By Iain Blair

To be Barbie in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis and suddenly develop flat feet and bad breath and end up traveling to the real world to find some answers.

That’s the clever setup for the biggest blockbuster of the summer — and now the biggest movie on the awards circuit thanks to its nine Golden Globe noms. Helmed by Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Lady Bird)) and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie is a joyful celebration of girl power that showcases truly awesome visual effects overseen by production VFX supervisor Glen Pratt at Framestore.

Glen Pratt

The film’s virtual production, previz, postviz and techviz were all done by Framestore’s London-based preproduction services team, led by Kaya Jabar. Final VFX were courtesy of VFX supervisor Francois Dumoulin and his Framestore team in Montreal.

I spoke with Pratt (Paddington 2, Beauty and the Beast) about the challenges and workflow.

How many VFX shots are there overall?
Around 1,600 shots were worked on during post. The final film had 1,300 in the end, which is a lot.

What were the big VFX challenges?
The biggest was dealing with Barbie Land, and making sure we kept the strong aesthetic that had been designed. We had many conversations with Greta about her desire for this to look as if Barbie Land is contained on a soundstage. For instance, the old classics like Singin’ in the Rain or The Wizard of Oz… their production values were a bit other-worldly, and they had a magic to them, and Greta wanted to make sure that feeling ran through the whole film. So working with her, DP Rodrigo Prieto (ASC, AMC) and production designer Sarah Greenwood, we decided to create the sets with painted backings to them.

Some of those sets were never going to be big enough for what Greta had in mind, so we had to come up with ways to use visual effects to help realize that world in tandem with the production design. A big part of that was to do some virtual scouting with Greta and Rodrigo early on to determine how large these spaces would be, as well as doing bits of visual development work. All that was to help her understand how big the stage should be before it became too big, at which point you’d lose that feeling and quality of it being on a stage.

The other big challenge was taking all that onboard with Greta’s idea of working with miniatures. Any time we were extending the world, we had to make sure it echoed and matched the sets we’d built so people wouldn’t question the visual effects. So we built a language that had consistency all the way through, that matched the production design sets and equally had a miniature feel to it. It always had to reflect the toylike aesthetic, so it was really a big balancing act and a matter of discovering the best language to use to tell the story.

Barbie miniatures

You must have done some tests?
Yes, once we had decided the size of the sets and shot some exteriors, we started testing how it would all look. In the tests you could actually see the four walls of the stage, and it was a painted backdrop with the scenery in it — a bit like The Wizard of Oz or The Red Shoes. All that evolved once we got into post, and Greta felt it would look more charming if, rather than it being a painted cyc, it was actually a 3D CGI placement of buildings.

So once all the miniatures were built, they were scanned and captured with photogrammetry, and we then began to build assets from those miniatures and from the actual set itself so that the miniatures and sets married up. There’s both a miniature and a build of the Dreamhouse, so they’re essentially the same. We could take that and expand Barbie Land and make it a bigger world.

How closely did you work with Greta?
Very closely, along with Rodrigo Prieto and Sarah Greenwood as well as the producers… we would all bring ideas to the table. Greta would come to me with ideas, and I’d go off and work on them and then present her with options. It was a learning curve for her, but she was amazing. We’d show her stuff we had developed from what we’d shot, and she was bowled over. It was a real pleasure to work with someone who could see the potential of where it could go. She was so collaborative and positive all the time.

Tell us about all the previz, postviz and techviz.
On each Barbie Land set, there’s always the question of “What’s over there?” If we put bluescreen there, what’s going to happen behind it? Before we began shooting, we began all the virtual scouting with Greta using Framestore’s virtual scouting system, Farsight Go, which is an on-set visualization tool that [allows us to preview a live composite of CG set extensions, objects, characters and animations within the physical set].

So, for example, if we’re looking in a certain direction, it very quickly falls off because that’s the end of the stage, but we were able to extend beyond that. And Greta was very mindful of not extending as if it was just the real world but instead keeping it in the style of filmmaking we had discussed. Even though there are VFX there, she wanted it to have that very heightened look and aesthetic of Barbie Land.

From the virtual scouting, we did shots on and around the beach for when Barbie first sees her Dreamhouse and drives downtown; we designed all the shots. Rodrigo chose the lenses so we knew exactly what we would see given the art department’s work on the designs. We figured all that out, and that formed the basis of what we used in the volume stage.

Using the volume would give us the complexity of lighting we needed, but it meant there would never be finished pixels. The miniatures are the finished versions of a lot of those buildings, but because of the schedule, we wouldn’t have the finished material because the miniatures were still being built. Thankfully, we could plan the shots in virtual production and then [use the volume to?] see what areas we really needed to work on so we could be ready in time for the actual shoot in the volume. In post, we did this for Greta’s first director’s screening since pretty much every sequence contained postviz that we’d completed for the screening.

There are over 700 shots of Barbie Land, which are either entirely CG or needed a lot of additional CG work to finish the picture.

What did VFX supervisor Francois Dumoulin and his team in Montreal provide?
All of the Barbie Land work. We’d show them key areas of film we’d identified and pick key shots that needed look development. Those shots filtered into other shots around them, which meant we could bring the level of the work up bit by bit and keep showing the shots to Greta.

You also had FuseFX, Chicken Bone and UPP do some VFX work. Break it down for us.
Chicken Bone mainly did a lot of clean-ups that we identified in post, and Fuse did all the Mattel HQ scenes. This included the establishing shots outside, the interiors when Barbie is trying to escape the executives and the boardroom sequence.

UPP did a lot of work on the Venice Beach scenes, adding a lot of sky replacements since it was very overcast on the shoot. They opened up the skies, punched up the blues and added more broken-up clouds. They also did the whole car chase, which used a new electric car that UPP replaced with a CG vehicle — all the shots where you see the blue Chevy — and all the interiors. We shot all the interior car scenes at Leavesden [in the UK]. The actors were in the actual car onstage, and we shot driving plates for the chase route, which we could use in a small-volume LED setup. Then we corrected the perspective and redid the whole environment backgrounds. UPP did all of that. Clear Angle did all the lidar and scanning work.

You’ve worked on a lot of huge projects. Where does this rate in terms of complexity and challenges?
It’s right at the top. Being able to be in New York with Greta at Gloss for all the post was really key for all the VFX, as I could contribute ideas and help craft the final film.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.