Production designer K.K. Barrett and the team behind Spike Jonze’s Her explain how they created a warm, futuristic Los Angeles and its visual effects.
Creating a Futuristic Los Angeles
Given his work on Jonze’s diverse group of films, plus several films by Sofia Coppola, Barrett was hardly in the market for a sci-fi project. “I work from the script and want the director to be attached to that script,” he said of taking on new projects. “I do want it to be a project that comes from the director, and not specifically from the studio as a for-hire assignment. I want to believe in the script.”
Featuring a Los Angeles imagined 10 years from now, with several scenes re-rounded to 2013, Barrett’s assignment was to modify current LA with physical and computer constructions and marry the look with another city, resulting in several exteriors being filmed in Shanghai given its dense urban landscape. Hence, Barrett’s tasks involved “curating and collaging the different parts of the city. We were all over: at the Pacific Design Center in Hollywood, downtown for little bits and scraps. The exterior work was in Shanghai, but you would turn a corner and be in Disney Hall. It was familiar, and something was odd about it and cleaned up about it.”
Keeping most of the scenes above street level provided another window into an imminent future in Southern California. “We tried to take away some recognizable factors and brought buildings [from Shanghai] into our skyline,” Barrett said. “We’re building a city out of images, not hammers and nails and wood. But every location we modified. Some were whole cloth. We heavily modified [lead character Theodore’s] lobby with an elevator built from scratch.”
Conceiving of the future can surely range from the bleak urban blight of Blade Runner to the desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland of Oblivion, and, as such, Barrett worked with Jonze to devise a wholly original construct. “We started out in futurist mode, and we wanted it to be a very comfortable world,” Barrett explained. “It wasn’t a dystopian future. Everything you wanted was there for you except for the struggle of human contact.”
In one scene, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) walks from his apartment, gets on a subway, strolls across an exterior concourse into his place of employment and takes an elevator to his office, with that journey revealing the entirety of 2020s LA. “One continuous stream of architecture,” said Barrett. “It’s always what’s fun and entertaining and not like other films. You don’t want something to jump out to be tech-y. We didn’t want anything to have a tech surface or coldness to it. [Jonze] was very wise in realizing that he’s starting to tell a human story.”
While in many digitally-realized films the production designer exits once a team of computer-generated imagery artists take over, Barrett remained involved in the making of Her all the way through post-production. “It’s been all one team where everyone’s involved,” he said. “We are in a very communal situation. Everyone has their own department to take care of, but interactions with other department heads are extremely valuable.”
Noting that the integration of digital visuals is a tool like any other, Barrett considers digital “as tangible as any physical effect. [The function of] production design is to make something feel like it’s unified.”
Though Barrett concedes that a science-fiction genre component exists in Her [“there is science aspect and a fiction aspect”], he noted that this film is grounded in reality. “It’s the future just a wink away,” he said. “It’s not something that we’re not familiar with. It was very fun, of course, when you get to design the future, but the best decision was not to run away with it, to do something very unique to this world.”
When applauded for making a film whose design is uniform and believable, Barrett was modestly reflective. “That’s what we try for with every film,” he remarked. “One thing can throw the whole thing off. You want everything to sing together and come across as one single experience and is timeless. We wanted to make a film in this time, whatever that time is, and create the bubble for the characters. Other designers all go about the process different ways, but we are all striving for the same thing.”
With the ubiquitous nature of the digital toolbox, smaller-budgeted films are now melding the previously separated crafts of production design, visual effects, and picture editing. Case in point is Her, in which all aforementioned skill areas were implemented in conjunction to fabricate the illusion of a vaguely futuristic Los Angeles. Longtime post-production supervisor Peter Mavromates served as Her’s visual effects producer.
“Even before I came on, they had location stills and an artist drew basic concepts,” Mavromates said of Her’s pre-production period in service of creating this imaginary world without a $200 million expense. “They were toying with ideas early on. One of the places they went to shoot is Shanghai with its groups of buildings — it could be LA with a modernist twist to it.”
Naturally, like many such contemporary projects, Her was shot and posted digitally. Since director Spike Jonze wished to populate his world with subtle references to the future, visual effects, combined with production design, were considered early in the process. “They were thinking [about visual effects] as early as scouting,” Mavromates said. “They were even looking at stuff after it was shot and thinking that they could change something slightly so that they could reflect that it was different than its period. This went on through pre-production and right till the end of post. It wasn’t the effects that drove the schedule.”
Given Jonze’s predilections for manifesting a future landscape, he consulted production designer Barrett (Oscar nominated this year) on how they would combine Los Angeles, Shanghai, original construction, and Mavromates’ effects to create a seamless universe within the film. “Spike and K. K. did not want to be so strong in what the look was that people would say [it took place in] an exact year,” Mavromates described. “It’s in the not-to-distant future. The concept behind that is it is a normal world, slightly different.”
Beginning work in October-November of 2012, Mavromates’ major work on Her was finished in September of 2013. During production, Mavromates made sure his department was present at all stages. “Either myself or somebody else in the process would be on set because there’s a specific need,” he said. “When they were shooting downtown in Theo’s [star Joaquin Phoenix’s] apartment, in night shoots, we shot reference material and stills. The great thing about digital technology is that you can go in and modify what you shot.”
When principal photography wrapped in Shanghai and Los Angeles, Mavromates’ major tasks remained, all in the name of realizing Jonze’s particular vision. “What happens is when an assembly comes out right after principal, I have a copy of the movie that I’m breaking down on the shots I know about,” Mavromates explained. “When Spike is in the edit room, other notes come up. In a shot, we’re talking about adding buildings on this side. I’m updating my database with all of those. There’s also the added complication of structure and scenes that are in or out. Obviously, we’re on a limited budget. You don’t want to commit to anything that’s going to be expensive if there’s a chance it could come out of the movie.”
In a sign of potentially revolutionary methodologies in feature post-production’s new fluid digital pipeline, Her’s key team brought a visual effects compositor into the editing room to work on monitor graphics — Christopher Doulgeris is credited on the film as “In-house Visual Effects And Motion Graphics: 1 Man Army.” “Spike likes to try things out,” Mavromates commented. “By bringing [Doulgeris] in-house, he can try different things. It’s an organic process for the computer screens. It’s becoming less and less unique. When Marvel does their movies, they have a big in-house team next door to editing.”
With large-scale effects films, sometimes requiring 1000 or more visual effects shots, hiring multiple visual effects vendors has become commonplace. Thus, in a smaller-scale film such as Her, having an in-house artist is merely logical, according to Mavromates. “In our movie, the number of shots that had to have work done on them is 200 or so,” he said. “With Spike, and [in my visual effects] work with David Fincher, we have somebody in-house that’s doing the smaller effects shots. You have this added benefit of trying things with a soft composite.”
Into this realm of adding visual effects elements to existing production shots, Her’s team added compositing said elements to the list of tasks executed by assistant editors. “By having a compositor in-house to do the easier jobs, you have someone to do higher-level temp work,” Mavromates said, illuminating how polished temporary effects shots can be crucial to the film’s reaction from producers or early audiences. “If you go out and test screen, if you have stuff that takes you out of the moment, how much of your score is affected by that?”
Through post-production, Mavromates would enhance shots that might not have been conceived as effects shots during production — this comes in stark contrast to planned effects shots which, in the past, were often referred to as background plates into which a new effects element would be composited. In Her, given the state-of-the-art in digital imaging technology, Mavromates had no such problem with Her’s lack of pre-conceiving many of its effects shots. “We decided to put some buildings outside of Theo’s office when he’s working on his computer,” he revealed. “The subtle thing like that to suggest that there’s tall buildings everywhere. These tools are getting so sophisticated now, it’s less and less of an issue. It seemed that it was a simple thing to do in that particular case. When you are on a small budget, you can enhance something for not a lot of money.”
Elaborating on his post-production modus operandi, Mavromates noted that often pre-planning effects shots can hamper a director, a necessity that has largely disappeared on smaller sets. “You are not overthinking how you are shooting the actor, Mavromates detailed. “When shots become effects shots, you can overthink it and make the camera static. I’d rather not make compromises because it’s an effects shot. In the last five years, the tracking abilities of the software [has become] just incredible. Now, I’m not worried. You can have somebody like Spike who works handheld but add something [later] to the background.”
Throughout the entire process, Mavromates needed to keep his shots and additions to the film within the allotted effects budget. “I have my breakdown going and I’m estimating every shot,” he remarked. “It’s a guesstimate based on shots that I’ve done on other projects that are similar and the number of hours I think it’s going to take. [Producer] Vince Landay gave me a reasonable number to work with. I was tracking it day by day to see that we were still going to be able to complete it for the number that I thought it was going to take.”
Reflecting upon the project, Mavromates explained that Her’s approach to visual effects in the end was unique and understated compared to other films. “A lot of effects are being used in a way that you are not even supposed to know,” he said. “Spike has a curiosity to see things in different ways and his overall approach to filmmaking has a lot of that in it. How much is previsualized and how much is found after the fact? Spike walks around looking for opportunities all the time. The map is roughly sketched out. He turns to K. K. [Barrett] and asks, ‘What if we do that?’”
In the end, with the carefully combined aspects of urban Shanghai and Los Angeles, and the interweaving of production design, locations, and effects shots, much of Her’s innate texture might be rendered invisible to the lay audience. “The way Spike does his movies, it doesn’t feel like an effect,” Mavromates stated. “Sometimes you think you’re going to need an effect to do something, but Spike just drops the actors in from out of frame. It’s so against the grain in many ways.”
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