‘Severance’ Turned to the ‘Anomalisa’ Team to Make Stop Motion Creepy
Originally, when Mark S. (Adam Scott) returns to the Severed floor of Lumon Industries, he and his erstwhile colleagues were going to be shown surveillance camera footage of them all exploring a new and improved Break Room. While the idea of a friendly, safe version of the Break Room was enticingly sinister in the script, “Severance” didn’t have surveillance-style footage from the relevant Season 1 scenes. So production designer Jeremy Hindle pitched showrunner Ben Stiller on an alternative way to have the Innies see themselves through the eyes of Lumon: a children’s show.
“I was particularly inspired by the visual aesthetics of puppets and stop-motion, reminiscent of classic stop-motion animation, and ultimately decided on a style that merged elements from ‘Davey and Goliath’ with ‘Anomalisa,’” Hindle told IndieWire, for reasons that are richly relevant to the situation of the Innies, performing tasks and exploring the contours of the company they work for without the full context of what it’s doing or what their lives are like outside of work.
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“[Stiller] informed me of his connection with Duke Johnson from Starburns, the director behind ‘Anomalisa.’ Ben reached out to Duke, and we subsequently began collaborating on the scene,” Hindle said.
“Severance” brought on the Starburns team to create the particularly paced absurdity of the video celebrating the “MDR Revolt” of Season 1. Stop-motion is painstaking — it really does take 24 frames to produce one second of footage — but it’s not actually that dissimilar from a live-action set in terms of lighting, production design, and, of course, the actors (puppets) on their marks.
“Even a quick scene, like Irving’s [John Turturo] hair bursting into flames, took weeks of testing to figure out: How do we switch from his normal hair to the fiery version? What is the fire made of and how do we get lights flickering from inside of it? The problem-solving never ends,” Starburns animation director Michael Granberry told IndieWire.
The Starburn team pitched dozens of visual gags like Irving’s hair to slightly infantilize the Innies inside of the cartoon, but the element that maybe took the most working out for the animators wasn’t adapting a Season 1 moment into animation at all. “The one that really stumped us was the Lumon building itself: How was it going to talk? Should it have a mouth that would separate, like a hand puppet? We finally landed on the elegant solution of magnetic features on a flat, metal surface, which gave us a surprising amount of facial performance and emotional range,” Granberry said.
The stop-motion Lumon building externalizes the feeling that live-action “Severance” is so good at engendering in its audience — that sense of possibility of switching from happy to enraged to happy again for unknowable reasons. The animators could tweak the Lumon building’s mood just by switching a mouth shape or the angle of an eyebrow. Hindle provided the animators with the Apple TV+ show’s existing set drawings and these digital files helped the animators 3D print to the exact scale they needed to bring to life the stop motion.
The build and the shoot for the MDR Revolt sequence took nine weeks, so Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), Irv, and Dylan (Zach Cherry) weren’t confronted with it live on set, but having the recordings of the actors in Season 1 really did help shape the performances of their stop-motion avatars in recreating those live-action sequences.
“[The Season 1 dialogue recordings] strip away all doubt that Lumon is recording its employees, providing a chilling contrast to the cute and friendly visuals. For the Lumon building itself, we had a temporary dialog track recorded by Ben that we used until we got the final voice track featuring a certain, uncredited-yet-legendary A-list superstar whom the internet has already identified,” Granberry said. “Suffice to say, both versions made for some powerhouse voice-acting coming through your headphones every day!”
“Severance” has a sharp, distinct visual style meant to be pretty powerful — or perhaps imperious (as Keir would wish). But when Hindle visited the stop-motion stage, he was impressed with how well that style holds up across different mediums. Of course, it might be that “Severance,” like any good company, is only as good as its employees and contributors.
“We are obsessive and detail-oriented while remaining open to new ideas and collaboration — [which] allowed us to effectively translate the show’s unique vision onto the screen,” Hindle said.
New episodes of “Severance” premiere on Apple TV+ every Friday through the season finale on March 21.
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