Glen Pratt On Incorporating the Concept of Play into the Visual Effects Language of ‘Barbie’

When I was watching Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, I didn’t realize how much visual effects played into the storyline. The amount of shots included in the film is staggering, and what separates it from other films heavy with visual effects is that it all aids the storytelling. Visual effects supervisor Glen Pratt is thankful that the visual effects flies under the radar. Discovering how much work went into Gerwig’s film is like discovering a new favorite toy for the first time.

“We wanted to make sure it had a grounded tactility to it,” Pratt says. “I know there is trend of bashing visual effects when it’s bad, but when visual effects are done really well, you shouldn’t know it’s there.

Is there a more iconic image from 2023 than Margot Robbie floating down from her Dreamhouse ready for another perfect day? Audiences love that Gerwig’s film visually translates the idea of “play,” because we all did this when we were a kid. Whether we were playing with a Barbie or any other toy, we created worlds in our heads and let our imagination run wild. If the visual language didn’t translate from the beginning, Barbie would feel too artificial and keep us at too far of a distance. Pratt explains how these conversations also extended into the visual effects department.

“From the get-go, Greta and the way she approaches filmmaking is very playful,” he says. “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 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 this miniatures as well. We built them on film for the satisfaction of seeing them realized as little macquettes 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.”

A good example of this is when Ryan Gosling runs onto the beach, and, unfortunately, doesn’t impress Barbie as much as he would like. Poor Ken…

“It’s just really silly and fun,” Pratt says. “I like how everybody really embraced it. It’s not what you normally do on a film. When he runs towards the wave, even the end result is very playful. Ryan couldn’t really run towards that wave, so we had to shoot it in a certain way where we got him as a separate element and the wave wasn’t there. And he just kept running so then we could look like he’s going to do this big…boinggg.”

Using VFX to establish scope and size to help the environment / endless possibility to the VFX that lends itself
Looking out into Barbie Land, we see endless possibilities–just like Barbie herself was meant to inspire. One of my favorite establishing shots is when we get to see the beach for the first time. It reminded me so much of Ocean Drive on Miami Beach drenched in pink. There are many shots that establish the ambitious scope of the film, and Pratt reveals that they wanted to capture the image of real miniatures to make it feel more tactile.

“There were 1300 visual effects shots in the film, and that’s credit to the team,” Pratt says. “All those artists, on both production sides, made these beautiful sets and miniatures. On the visual effects side of it, Framestore did nearly 800 of all those key Barbie line shots–many of which were all CG. There’s such a seamless, beautiful blend between the practical and the digital. No one’s noticing, and I think that’s fantastic. The production design element is so beautiful, and it allows us to have this language dialed in when we were shooting. We took some of those key shots, like when you see the car on the beach but also the one when Margot waves on top of the roof, and there were a lot of iterations of those shots. We had discussions how we wanted them to look. We still do use that language, particularly when we are in the desert, of these scenic paintings or painted like a soundstage with four walls. That goes back to being playful or feeling like you’re in a box.

As we progressed that idea as we were shooting, we were running out tests to show Greta, and we landed on the idea that it would be more fun if they were actual buildings. It added more of that toy quality. We would add digital miniatures that we built from the practical ones, and it allowed us to add vehicles and people–all that dressing to help make it come to life. That progression of the idea and landing on the final idea was this very lovely palette of the toy-like houses and buildings that existed within the environment. When we were in pre-production, we realized that the space wasn’t going to be big enough for the scope of the story that we wanted to tell. We knew there would be quite a lot of extension beyond the end of the stage.”

When Barbie and Ken are traveling to and from Barbie Land, the visual language reminds us of something playful and whimsical. It’s like the visual effects tapped into the best version of our imagination and, quite literally, made it come to life. It reminded me so much of how Pee-wee’s Playhouse felt built by a child’s brain.

“It’s such a fun sequence, and we had so many meetings about it,” he says. “Pee-wee’s Playhouse is something that Greta has spoken about. For that sequence, there were initial concepts which evolved and idea was that we wanted to try to achieve as much of it in camera as we could. Which, for the most part, we did. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong with something that appears to be that visually simple. We had to figure out how big the pieces could actually be before the effects shifted too much so that the special effects relied on a lot of what we were giving them in terms of measurements. Equally, we were running that by the art department, so when we got there, it worked. The actors had to always be the same distance from lens, so that it didn’t bump and then working backwards and forwards, there was a lot of layout that we did with visual cleavers. It helped with the speed that pieces needed to move. If one piece in the foreground was slightly larger then it would have to travel at a different speed from the previous one or vice versa. That way, everything looks like it moves at a continuous speed, and visual effects helped figure that out. When Barbie, Sasha, and Gloria travel back and all those piece land on Venice Beach, that was a visual effect.”

Barbie is streaming now, exclusively, on Max.