The following is an extract from my article on Welcome to Marwen, published in Cinefex 162, December 2018
In the early hours of a Saturday morning in the year 2000, kitchen worker and amateur artist Mark Hogancamp was walking home from his local saloon. At the bar, he had been chatting with a stranger, who now approached him with four other men and beat him within an inch of his life. After nine days in a medically induced coma, Hogancamp awoke unable to speak, and with most of his adult memories wiped clean. As his assailants came to trial, certain evidence suggested that Hogancamp had been assaulted simply because he had revealed in conversation that he was a cross-dresser.
Hogancamp’s state-supported therapy program ran out before his rehabilitation was complete. Rediscovering his interest in World War II miniatures, he began collecting one-sixth-scale military figures. In Hogancamp’s traumatized mind, each doll became an alter ego of someone he knew, so he built a miniature town for them to live in, called ‘Marwencol.’ As the project expanded, he began taking photographs of his Lilliputian realm, and used them to tell stories that closely paralleled his own life experiences — including the vicious attack. Gradually, his cognitive abilities began to return; meanwhile, the rigors of modelmaking were improving his fine motor skills. Incredibly, Hogancamp was using his natural creativity to heal himself.
Mark Hogancamp’s photographs eventually came to the public eye, first in an issue of the non-profit arts journal Esopus, then in an art show at the White Columns gallery in Manhattan. In 2010, filmmaker Jeff Malmberg premiered his feature-length documentary Marwencol, an intimate chronicle of the emerging artist’s life and work, and it was this film that first brought Hogancamp’s remarkable story to the attention of feature director Robert Zemeckis. “I was channel surfing,” said Zemeckis. “The documentary was being broadcast on public television, and as I turned on the station I saw an image of these dolls dressed in World War II regalia, and I just started watching. I don’t remember exactly where I came in on the documentary, but 15 minutes later I stood up in my living room and literally watched the rest of it on my feet. I immediately saw the potential of taking this story and expanding it into a feature movie.”
In adapting the story, Zemeckis balanced screen time between the real-world character of Mark Hogancamp and his doll alter ego, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot called Hogie, both played in the film by Steve Carell. Welcome to Marwen begins with Hogie crashlanding in Belgium during World War II. Set upon by five Nazi soldiers, he is rescued by a group of women who take him back to their town of Marwen. Meanwhile, in the real world, Mark struggles to recover from a brutal beating, helped by his female friends, each of whom has her own doll counterpart in the miniature town he has created, including Anna (Gwendoline Christie), Julie (Janelle Monáe), Carlala (Eiza González) and Roberta (Merritt Wever). As Hogie and the women of Marwen continue to battle the Nazis, and Mark searches for the strength to face his attackers in court, the lines begin to blur between the real and miniature realms.
Zemeckis sent the script to his long-time visual effects collaborator Kevin Baillie, who took the role of production visual effects supervisor on Welcome to Marwen, working alongside production visual effects producer Sandra Scott. Atomic Fiction handled the majority of the film’s 655 visual effects shots; given the director’s predilection for long takes and intricate camerawork, the relatively low shot count belied the complexity of the work involved. Additionally, Framestore delivered the film’s opening sequences, and Method Studios did a range of compositing and performance editing tasks. In September 2018, near the end of postproduction, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. acquired Atomic Fiction, which became part of Method Studios; however, the credit for the company’s work on the film remained under the name Atomic Fiction.
“I was in my backyard on a Sunday, barbecuing, and Bob called me,” Kevin Baillie recalled. “He’d just gotten back from a trip to Italy, where he had written this script. He said: ‘Kev, this is kind of out there. Can you tell me if it’s doable?’” Having read the script, Baillie immediately tracked down Jeff Malmberg’s documentary. “I was blown away by the heart of the story, by Mark’s struggle, and by the visuals that he crafted. I could see instantly why Bob had gravitated to it as a story that he wanted to tell as a feature film.”
With nearly 50 minutes of the film set inside the miniaturized world of Mark’s imagination, establishing the model town and its diminutive inhabitants was a key creative challenge. If the filmmakers were to honor the guileless grit of Hogancamp’s work, photoreality was a must, but so too was emotional truth. Moreover, the interface between Marwen and the real world had to be seamless, not least because the director’s playful imagination envisioned many scenes in which doll characters slipped effortlessly between the two realms. “Usually, miniature photography is sort of tongue in cheek,” Baillie observed. “But Mark’s photography is about playing out the struggles that are going on in his head, through this narrative that is designed to help him make sense of life. There’s no irony in his photography. It’s real to him. That was a real challenge for us in terms of the compositions and the tactile qualities of the doll world, and most importantly, the characters in it. They had to feel like living, breathing beings, just as they are in Mark’s imagination.”
Seeking ways to portray the doll characters on screen, Robert Zemeckis immediately expressed reservations about using motion capture. “I think Bob felt he’d received enough criticism on some of his previous motion capture movies, in terms of the character performances not resonating with audiences,” stated Baillie. Early experiments explored a live-action approach, with plans being made for actors to perform in oversized sets. Zemeckis shot test footage of Steve Carell playing Hogie and the director’s actress/producer wife, Leslie Zemeckis, as Suzette. Visual effects altered their appearance using 2D warps and de-aging techniques, and added CG doll joints to their limbs. “With the first iteration of that test, it became wildly apparent that this methodology was a dead end. Putting rigid doll joints in between soft human tissue just made it look like they had dressed up in really good doll outfits for Halloween. So we went back to the drawing board.”
As a next step, Baillie produced a 30-second test to demonstrate the potential of a conventional motion capture approach, by rotomating the actors’ performances from the test footage and translating them onto CG dolls. While Zemeckis liked the doll bodies, he still feared that CG facial performances would drop the film straight into the so-called ‘uncanny valley.’ Applying a little lateral thinking, Baillie hit upon a novel solution. “We had this footage that was perfectly lit, with the actors in makeup,” Baillie said, “and we had these digital bodies lit to match them. So, instead of augmenting Steve and Leslie with digital doll parts, why not augment the digital dolls with Steve and Leslie parts?” The final approach involved extracting the essential parts of the actors’ faces from the plates — usually the eyes and mouths — and projecting them onto the CG dolls. “We developed a proprietary process at Atomic Fiction to drive the doll faces with these live-action elements, plasticizing it to integrate the footage into the doll bodies, and voila — it just clicked. We pitched that to Universal as a test, and that’s what got the movie greenlit.”
Simple though the methodology sounded, the complexity of the operation needed to implement it swiftly became apparent. Actors would have to perform doll scenes wearing motion capture suits, but without the usual facial capture rigs. Instead, makeup department head Ve Neill would apply full makeup so that motion picture cameras could photograph the performers as if for a regular live-action shoot, simultaneously with the motion capture. Visual effects would later impose the live-action faces onto the CG dolls using the digital equivalent of front projection, for which both camera and projector must be perfectly aligned. Before any of this could happen, the visual effects team had to develop digital assets of the dolls and Marwen environment, not only to assist with previs and prelighting, but also to kickstart the manufacture of the one-sixth-scale practical miniatures that would be needed for the separate live-action shoot.
“This was the most integrated we’d been in preproduction on any film,” Sandra Scott asserted. “We had to work with every department months before we started shooting. We had to have practical dolls in hand on day one, so that Steve Carell could interact with them on set. We had to back that way, way up so that, as casting was happening, we could sculpt the dolls, scan them, provide 3D files to create the practical dolls’ heads — the schedule was just mind-boggling in terms of interdependency. At the same time, working so closely with all the departments brought a real emotional component, because everybody was working together to create the central characters of the film. That made it a pretty special collaboration.”
The production of the dolls began the moment each actor was cast. Doll designer Bill Corso created each ‘dollified’ alter ego by painting over a scan of the actor’s face, smoothing out the skin and subtly caricaturing the features. Atomic Fiction interpreted the designs as digital sculpts using Pixologic ZBrush and developed CG doll bodies to accompany them. The digital files then passed to Creation Consultants, which manufactured all the practical dolls used during the shoot.
Creation Consultants used laser stereo lithography to 3D print the doll heads in SLS resin at a fine resolution of 25 microns, then took silicone molds. The team pressure-cast Smooth-Cast 300 resin, tinted to the correct overall skin tone, into the molds, and artists hand-painted the finished heads to follow the concept art. At the same time, Creation Consultants began designing and fabricating the female bodies, based on Atomic Fiction’s 3D files; male dolls used the bodies from Dragon Models action figures. “We dissected Atomic’s sculpt in Rhino and ZBrush, breaking it into the different components and putting the seams and joints where they needed to be,” said Creation Consultants founder Dave Asling. “Each female figure had over 50 different parts, and every one had to be engineered from scratch. Developing an action figure like this typically takes about a year — we had just 16 days to design and create the first prototype.” Once approved, the prototype was rushed to London, where costume designer Joanna Johnston and her team began fabricating one-sixth-scale wardrobe items for all the doll characters.
As with the heads, each piece of the body was 3D-printed, molded and cast. Left unpainted, the body parts relied on the pigmented resin for their final appearance. Each doll part was just one element of a carefully engineered armature that needed to be easy to manipulate, yet able to hold its pose. To achieve this, each joint contained small rubber O-rings that applied friction to the moving parts. “We added tiny set screws that we could tighten against the joints,” Asling elaborated. “These allowed you to position the doll then lock the joints. With less pressure on the screw, you could move the joint but still have a little bit of resistance. The engineering in these things was kind of over the top, because Bob wanted to be able to put the dolls into all the positions that the actors would be in. With the joints on the women, we were trying to squeeze all of this functionality into a structure with just a quarter inch diameter. It was quite a challenge.”
Every male doll was fitted with a magnetic neck mount that allowed the head to be snapped on and off, and all the males had solid hair, cast along with the rest of the head and hand-painted. Around half the female dolls boasted elaborate hairdos built up on detachable skull caps. “We used the kind of hair extensions that you would get at a salon,” commented Asling. “We printed a magnetic receiver that locked into the back of the head, and on it we built up a layer of hard wax. Using a fine-pointed soldering iron, we softened the wax and inserted the hair six or eight strands at a time. The hairstyles on the actors had a very defined look, and it took quite a while to get all those fine curls and ringlets happening on Barbie-scale heads.”
Creation Consultants created a lineup of 24 hero dolls, comprising 17 characters plus backup duplicates of the leads. When second unit recruited the backups for use in additional hero setups, the team scrambled to create a separate set of ‘stunt dolls.’ These served in action scenes deemed too risky for the pristine main characters, including those in which Mark hauls his model jeep down the road with the dolls crammed on board. “They were already filming in Vancouver by this point,” Asling recalled. “I got a bunch of dollar store dolls, modified their bodies with latex foam, and had castings of the heads sent up from our studio in Los Angeles. I was literally in a tent behind the set, in the middle of a cow pasture, hand-painting these one-sixth-scale doll faces!”
Just as the practical dolls needed to be ready before principal photography, so too did the miniature town. But Marwen was more than a mere set piece — it also had to function as the 3D template for the motion capture shoot, and be scanned to generate assets for fully digital scenes set inside the doll world. “It was important for people to realize that the miniature town we were building wasn’t a prop,” said production designer Stefan Dechant. “You had to think about it as a backlot, because when we went into motion capture and visual effects, that’s exactly what it was going to be.” Dechant designed background buildings that closely matched the model structures built by Mark Hogancamp, and adapted hero buildings such as the church and Hogie’s bar, The Ruined Stocking, to better suit the needs of the film. All the architecture reflected the improvised, rough-hewn aesthetic of the real model town. “If you’re up at a human level looking down, that town looks like it’s just made out of scraps of wood. When you get down at the dolls’ level, it becomes a world.”
Concept artist Craig Sellars developed Dechant’s sketches into production paintings. Supplemented with concept art done earlier by Atomic Fiction, these spawned digital models from which Creation Consultants fabricated a foamcore mockup of the complete town. A regular visitor to the workshop, Robert Zemeckis used the mockup to plan shots and refine the layout. In its finished form, Marwen occupied a rough circle some 32 feet in diameter, with around 14 buildings centered on a courtyard with a fountain.
Once the mockup was approved, Creation Consultants began constructing the final miniature. “We wanted to expand a little on Mark Hogancamp’s work in terms of scope,” remarked Dave Asling, “but not go too far with adding detail. We especially didn’t want to make it look like a professionally-built miniature village, so we used the same sort of materials Mark would have used — thin plywood, two-by-four, bits of window trim.” To help achieve the homespun look, Asling limited the use of power tools, and encouraged his crew to favor their non-dominant hands. Artists aged the finished structures, replicating the effects of harsh weather by delaminating plywood and applying peeled paint effects.
Text copyright © Cinefex 2018. Reprinted here with permission.
Graham Edwards 