Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is now streaming on Max and to say the film has been a success is something of an understatement. The film dominated the 2023 box office, becoming the highest grossing film of the year and a pop cultural moment. But while the film notably features the vibrant, almost fantasy-like, pink-drenched world that is Barbieland, the Real World also looms large in Barbie’s story — both in terms of the adventure of Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie and in the look and feel of the film as well. Creating the “Real World” of Barbie, particularly the Mattel headquarters, required just as much detail as the creation of Barbieland and now FuseFX VFX supervisor Josephine Noh is opening up about how they brought that real world to life.
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“There’s the comic part about the Mattel headquarters that we worked on. First is when Barbie goes to the headquarters, you see the matte painting of the Mattel building against the downtown LA skyline. And then as she goes to the headquarters, you could see the endless cubicles that it was just a bleak corporate environment that they wanted to portray and just with these endless cubicles,” Noh told ComicBook.com. “The office, they were shot practically on set, but those were generally just 16 cubicles that were on set. But we generated close to 150 cubicles in CG just to make the room look more endless. And then we just have a fate black with the atmospheric, just to make it so that it looks like, again, suggesting it’s endless. Then as Margot [as Barbie] meets Will Ferrell’s character, the Mattel CEO, he’s in that pink button down with the pink tie, pink drumsticks and all, and there’s the boardroom, basically.”
Noh went on to explain that while the boardroom is meant to look sleek, the actual boardroom windows didn’t have real glass in them, meaning it was up to VFX to create the glass and reflections for the room — as well as the reflective nature of Barbie’s box.
“Because of the unique structure of the boardroom, they decided to do CG glass instead that we were tasked to make it look like CG glass to add in the reflections there. And the reflections was a bit of a creative and technical blend that we did with that, because there was some of it, we interpreted as, ‘This is how we want the reflections to look like,’ versus also then the technical where we were like, ‘Okay, the room should also reflect.’” Noh explained. “We use LiDAR scans of the environment where they just basically scan around the environment. It gets translated into a CG model. We use that CG model, then we use it as a reference more. We build our own for our own needs, and then we have our CG glass reflect and we comp it in.”
Noh continued, “That actually was like 40 percent of our work, because it was quite a lot of shots with 25 unique angles, and we had to make sure that they all looked consistent. And it’s like we had to make it look visible, but not distracting while people are viewing the funny performances during that time. And then the Barbie box, the very famous Barbie box as well, it’s a quite reflective surface, we just did some straightforward cleanup on that, but it was very fun to work on.”
And for Noh, getting to be a part of Barbie was personally meaningful as she was a Barbie fan growing up as well — and even had her own Weird Barbie.
“Absolutely,” Noh said about having her own Weird Barbie as a child. “Just drawing it up and the legs are all in different positions. But I think I won a raffle at school once and I got one of the Barbie pool house sets and it was amazing. It was so fun. I trashed it though; I don’t have it anymore. But at the time when I was young, I was just playing with and having the time of my life with it. I actually remember the smells as well from those toys. That was great. It’s one of those sensorial kind of things, but definitely, I was a Barbie fan for sure. This was meaningful.”
Barbie is now streaming on Max.
