A Breakdown of the Practical VFX in "Strawberry Mansion" | Part 2

Here is the second part of our VFX breakdown for our movie “Strawberry Mansion”. If you missed part one, check it out here.

In our movie two characters turn into beets. Marnie Ellen Hertzler made two, large papier-mâché costumes for the actors to wear in front of a green screen.

The footage ended up looking kinda silly so during the edit we realized they should have real beets for their bodies. I went to my local supermarket and bought the biggest beets they had and we filmed them in front of a piece of green paper.

Then we filmed an out of focus background on my dining room table. This was filmed eight months after we had filmed the original dinner scene. Since it would be out of focus we knew it wouldn’t have to match the original scene perfectly.

Then we gave all of this footage to one of our visual effects artists, Matt Lathrom, who put it all together into the final image. He used the footage we had shot of the actors wearing the papier-mâché costumes and replaced their bodies with real beets.

At one point our main character, James Preble, falls from the sky into the ocean. We filmed Kentucker sitting on a green block in front of a green screen and he pretended to be falling.

We wanted to film underwater as he crashed into the ocean but we ran out of time. I found some jellyfish footage I had filmed years earlier at an aquarium so we used that to bridge the gap between sky and ocean. In the edit we discovered that the jellyfish tentacles made for a nice dissolve into Bella’s hair blowing in the wind.

The pink room, made by production designer Becca Brooks Morrin and art director Lydia Milano, is one size for most of the movie except for a scene where it shrinks. To pull this off we had one wall on hand trucks so it could roll.

At one point Preble is lost in a frozen tundra. First we filmed him walking in front of a green screen wearing my grandmother’s old coat. Then I made a background by combining various free stock photographs.

To make snow to overlay in front of the image, we filmed flour floating through the air lit only by a flashlight.

Then we put it all together and added some breath condensation to sell it.

I made the small pink house at the end of the frozen tundra from a shoe box, some leftover dollhouse roof tiles, and other junk laying around like a plastic, drinking straw. We layered snow on top and added some smoke coming from the chimney and it was done.

The ad-blocking helmet was made by Marnie Ellen Hertzler. She made it by taking apart a bunch of electronics and then hot gluing wires and random bits to a bike helmet with some foil tape and Christmas lights thrown in.

Here’s the initial sketch for the Captain Kelly’s Chicken logo next to the final design by Nolan Strals.

I designed the menu screen in photoshop and then our friend and animator Julian Glander made the chicken head that talks. (Go watch Julian’s new animated feature “Boys Go To Jupiter” wherever you find your movies online)

A few of the effects in “Strawberry Mansion” involved some 3D modeling by Matt Lathrom. Here’s some photos showing how we turned a character into a blimp.

I sent Matt footage I had shot of a dead fly in a web made of hot glue (1st image) and then he worked his after effects magic and made it move and talk (2nd image.)

We filmed the actor’s in front of a black background then Matt built a 3D model of a bubble that would float down and swallow them up and float away.

When the bird lands on the chair in Bella's dream, I was just on the ground moving it around a bit and then I removed my hand in post. I bought the taxidermied bird on ebay and once we were finished filming it, put it right back up on ebay.

Perhaps the most important visual effect of all was transferring the entire movie to 16mm film. We knew since we used so many different VFX styles and artists, that putting it all to film would help bring a cohesion to all the footage.

We did multiple tests to figure out how the digital footage would look once we transferred it. We realized it looked best if we color corrected the digital footage once, then transferred it to film, then color corrected it a final time. Here’s some early digital test footage we transferred to film.

When we were first trying to make “Strawberry Mansion” people kept telling us we would need 15 million dollars to make it. Sure, there’s a version of the movie we could’ve made for that amount but the reality was we only had 200k. From these monetary limitations came creative solutions that gave the movie a handmade charm. A reminder to get together with some friends and make a movie by any means necessary.

Paying subscribers can watch a deleted scene below of Preble in a six minute epic battle with a Witch. For this scene we filled an entire room with unspooled VHS magnetic tape…Upgrade to paid subscriber now and you can watch this scene and we will also send you a Strawberry Mansion postcard. (DM us once subscribed with your mailing address).