Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512164
P O O R T H I N G S | P E R S P E C T I V E 7 1 James' experience in feature films is well established, Shona's is non-existent bar a few shorts. We feel so lucky that we got to work on this project together, thanks to Kasia Malipan (coproducer of Poor Things) who had the wild idea to pair us together. It worked surprisingly well, especially as neither of us normally work as a duo. We both work in completely opposite ways, James from the outer edges in, and Shona from the smaller details out, and we met very happily in the middle. In the end, Yorgos took a huge leap of faith in his people and is loyal to that leap and endeavor. Yorgos' brief to us was he wanted to make a 1930s-style studio movie but using modern technology and hand-crafted techniques from a bygone age, with the aim of creating something that would be totally unique. Design Approach The character of Bella Baxter came first. How she would be, and then her world was dreamed up around her. Death, birth, rebirth, growing and dying and growing again. A carousel of newness, a wonderful world with no filter. We tried to hit a place where no one has been, hopefully no one can quite put their finger on it. We were looking at a very old and very new design, imagining that in Bella's world art and design history wasn't the same as ours. A science fictional past. It is somewhere in sometime that one thinks they might know but would have to check… but don't. We just knew we wanted there to be elements of wonder, the ridiculous, the extreme, the beautiful and the ugly all together within the design. The film is a story after all, you must never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Yorgos had no preconceived idea of what the world should be, as long as it was hand-crafted and extreme. Extreme could mean huge, tiny, plain or decorative, as long as it tipped the scales in a particular direction. Yorgos is incredibly receptive to strong ideas. Details that were funny in some way or confusing, those are the things that blindly guided us. We were always worried that the overload of visual detail may drown the subtle and absurd humor in Yorgos' work, but we think it just sprinkles a bit more fun in there, this time... Conceptualizing The conceptualization process was intensive and detailed. It started with receiving the script from Yorgos and four random images that he liked. They were in the realms of Egon Schiele and Hieronymus Bosch, so we began building from there. We would go back to them time and time again to see what he wanted from these paintings. A lot of our core references were paintings. The feeling of a painted sky or masses of painted fabric, the presence of the human hand was always to play a part. We looked to Albert Robida the 19th century French futurist, Francis Bacon, Maxfield Parrish and Ricardo Bofill to name a few. We decided our world would have electricity, combustion engines, plastics and suspended trams. Modernism, Brutalist detailing, Georgian, Romantic, Classical, the weird and the strange with sprinkles! We referenced far and wide then edited and re-edited, then cut it all up and threw half of it away, before sticking different parts back together like one of Baxter's animal experiments. We played with scale and time, the more abstract the idea, the more we ran with it until we had our world. The Big Four Nearly every set was a complete build. The main sets were known as 'The Big Four.' These consisted of London, Lisbon, Paris and The Ship. Each one a monster of a build and a massive undertaking in their own right, needing to be delivered just weeks apart. The only studio these places could fit was in Korda Studios and Origa Studios in Hungary. We only shot in a few real locations in Hungary, Alfie's house, a Lisbon restaurant, the Paris medical school, the church and the forest. These all got an intense Poor Things transformation, spider-like padded buttresses in the restaurant, huge oak trees leaning on a 45-degree angle, and the church had an Escher-inspired black-and-white makeover. A. LONDON CHAPTER HEADING. INITIAL COLLAGE SKETCH BY SHONA HEATH. B. LONDON CHAPTER HEADING. CONCEPT ART BY PLUM WOODS AND SALWA MCGILL. TIME-BASED ARTS (VISUAL EFFECTS) CREATED THEM IN CGI USING A MINI MODEL OF THE EYEBALLS AND BRIDGE AND SHOT THE CLOUDS IN A SMOKE TANK.