photographing landscape plates that would help create Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s mythical island home.

I had previously worked with the incredibly talented production designer Aline Bonetto on Pan. Aline had designed one of my all-time favourite films, Amélie, and working with her was a complete joy.

The main filming for Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s mythical island home, had taken place in Southern Italy. But visually the filmmakers needed additional landscape elements to help create the scale and exotic beauty of the finished island.

The brief was enormous:

waterfalls,
mountains,
rice terraces,
misty forests,
karst landscapes,
fantasy vistas.

Asia was the visual reference point.

Scouting China for Wonder Woman

This wasn’t a normal film location scout.

I wasn’t simply shooting location reference photographs for a director or production designer.

I was photographing landscape plates that could later become part of the finished film through visual effects.

That changed everything.

The photography needed to capture the landscapes at extremely high resolution and from the right angles, allowing the VFX team to take elements of real locations and stitch them into the digital world of Themyscira.

When I mapped out the locations we wanted to explore, I realised I was effectively travelling across the width of China.

Starting in Chengdu in the west, I built a route through some of the country’s most extraordinary landscapes before eventually finishing in Shanghai on the east coast.

Finding the Landscapes of Themyscira

The journey took me through places that genuinely felt as if they belonged in a fantasy film.

Jiuzhaigou National Park was extraordinary — turquoise lakes, tiered waterfalls, ancient forests and mist hanging between the mountains.

Huangshan, the Yellow Mountains, had vast granite peaks rising through cloud and mist.

At Dehang Canyon, huge cliffs, waterfalls and remote mountain landscapes eventually helped form part of Wonder Woman’s early training world.

And finally there was Mount Huashan — one of China’s sacred mountains, with sheer granite cliffs, temples perched on peaks and staircases disappearing into the mist.

It felt like something from ancient mythology.

Exactly what we were looking for.

Creating Themyscira Through Real Locations

One of the things I love about location scouting is seeing how real landscapes can become something completely different in the hands of filmmakers and visual effects artists.

Themyscira wasn’t one single location.

It was a world built from different elements — the Southern Italian coastline used for principal photography, combined with landscape photography and visual references gathered from much further afield.

My job in China was to find and photograph some of those elements.

Here is a selection of my original scout and VFX plate photography from the journey:

From China to Themyscira

And this is how Themyscira looked in the finished film:

Seeing landscapes I had travelled thousands of miles across China to photograph finally incorporated into the world of Wonder Woman was incredibly rewarding.

China remains one of the most extraordinary countries I have ever scouted.

And occasionally, getting the right image involved going slightly further than perhaps I should have.

The Things You Do to Get the Shot →