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A few years ago, in an effort to bring a sense of hope to his children who were experiencing depression during the pandemic, John Krasinski (A Quiet Place) wrote a script about a young girl trying to reunite forgotten imaginary friends with their children. Eventually, the talented multi-hyphenate ended up directing the movie, which is titled IF and stars Ryan Reynolds and Cailey Fleming, as well as Steve Carell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr. and Christopher Meloni as the voices of the imaginary characters. To make the invisible visible, Krasinski turned to VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence (Christopher Robin) and effects house Framestore to deliver around 800 shots and a cast of approximately 42 different CG characters.
“We’re having so much fun with this because it calls on all kinds of different movies that I loved when I was growing up, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jim Henson’s films through to Who Framed Roger Rabbit” says Lawrence. “And we’re doing that with a completely original idea with a director who is as insanely enthusiastic as John Krasinski, who loves our craft and every little detail of what we do! It’s so nice to be working with that kind of talent!”
Ruled by Imagination
Lawrence adds, “There is an element of imagination and magical realism to this story. As a film tool, the audience believes that the characters are there. The magic feels more elevating. We filmed with a lot of puppets and tried to allow John to stage things in a way that respected the truth of the space and the performances [that] were ultimately going to be there.”
Dealing with the hybrid approach of live action and animation was a welcome challenge. The film’s animation supervisor for Framestore, Arslan Elver, says animating a character and creating them from scratch in a live-action movie was quite rewarding. He adds, “On top of that we came up with a couple of clever things. For the character Blue, who is quite big, we wanted to keep that spatial truth and size. There was a backpack for the stand-in guy with an eyeline but also a little hula hoop around him, so when he moves around we know roughly how big Blue is and where he’s going to touch stuff. That was all helping John with framing and to place his character exactly as he wanted but also in a believable way.”
‘We’re having so much fun with this because it calls on all kinds of different movies that I loved when I was growing up … and we’re doing that with a completely original idea with a director who is as insanely enthusiastic as John Krasinski.’
— VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence
Steve Carell’s energy was a huge help when the team was working on ADR. “It’s fun to animate to him,” notes Elver. “For this project, particularly, we had a new facial system at Framestore. Normally, we used this blend-shape-heavy system where everything is based on FACS (Face Action Coding System) which is truly moving in the same way that a muscle would move. But in this system we were a lot closer to a feature animation rig where things are freer for the mouth and eyes of the character so that artists can truly shape the emotional aspect of it or the mouth shapes into the finest details that they were not able to do before.”
The film’s cinematographer was none other than Janusz Kamiński (The Fabelmans), who has a vivid photographic style. “Janusz was so brave with his lighting choices that the whole world of the movie is in this heightened reality anyway,” notes Lawrence. “That was important. We were obviously shooting quickly, because you always shoot quickly and try to not waste time, but we were given the space by the ADs to do takes with puppeteers in and, honestly, quite often we would leave them in.”
Every environment in the movie was lidar scanned. “Often there is a whole load of reconstruction that’s going on in the background,” reveals Lawrence. “In the case of the Tina Turner dance number, that reconstruction was insanely complicated and was a heavy CGI build of the whole theater. However, when you watch it, I couldn’t tell you which bits are plates and real because they dealt with it so well.”
As expected, the project showcased some amazing on-set ingenuity. “With these smartphones you can now scan a room or set,” says Lawrence. “Sometimes Arslan would literally walk on as they were about to shoot, scan the set, upload it to his laptop connecting with the real rig for the character, and he would start animating a shot. You could line up, match the dailies take [on Camera Assist] and show John, ‘This is what it’s going to look like.’”
Elver points out that achieving the proper tone for the film’s imaginary characters was quite important. “You imagine something quite interesting where these characters and their humans aren’t there anymore and they’re desperate to connect back. But at the same time you don’t want their performance to be sad,” he notes. “You can fall into this world that is only sad; you don’t want that. You want them active, still trying to figure it out and find happiness, because otherwise your audience will not connect with them.”
Normally with effects-heavy creatures, the simulation needs to be physically correct. “In this case a lot of our character are so handcrafted and artistically driven in terms of posing and silhouettes,” says Elver. “You have this character [Cosmo] with a trench coat, like a spy kind of thing with a fedora hat, and when he is on top of Ryan or questioning him you want that silhouette to be really beautiful. If you run a normal simulation of a cloth, it might look baggy or different. We have a lot of controllers in our animation rigs to be able to pose the character for the cloth as well and then do a pass for the character effects to add an extra level of movement or believability — like the cream on top.”
One of the key challenges was to fit the gigantic Blue into a laundry basket for one scene. “Literally, I started to do some tests before the shoot and was thinking that you need a big laundry basket,” recalls Elver. “Then the day came for the shoot, and I was like, ‘How is he going to fit in!?’ Then it was John who said, ‘That’s OK! He’s just imaginary: The rest doesn’t matter.’ This is the cool thing about John. If Blue is into that basket, then he’s into that basket and you know what? You believe in it, because when Blue comes out there is a big squish going on around his belly; he’s in that space.”
The VFX team has a lot of praise for the work of actor Cailey Fleming, who portrays the young girl Bea in the feature. “It’s Cailey’s show, and she was absolutely incredible,” remarks Lawrence. “John absolutely eulogizes about her as a performer, and I believe in that. She is so good at getting that out. But she also has got that wonderful thing that kids have, which is an imagination. We had an iPad and AR showed them and we introduced them all to the characters on an iPad. But ultimately, she couldn’t hold an iPad on set while she was performing! Cailey had to imagine it.”
The film’s special effects team added a lot of atmospherics and also worked on a challenging falling wall sequence. As Lawrence recalls, “Ryan Reynolds falls in a swimming pool, which we did for real with him. That was interesting because we changed the swimming pool that we fell into. John was keen that Ryan did it for real because he wanted that realism. We made the swimming pool into a digital environment based on the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia.”
Overall, the goal was to make sure that the audience would not question the presence of the CG characters throughout the movie. “You’re not pretending that it was done in any other way other than the way it was,” remarks Lawrence. “But at the same time we should celebrate the high level of craft that goes into it to make that appealing, believable, charming and all of the things that will hopefully be perceived when this movie comes out, because I think it’s quite special.”
Paramount Pictures’ IF is currently playing in theaters worldwide.
