A Breakdown of the Practical VFX in "Strawberry Mansion" | Part 1

We didn’t have millions of dollars to make "Strawberry Mansion.” On the first day of filming we only had 30k in the bank. By the end of post production the total budget was 200k. When working with a budget this size we knew we would have to get creative with the special effects, making many of them ourselves and by hand. This didn’t feel like a restriction to us, but rather an advantage. Handmade special effects can help the film standout amongst all the cookie cutter CGI. Even if the VFX are not 100% realistic, there’s a certain magic and charm in seeing the hand of the filmmakers up there on the screen.

Let’s start with the house. Originally we were hoping to find a real mansion we could use for all the exterior shots. The summer of 2019 we drove all over Maryland hoping to locate the perfect house. We found some promising ones but none had that magic we were looking for. The final straw was when the Maryland Film Office gave us a binder of houses that they had used over the years and we drove way out into the country to see one and when we got there it was just an empty field. The house had been demolished years earlier. That day we resolved to go another route. I remembered a dollhouse I had purchased four years earlier for $99 from a thrift store. With my stepfather’s help, we built a porch addition on the front, painted it, and glued on some roof tiles. It was quite large so we nailed it to a board and added some fake bushes and trees in the front to help sell the illusion.

Watching behind-the-scenes videos I’ve learned it’s helpful to film your miniatures in the actual location where they will be inserted if possible, to help keep the lighting uniform. In the photo below you can see the house raised up with C stands so it sits in the frame pretty close to where it will be in the final image.

There’s a desert island that our two main characters spend some time on. Like with the miniature house, we knew it would be best to make a miniature and film it against a real sky. I made a small island out of clay, added a plastic palm tree and glued it all to a cork board I found in a dumpster. I screwed a table leg into the board to help it stand up.

In August of 2019 I was going to Bethany Beach for a week with my family so I brought the tiny island along. Every morning I’d wake before sunrise and take it to the beach and film. Every evening at sunset I’d do the same. I filmed on my trusty Canon T3i which I bought in 2011 and still use to this day. It felt nice to be filming at the beach I’d been coming to since I was a child. Some sunrises and sunsets were not spectacular, but a few were and those are the ones that made it into the movie.

There’s a buffalo that appears in an early dream sequence. We didn’t quite know how we would pull it off but thought if we made something for the actor’s to respond to, we could figure out the rest in post. Local artist Jac Bennett built a styrofoam head and glued fake fur to it. We brought it to the field and made a body out of fake fur. Then we had someone positioned under the fur, slowly moving it up and down, so it looked like the beast was breathing. The actors could walk around it and touch it, which was the most important thing to capture. Then in post production we digitally added blood to the buffalo’s wound and details to the head, making it look more realistic.

The first time we meet Young Bella in her dreams she has a woolly bear caterpillar crawling around in her hands. This wasn’t planned or written in the script. It happened spontaneously one day when Kentucker was changing out of his Preble outfit into the Grassman costume. We were waiting for him to come back and I looked down and saw a caterpillar crawling at my feet. I asked Grace if she would be comfortable holding it. She said ‘Yes’ and we rolled a few minutes of B-roll while we were waiting.

During post production we found ourselves a bit stuck in the edit and realized that if Preble turned into a caterpillar, it could solve some of our problems. We felt like it made sense since we’d already seen Bella holding a caterpillar in her dream. We asked our friend and animator Lawrence Becker to animate Preble’s caterpillar journey. He used a pipe cleaner and animated in front of a green screen. We took his footage and mixed it with a sunrise I had filmed one evening from my front porch. The ocean and desert were stock footage we purchased. Much of the snowstorm was flour filmed blowing against the night sky.

Towards the end of the movie our two main characters turn into comets hurtling towards Earth. First we filmed them saying all their lines in front of a green screen.

Then Lawrence animated the comets using hot glue, cotton balls, and colored acetate.

Lawrence then sent us the animated comet footage and we inserted the actor’s faces onto the burning rocks, as well as adding stars behind them. Then our colorist added a little shake to the whole shot to help sell the velocity.

For the scene of the dancing skeleton in the cemetery, we started by filming the empty grave where the skeleton would emerge. We sent this to Lawrence who then filmed himself for reference. Then he animated a cheap skeleton toy on blue and we put it all together for the final shot.

Towards the end of the movie we needed to show an entire room on fire. Of course we didn’t want to burn down our location so we built a section of the room outside and then burned that down.

The head of the Frog Waiter was built by Marnie Ellen Hertzler in a style she learned making Mardi Gras floats. The frog began as insulation foam on a bike helmet, then one sided corrugated cardboard, then papier-mâché and paint. The eyeballs were two red maracas we found in a thrift store. There was a thick rubber band on either side of the mouth that allowed it to open and close when I moved my mouth.

For a quick shot of an exploding head, we filmed our actor on a green screen and then sent that footage to Lawrence. He animated with clay, hair, and strawberry jam.

Our main character Preble has a dream where he looks into a mirror and sees his head open up, filled with squirming maggots. To achieve this we filmed Kentucker in front of the mirror, sent it to Lawrence who created a clay replica and animated on green.

One of my favorite practical effects was also one of the simplest: our main character is knocked over the head and falls to the floor. To show him woozily regaining consciousness we put a flexible mirror sheet on the ground, warped and bent it and filmed the reflection.

We wanted this parking lot to look more run down so one of our VFX artists, Matt Lathrom, added a bunch of cracks and overgrown grass. We also wanted the skyline to be littered with billboards and fast food signs so our friend Alan Resnick made some for us. Fun fact: the building in the background used to be a Sears and it was the first place I ever played a Super Nintendo.

Here’s how we made the blue demon grab the ship out of the ocean: first we made a collage sketch to help visualize what we were imagining. Then Clockwork Creature made the mask and I performed the action in front of a green screen. Matt Lathrom took the footage and added water and fire effects. I found the miniature ship at a thrift store and the large ship is the USS Constellation in the Baltimore Harbor. It was still open to tourists so sometimes we had to stop filming to let them walk through our frame. Since the ship is permanently anchored in the Baltimore Harbor we had to position the camera low and film up so we wouldn’t see any of the buildings in downtown Baltimore.

Which brings us to the four amazing heads that Clockwork Creature made for us. The only thing we added to any of them in post was a few blinks for the blue demon, other than that they all appear in the movie as they were filmed.

Throughout the film our main character Preble dreams in a small, pink room. At one point he’s greeted by someone special and we wanted the walls to fall down around him, revealing a green field. To achieve this we just built a pink wall in a field and then pushed it over.

Next week in part 2 we’ll share the rest of the VFX, as well as some deleted scenes and how we transferred the whole movie to 16mm film as our final visual effect.

Paying subscribers can watch a deleted scene below of Preble, in his apartment, going over his assignment before he heads to Bella’s home for the first time…Upgrade to paid subscriber now and we will send you a Strawberry Mansion postcard. (DM us once subscribed with your mailing address).