May 22nd, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
Academy Award winner Chris Lawrence (Gravity) is the Visual Effects Supervisor of America’s No. 1 movie, IF. Director John Krasinski’s new family film, starring Ryan Reynolds, is about the power of imagination and memories. Lawrence describes the work that went into creating the vibrant, CG characters and bringing Krasinski’s passion project to the screen. (This Animation Scoop Interview was conducted as an Email Q&A and was edited for length and clarity. Images Courtesy: Paramount Pictures.)
Jackson Murphy: What were your initial reactions to John Krasinski’s vision of these imaginary characters?
Chris Lawrence: I loved it! He came to me with gigabytes of concept art from some of the best concept artists in the world. It was so refreshing to be working on original ideas, and I think we loved a lot of the same films as kids and teenagers, so it was easy to draw on common experiences and influences. We talked about this a lot. Realism and tangibility were really important to him, so we did everything we could through the production process to aid the realism and help them make all the interactions as natural as possible.
JM: There are SO MANY characters, with distinct looks and a range of sizes. What were the biggest challenges of bringing them to life?
CL: One of the biggest challenges was the ideation of the characters in the first place. I mentioned that there were loads of incredible concept art, mostly covering the leads. There were still plenty of other characters to conceive of, and John was very collaborative about accepting suggestions (as long as you could support them with really strong story ideas – he was all about the story!). We had a great time with Framestore’s visual development team riffing off various ideas we’d come up with. They would quickly model the ideas in Blender and show posed renders to John. It was a great way of iterating very quickly and getting fast approvals to push into production in the regular Framestore pipeline.
JM: How do the live-action performances of Ryan Reynolds and Cailey Fleming help you with placing the IFs next to/around them?
CL: Ryan and Cailey were great! They really engaged with the puppeteers on set, and we worked hard to make sure all the eyelines and other details were perfectly figured out.
JM: How did your Academy Award nominated work on 2018’s beautiful “Christopher Robin” prepare you for “IF”?
CL: We wanted “IF” to have these really tangible characters, so “Christopher Robin” was great preparation for that! The characters themselves were very different, so there was still lots to learn. We wanted the audience to feel like they could smell them. (Blue smells of croissants, in case you were wondering!) So there were similarities and differences. Winnie the Pooh had this incredible detail and realism, but his animation was incredibly subtle and minimalist. For Blue, we were striving to have an animated character who lived in our world, but he’s huge and his motion was quite broad, so we adopted the kind of deformation you’d use in an animated feature.
JM: When did your imagination come in handy the most while working on “IF”?
CL: There were so, so many ideas on this show that my imagination had to be permanently engaged! We visualised the Tina Turner dance sequence for John before it was shot. That was quite something because he described it in a lot of detail, but it wasn’t until we’d put it all together that we were like, “Oh, maybe that’s what he wants.” We showed him, and he laughed and then immediately cried! They were happy tears because he’d had this idea in his head, and he wasn’t sure he’d been able to express it. I think he was at once appreciative and emotional that these ideas he’d been holding onto were becoming realized.
JM: It’s been just over 10 years since you won the Best Visual Effects Oscar. How would you say what you accomplished on “Gravity” changed how people view visual effects?
CL: I love working on films that tell stories in an artful way. I see all my work as a true collaboration between VFX and animation. I think if you value the craft of animation rather than see it in service of the VFX you end up with a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This was the case on “Gravity” and has been the case on every movie I’ve done since. I’ve been extremely lucky to work with some really great people over the last 10 years and am humbled to be a part of this community.
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