Mickey 17

One such script-to-screen challenge were the alien ‘creepers’. “Director Bong had been working with a creature designer for some months before we met him,” explains Penn. “We had these excellent designs serving as our north star, and our task was to make them work - both in terms of how they would function and move from an anatomical and pacing point of view, but also how to imbue them with character, humour, warmth and personality despite their being so completely alien.” 

Working on the ‘baby’ and ‘mama’ creepers, Framestore was charged with early dev work on the creatures before the shoot even began. “We had to give Director Bong and the on-set team a sense of how and how fast the creepers would move so we’d have what we needed from the shoot,” explains Penn. “It was a long development process, but it meant the plate photography matched Director Bong’s vision perfectly in terms of pacing, action and the beats we had to hit.” 

Designed to seem friendly and benign in their ‘closed’ state and more menacing as they open up to reveal their many tendrils and appendages, the aliens serve as emotional touchpoints throughout the film: conjuring fear, tension, humour and, as audiences come to root for them, a sense of emotional connection. 

“Usually when you’re trying to tease an emotive performance out of an animated character you have some familiar parameters to work with,” says Animation Supervisor Max Solomon. “Whether it’s a ‘real life’ creature or something more stylised, you can usually rely on facial expressions or body language to provide cues as to intent, mood or state of mind. With the creepers being so completely alien we had to rely on more subliminal connections to help them resonate with audiences. For the baby creepers, for example, we looked at the playfulness of kittens, puppies and lion cubs, whereas the mamas were more elephantine in their movement and behaviour. These were all subtle references, but they ultimately help us relate to and care about creatures that, at first pass, don’t seem wholly endearing.” 

Director Bong’s preference for shooting in-camera as much as possible also helped bring the creatures more fully to life. “There’s a scene where the creepers are pulling Mickey up through a hole in the snow,” says Solomon. “For the shoot, a group of white-clad SFX artists physically passed Robert Pattinson up through the hole. This provided us with a really great organic, undulating reference and a sense of bodily heft, and the final result is extremely satisfying.” 

To help inform the film’s environment builds and set extensions, Stuart Penn travelled to Iceland to capture reference footage, travelling across glaciers and climbing through ice caves. This helped inform the final look and feel of key sequences such as the crevasse into which Mickey falls, the creepers’ snow tunnel and the ice cave. “Crafting icy environments in CG is always a challenge,” says Penn. “They’re entirely unforgiving, and the way the light refracts and scatters adds multiple layers of complexity. Being out on recce was invaluable in terms of gathering reference materials and helping give the environments a real sense of tangibility.” 

As an ‘expendable’ testing dangerous situations and hostile environments, Mickey is doomed to face gruesome death after gruesome death - reprinted on demand when a new test subject is required. “We treat Mickey pretty badly throughout the film,” admits Penn. “He loses a hand, is subjected to radiation and airborne toxins, dropped into lava… he goes through a lot. This made it interesting from an FX point of view, because instead of having one or two drawn-out FX-heavy sequences, we run the gamut with a range of standalone moments. There’s fire, blistering radiation burns, poisonous gas clouds, gunfire - a lot of pretty unpleasant stuff.”  

In these moments - as with humanity’s various encounters with the creepers - dark, acerbic humour is inextricably bound with tension and horror. “The tone of the film and the way Director Bong juxtaposes gruesome acts with moments of humour made Mickey 17 a really interesting project to work on,” says Penn. “Everything we did was in service to this very clear, specific vision, and that meant all our VFX work had to be as natural and seamless as part of Mickey’s world as the costume design or the physical props. Everything has to work together to keep you immersed, whether what you’re seeing is weird, hilarious or absolutely horrifying.”