Avoiding the "plastic toy frog" look
One of the areas that Bartoli worked on for ages was the bright color schemes of Pandora's creatures — which manage to be striking without looking garish or tacky. As you've no doubt already heard, the designers looked at real-life sources of color in nature, including ocean life, but also insects, amphibians and the plumage of parrots or toucans. But Bartoli says it wasn't easy to avoid something fake-looking:
The challenge was to make brightly colored creatures that didn't feel like plastic toys. A good test that helped highlight the difference between the two I did early on was to take images of a plastic toy frog and compare them with a real Amazonian poison dart frog. Both have bright colors in simple shapes and a shiny surface, but there is a subtle break up in the live frog that makes all the difference.
I love the idea that he studied a plastic toy to learn what not to do.
And production designer Robert Stromberg says there's a good reason why the kind of bioluminescent look you see in the movie had never been done before: "It can look really bad, really fast." It can also look very cheesy if not handled right, he adds. "Obviously, the scare is that it's going to look like a black-light Elvis painting, and it very well could have gone that direction." The designers spent months and months experimenting with different combinations of techniques — "layers of diffusion, amounts of glow, intensity of color, color combination" — to get it right. "We did enough testing that we realized that there really is something there, and it works in our world, in the way these deep-sea fish comunicate and so on."
Robert Stromberg moves from visual effects to design for “Avatar” and “Alice,” and wins an Oscar
Robert Stromberg in New Zealand in front of a rare physical set piece for “Avatar.”
Stromberg was co-production designer, along with Carter, on “Avatar”—a project that first earned them an Excellence in Production Design nomination from the Art Director’s Guild leading up to their Oscar nomination and victory. Following “Avatar,” Tim Burton hired Stromberg to serve as production designer on the visually tripped-out “Alice in Wonderland”—another high-profile, digital design project.
Shortly after his Oscar nomination, I chatted with Stromberg about his unusual transition from visual effects to production design, and how his background helped that transition for design work on state-of-the-art digital stereoscopic projects like “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland.
“Cut to three and a half years later, and that one night of inspiration turned into a production design career for me,” he says. “I did about a year of design work with several other illustrators that I brought in. That was before the production was green-lit and I still considered myself a visual effects designer at the time. There was a (production designer) at the very beginning (Martin Lang), but once the movie was green-lit, he left the show and I realized the movie was so big we would have to split up the duties. So Rick Carter came on, and he’s gone on to be one of the guiding forces in my production design career. We split up the movie—I took on Pandora and all the organic elements of the planet, and he took on the man-made, live-action stuff, including all the mechanical elements and the physical sets in New Zealand. I found that splitting it up helped the story in the end, because we had two very different perspectives on the story—one gives you the design of the indigenous population on Pandora and where they live, and the other gives you the look of a foreign, alien force (humans who attempt to exploit the moon’s resources). That gave us a visual contrast similar to the story arc.”
Robert Stromberg's production design on Alice in Wonderland called for a variety of techniques
Ultimately, the final rendering of Alice became a cross-pollination of many techniques. “Part of my job was to understand what it was that I was doing, what Tim was going for, and what his style is,” Stromberg said. “I watched his films to see what he was doing in each of them. I dug into the [Lewis Carroll] books, took that information, and went forward designing each environment.”
With Burton’s definitive gothic tendencies, Stromberg knew that the fantasy sequences would have a darker tint than previous live-action or animated versions of the story. “In a weird way, what we created was light and dark at the same time,” he described. “ The initial questions are, ‘are we making the fluffy bunny tail version of this or something with more theatrics to it?’ You start talking about the Red Queen ruling this land, which was beautiful and has now become decrepit. What used to be a beautiful English garden is falling apart.
The Red Queen's Castle at night
Design sketch of the Red Queen's Castle
“That required a higher level of digital set work,” he stated. “My job was to help Jim not only see what these environments are but be there on the day to compose elements in a scene for a virtual camera. It was a very unique way of making a movie. It was exciting and terrifying at the same time.
