The Credits: “It was trying to find a solution to what makes a toy,” says production designer Sarah Greenwood about creating the charmed sets of Barbie alongside set decorator Katie Spencer. The two have been near inseparable, having worked on over thirty projects together. Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, and Anna Karenina are among their six Academy Award nominations. “It became this huge journey of discovery, and it started with us buying a Barbie Dreamhouse and playing with it.”
4 comments:
I really enjoyed the production design for Barbie, so it was exciting to learn a little bit about the challenges they faced. I love the fact that the production designer and set decorator are like best friends. I feel like that would be such a fun relationship to have in the industry. The Barbie film does provide an interesting problem for production design to solve on how to make things look like they are toys. Greenwood and Spencer were clearly able to successfully solve these issues. I think it’s great that they actually just took the opportunity to play around with the dolls and toy pieces to see how they all related to each other. It is quite surprising to think about how out of scale Barbie is to her actual dreamhouse. I would have just assumed that they had made her scale, but I guess that probably would have made my playing experience as a kid much different. It’s also quite interesting that we as people kind of pick up on that visually, so that when they made all the actors on set bigger than everything else it immediately made the Barbie set seem toy-like.
It continues to baffle me what is practical and what is CGI in movies. Specifically the costs behind both. I always hear that it is “less expensive to do things practically” but I really don't understand how that is possible given the sheer amount of materials needed. However, in this movie, I think it's important for most of these things, particularly the dream houses. I think it provides a real sense of place and character for the actors and the audience. The other thing I found fascinating about Barbie was that they often did things in three dimensions and intentionally had them look two-dimensional. It really gives it such a unique feel and a really solid world in which Barbieland exists. I also found it interesting how they had a 140-foot backdrop, real houses but the landscape in the center is CGI. It's truly baffling to me how decisions regarding practical vs. CGI effects are made.
I enjoyed the scenic design in the Barbie movie so much. To me, it perfectly encapsulates so much of the power that scenery has to make the place feel real (or, in this case, not real). I think that it was really impressive the amount of work and detail that went into trying to make Barbieland as Barbie as possible. It was super interesting to learn about how they figured out how to scale things down to make them appear more toylike, as that is something I would have never consciously considered, but I did notice in the film how much the car, for example, truly looked like a Barbie car, even outside of the colors and treatment of the surface. I also really appreciated the blend of 2D and 3D elements, as I think it really served to merge the disparity between toy likeness and the 3D live action that the film is.
The production design for Barbie was one of my favorite parts, so this was a cool read - at first I thought it would mainly discuss the plasticy feel of a toy, but some of the comments about the dimensions of the homes were super surprising, and made total sense; the fact that they build the homes 23% smaller as Barbie is normally bigger to scale than most of her homes and accessories is so fascinating. Also the discussion of 2D vs 3D objects was interesting, and made me remember playing with Barbies a long time ago with my baby cousin, and how many accessories with toy kits like that have objects that are 2D or like they said in the article, painted on posters on the wall, etc to make the doll house look real, and yet in the production design of Barbie it makes it look more like a toy house instead, exactly the effect they wanted. Overall props to the Barbie creatives, they did such a great job making the world look like Barbie’s, and it really made the film.
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