Awards Daily | Barbie
With Barbie on the VFX Oscars Long List, Joey Moser at AwardsDaily caught up with Production Supervisor, Glen Pratt on how the invisible VFX of Barbie aid the storytelling. Giving an insight to the on set experimentation and exploration encouraged by Director Greta Gerwig, Glen elaborates:
“From the get-go, Greta and the way she approaches filmmaking is very playful. I think that lends itself equally to me personally, as a visual effects supervisor, I’ve found. My background was in fine art and drawing and painting and just experimenting with imagery. Visual effects is really well-suited to that because it is an exploratory, expressive form of making images. You’re limited by your imagination with what you can do, and I think that was very much the same with Barbie.
“One of the first conversations I remember having with her was about how excited she was to go to Harry Potter World which was right across the road. At Leavesden Studio in London, you can see Hogwarts Castle which, again, has this brilliant, tactile, toy, childlike quality. That is something that we brought into making the miniatures as well. We built them on film for the satisfaction of seeing them realized as little maquettes to the finished, realized, practical miniature that we captured as a CG miniature that just encapsulated the tactility of it. The playfulness was all the way through. Even down to things like seeing how fast the car would move. We had conversations that it wouldn’t move that fast if you were a kid playing with it. It wouldn’t drive like a normal car. We settled on that, when she’s on the open road, it goes seven miles an hour.”