To fulfill Yorgos Lanthimos’ vision of “Poor Things” as a surreal Victorian world embodying Bella’s (Emma Stone) wild and forward-thinking imagination, Simon Hughes, the production VFX supervisor, got to play with a vast toolbox of traditional and cutting-edge techniques with Union VFX. This included miniatures, painted backdrops, LED screens, CG enhancements, and mixing strange hybrid animal combinations shot in camera and digitally composited. The result is a unique retro-futurism that was achieved in collaboration with production designers Shona Heath and James Price and the art department.
“From the get-go, the idea of avoiding this run-of-the-mill visual effects world was discussed with Yorgos,” Hughes told IndieWire. “So it’s like, how do we embrace some of that traditional approach? ‘Black Narcissus’ [from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger] was openly discussed [for its use of miniatures and painted backdrops for the Himalayas]. So that was a huge part of the work that we had to do, creating environments that are photoreal with traditional filmmaking techniques but with miniature and backing qualities.”
In “Poor Things,” Bella gets brought back to life in a “Frankenstein” gender bender by eccentric English scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe). The reanimation scene, swapping in the brain of her unborn child, features CG electrical current running through tubes in homage to the James Whale film classic. Quickly bored and insatiably curious, the naive Bella journeys with slick attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) to fairytale-like versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris.
But before she leaves and her world turns into one with color, she lives with Baxter and a menagerie of strange creatures that he Frankensteined from different animal combinations: a goose/bulldog (“gooseWillis”), a duck/goat (“billThe Kid”), a bulldog/goose (“barkWahlberg”), a goose/basset hound (“gooseBumps”), a pig/shaggy dog (“sixSox”), a shaggy dog/duck (“siriusQuack”), and a pig/chicken (“davidEggham”). The VFX team shot live-action footage of animals and then stitched them together.
“I’d like to think that a big reason why we ended up working on the show is because we thought this was achievable,” Hughes said. “What we suggested doing is we did some pre-shoot just to see what the animal handlers could offer up in terms of what performances they could get with different kinds of animals. And then we looked at what animals worked well together. So we shot a bunch of chickens, a bunch of geese, and different dogs.
“These animals were quite well-behaved and the body shapes worked well in a surreal way,” he continued. “But, obviously, if you take one half of a chicken body and line that up to the shoulders of a dog, it’s a good option. And when it came to shooting, the animals did whatever they want, so there was a lot of trial and error, and we overshot to just get a lot of variation of animals.”
Hughes and team scanned all the animals, which they rigged in the computer, and added some roto for the key animals after they were composited together to complete the joins. “And another reason for the join is that Yorgos wanted to incorporate that sort of Frankenstein surgery scar kind of look as well, which obviously we didn’t have as makeup effects or anything like that,” Hughes added. “So we needed to do that as a CG and some of them included little staples or stitching, and things like that.”
Bella’s journeys, meanwhile, take on a candy-colored hue thanks to vibrant skies derived from artist Chris Parks, whose liquid experiments were enhanced by the VFX artists throughout the film. The effect was a painted backdrop look achieved through clever stitching. “We used some of [Parks’] actual work, but obviously it’s been composited, so it’s all layered up and manipulated in addition,” added Hughes.
Bella and Duncan travel aboard an ocean liner, where LED screens created the animated sky and ocean environments at Origo Studios in Budapest. There was a series of ocean movements for various times of day, played back on the 11 wrap-around LED screens (in 24K). Alongside them were nearly a dozen sky variations with matching reflections.
“We created a series of CG oceans with different kinds of wave heights,” Hughes said, “and obviously that also needed to incorporate a miniature field. So there was trying to find that sweet spot between it being a real-world scale versus a miniature scale.”
Initially, Hughes offered this up as a special effects shoot for the skies, until they discovered the works of Parks. “So we have these kind of hyper-real sky environments, but we also added in these sort of slightly surreal layers, which sit in the distance and have like an ink and water kind of feel.”
Meanwhile, the slums that Bella visits with Duncan in Alexandria (also shot at Origo Studios) combined miniatures, live-action sets, and CG environments, with the actors re-projected onto them to control the camera movement. “There is a sand stormy, very golden feeling kind of environment that we were creating,” Hughes added. “So quite stormy [clouds] moving and layered in within the skies. We did arc elements more as a kind of stratosphere kind of feel to them.
“But also the big body of the work on there is a lot of miniatures,” he continued. “So we had miniatures for the slum environments and the kind of cityscape around it, which we were then shooting as live-action plates. We needed to marry with the miniatures and then expand to make the world even larger. And then we were adding digi-doubles of people walking around the slums, lots of atmosphere, and sand floating in the air to make the whole environment feel dirty and grubby. We were having to get quite involved with the CG, but always keeping an eye on the fact that everything needs to retain that miniature quality.”
