GoKawiilis a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
In Manuel Gonzales’ 2013 short story “The Miniature Wife,” a woman starts to become a different kind of person after her husband accidentally shrinks her down to the size of a coffee mug. Because of her new stature, the woman is more physically vulnerable, and it’s difficult for her to effectively communicate with normal sized people. But for all the danger that the woman’s tininess puts her in, it also pushes her to tap into a strength that takes her husband by surprise.
The marital dynamics are very similar in Peacock’s new The Miniature Wife series adaptation starring Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen. The show adds depth to both of its leads with commentary about tech bro chauvinism, and it spends more time with the wife’s interior thoughts. But like the book, Peacock’s series emphasizes that mundane objects can be terrifying to a person who is just a few inches tall. And it fell to VFX supervisor Ashley Bernes to make The Miniature Wife’s world of ordinary things feel menacing.
Bernes spent months working with a team of artists figuring out just how to present the show’s core conceit in a way that was both fantastical and loosely grounded in real-world physics. When I spoke with Bernes recently, he told me that, while much of the show could have been entirely green-screened, he believed that the project could be made stronger by using a blend of practical, in-camera filmmaking trickery and complex VFX post-production. But to blend those two modes, Bernes knew that there needed to be strong communication between the show’s various creative teams long before cameras started rolling.
“There’s no case where those things aren’t critical, but with a project like this, there is no ‘fix it in post’ because it just can’t work like that,” Bernes said. “This is a show that has about 3,000 VFX shots, and we were working with up to five different VFX vendors at times.”
Though Lindy Littlejohn (Banks) is alarmed when she wakes up in a dollhouse after her husband Les (Macfadyen) shrinks her, it isn’t until she gets out into their full-sized living room that she starts to understand what kind of predicament she’s in. The carpeted floor is soft, but it’s a relatively long way down from the table Lindy finds herself on, and she knows that she would probably die if she were to fall while trying to climb down.
To ease viewers into the show’s fantasy and its dark sense of humor, Bernes thought that it was important for Lindy’s dollhouse to be a fully realized set that Banks could physically interact with. And while VFX would be necessary to depict characters’ size differences, Bernes was keen on keeping the series from feeling like too much of a “CGI Fridays” situation.
“When we’re inside the dollhouse, that is a real set that we built based on the dimensions and specs of a real toy,” Bernes told me. “We actually scanned objects from a real dollhouse, blew them up into a larger scale, and then had them made so that we could use life-size versions of these tiny things.”
As much as The Miniature Wife is a dramedy, it’s also punctuated by moments of action as Lindy escapes her dollhouse and ventures out into the larger world around her. She’s exhilarated when she realizes that she has the strength and know-how to make her way down onto the floor. But her feelings quickly turn to fear when she encounters everyday things like houseflies and her vacuuming robot — both of which are gargantuan from her miniscule perspective.
Crafting those kinds of shots posed a series of challenges to Bernes and his team, who were committed to keeping the show from feeling like a straight rehash of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Marvel’s Ant-Man films. They wanted to make it so that viewers could always understand Lindy’s perspective in relation to their own, which required the crew to establish some hard artistic rules.
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