Interviews The Electric State: Joel Behrens (VFX Supervisor) & Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard (Animation Supervisor) – Digital Domain By Vincent Frei - 15/04/2025 In 2018, Joel Behrens discussed Digital Domain‘s work on Ant-Man and the Wasp. He later contributed to Morbius and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Now, he walks us through a very different kind of project: The Electric State. Back in 2022, Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard told us about Digital Domain’s work on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. She then worked on Secret Invasion, and today, she returns to discuss her latest project: The Electric State. How did you and Digital Domain get involved on this show? Joel Behrens: Matthew Butler was brought in to talk with the Russo Brothers very early on before the project was with Netflix, and brought me on. We obviously wanted to take on a big part of the show and decided to do some preliminary testing on our mocap stage to show how these characters might interact in the world of the film. From there we got the award and moved forward with character designing and builds. How was the collaboration with the Russo Brothers and VFX Supervisor Matthew Butler? Joel Behrens: Matthew and I have worked together for many years, so working with him was great as usual. This was the first time I worked with the Russo Brothers for me, and I felt like we had a fantastic collaboration on this film. I was able to go into AGBO often for reviews and meetings throughout the entire post-production run. They were always very receptive to ideas, and I enjoyed the experience of reviewing our work with them on a regular basis. Obviously, it was a very large movie in terms of scale and scope, and they always had a pretty clear vision for what they wanted. What are the sequences made by Digital Domain? Joel Behrens: We worked on quite a few throughout the film. Cosmo’s first appearance with Michelle, Fort Hull robot battlefield graveyard, The Mine sequence, The Exclusion zone and traveling through the Ex to the mall, Arriving at the mall and Mr. Peanut’s intro, all of Happyland and the haunted house, and the epilogue back at the mall. Can you walk us through the design process for the main robots such as Cosmo, Herman, The Marshall, and Mr. Peanut? What were the core ideas you wanted to convey through their appearance and movements? Joel Behrens: All the bots had their own sets of challenges and goals that we went through. Cosmo, from an overall design point, was probably the easier of them since his overall look and silhouette was pulled directly from Simon’s book. We still took great care in Cosmo, as well as the rest of the bots, to try to ground them in reality as much as we could. We studied modern day robotics, and how the structure and the joints are put together. We wanted them to have realistic gears, servos, motors, pistons, actuators, etc. We tried to infuse these bots with as much believability as we could from the materials we chose to use, to the structural components that allowed them to move with an acceptable range of motion. Herman had a unique challenge of creating a retro-futuristic domed screen for his head. The desire was to evoke the feeling of old CRT television technology with the RGB pixels under glass, while including some modern touches of being able to essentially use it like a modern LCD screen with the ability to create whatever facial expressions and graphic elements we wanted. The Marshall went through a few design changes. Initially drawn up to have a cowboy aesthetic, he was eventually brought in line with the rest of the “drones” in the film. A big part of that was mirroring the iconic headset that is pulled from the book as the actual heads on the drones to try to reinforce to the audience that these were being controlled by humans. Mr. Peanut obviously has a well-known look and design to work from. The thought behind his build was that he was some sort of mascot robot for the company. He was a somewhat simpler robot that had a sort of latex shell that has not aged well, around an interior robotic structure — like the mid to late 80’s animatronics from Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza that were made to entertain kids. How did you approach the animation of each of these robots to ensure they had distinct personalities? Were there specific inspirations or references that helped guide their animation? Liz Bernard: When you begin with this idea of animating these characters to look “robotic,” that could mean almost anything, and in a show with this many unique characters, it doesn’t even always mean the same thing from ‘bot to ‘bot. I’ve always loved this concept that physicality drives personality, that those two things are irrevocably linked. So, we started out by studying each robot’s body structure to figure out what each bot could and couldn’t do: some of them were on wheels, others were bipedal but had limited joints that could only rotate in one axis, some had faces, some didn’t, others were suspended from the ceiling, etc. A great example of this is that our piano-playing Tacobot was, naturally, shaped like a hardshell taco that came to a sharp point where his butt would be, and thus he couldn’t really sit on a bench at the piano. So we had to have him stand at the piano instead, which meant that it made sense for him to dance and sway as he was playing: a little character detail that added extra sparkle and life to his performance. We also started to think about the timeline of when these characters would have been built: Mr. Peanut and Popfly are more vintage and clunky, whereas Herman is a little more advanced tech with his screen face. That allowed us to make a rough timeline of when each of our characters would have been built, and that impacted how we felt they should move and behave as well. With all of that in mind, in the summer of 2023, we spent some time creating a “four-pack” of different movement styles per main character to pitch to Joe and Anthony. The styles ranged from stiff and clunky to smoother and more natural, so that the directors could choose which style they liked best for each character. That early effort established the hero ‘bots like the Marshall and Cosmo, but we still had dozens of background characters to flesh out for the Exclusion Zone and the Mall. For those, I assigned out two or three robots per animator and asked them to use their imaginations and put their own personality into some longer animation clips that we could use throughout the Mall. What we got out of that was this really organic mix of styles and distinct personalities, and when we put them all together in the mall, it was magic. Cosmo and Herman are very different in terms of function and personality. What unique challenges did you face animating these two characters, and how did you solve them? Liz Bernard: Cosmo is the heart of the film and the book, and he needed to be able to do a lot both physically and emotionally. His feet were huge, and his lollipop head was absolutely enormous, giving him a top- and bottom-heavy silhouette with spindly little limbs, and hands based on the old school white gloves used in classic cartoons. This odd anatomy gave his movements a kind of clown-shoe-shuffling dodder that was quite charming once we worked out the kinks in the mechanics of his boots. His white hands were the brightest part of his body, and naturally drew the eye, so hand posing was critically important. And, of course, it’s tough when you have a character with a giant smiley face permanently painted on to have him emote pathos, sadness, determination, and depth. With a character like this, restraint is important. Context tells a lot of the story, and the audience knows what a character might be thinking about without us knocking them over the head with it. Herman was at the other end of the spectrum in some respects. He is loud, sarcastic, confident, and most importantly, he can talk. His body was built to lift and move things, and we put a lot of time into making sure his joints were functional and could support the weight he was expected to carry around (in all his different size iterations). Because of that contrasting lightness in his humor and personality, we gave Herman a little bit of extra spring in his step (both figuratively and literally), and a touch of swagger. His banter with Keats is often deadpan, so there were also moments when it was important to dial back the movement and let the comic timing play out in stillness. As we developed Herman’s pixelated face, our Rigging department gave us the capability to project images onto it, and although we used that feature very sparingly to ensure that he stayed on model, we got some funny moments out of it. The Marshall has a more humanoid form compared to the others. What considerations did you take into account to make sure it felt both robotic yet expressive in its movements? Liz Bernard: We started with motion capture for most of the Marshall’s performances, and the performer played the character with a touch of cowboy swagger, which suited Giancarlo’s vocal performance. From there, it was up to us in animation to adjust the movements to make his body feel heavier, his joints stiffer, and his range of motion a bit limited by rust and disrepair. Giancarlo played the Marshall’s voice and face with a quiet professionalism and dignity even though his drone was a built-to-task bot-killing machine. When we animated him, we were usually looking for a balance between those two things: the restraint of the man controlling the drone, and the immense strength and ruthless violence his heavy drone body was clearly capable of. Mr. Peanut has such a quirky design. Can you share the creative process behind his look, and how his animations helped to bring out his character traits? Liz Bernard: This character was maybe the most challenging one in our roster of hero characters. We had a clear silhouette to maintain and specific features like the top hat, cane, spats, and monocle because we were basing him on a real corporate mascot that is instantly recognizable in North America. He was one of the older ‘bots in the world of the Electric State, a savvy and inspiring politician, and the founder of this “oasis of safety” in the desert. We realized that if we kept Mr. Peanut as a solid peanut shell (as he is in the corporate mascot), his body would be too stiff, and we would be forced to teeter-totter him around like a child playing with an action figure; not exactly the dignity that this character deserved. To avoid the totter, we separated his head from his body and sliced off his butt so that we could swivel it like hips to help him move around without breaking that all-important peanut shell silhouette. The resulting stiffness in his walk worked perfectly with his iconic cane and with the slightly elderly warble that Woody Harrelson gave to the character in his performance. Mr. Peanut’s face was a unique challenge, too. As they say, “the eyes are the window into the soul,” and we knew from Woody’s voice that this character had a lot of soul. Even though Mr. Peanut’s eyelids and eyebrows were simplified and non-deforming, the eye animation we developed for him was fundamentally human: long gazes, quick darts when he felt threatened, blinks to punctuate dialogue and bump up the humor, etc. The mouth was another matter, however. As Joel mentioned, the shell of Mister Peanut was meant to be a metal endoskeleton covered in a layer of thick rubbery latex, so we started out by making a whole batch of rubbery blend shapes similar to how we would approach a normal fleshy human face. However, too much articulation in his lips while speaking meant that he started to look like a character in an animated feature, and that look didn’t fit into the gritty world we had built with all of the other bots. After some experimentation and research, we settled on the somewhat dilapidated classic animatronics from the 80s/90s, which meant that we kept restricting and removing blend shapes until we were down from about eighty to six. Less is sometimes a whole lot more. Was there a specific moment or sequence in the film where animating the robots felt particularly challenging or rewarding for you and your team? Liz Bernard: One of the most beautiful and understated scenes we animated was an intimate one in the car between Michelle and Cosmo after they escaped from her deadbeat foster dad’s house. Cosmo can only speak in these canned kid Cosmo doll expressions (e.g., “the solar system’s gone haywire!”) when he’s trying to communicate with Michelle. He is not fully used to his new robot form either, and yet he finds a way to overcome his own physical limitations, his weird body, his inability to say what he wants to say, and he manages to tell her what she needs to know. We had good acting reference from Devyn, the stand-in actor who played Cosmo on set with Millie, but editorial changes and other adjustments to the acting beat meant that we started to veer away from that performance in the details. We used pantomime and subtle body language — particularly carefully timed head movements — to steer the conversation and develop the empathy and chemistry with Michelle needed for that scene to work. This film explores themes about humanity and technology, and how those ideas intersect. What’s more relatedly human than figuring out a way to communicate with another person, even when the language is not there? I love that scene because Cosmo shows that he can be interpretive and creative; he is so human in that moment. Tricky question, out of all the robots in The Electric State, which one is your personal favorite, and why? Joel Behrens: That’s a hard one, there are so many. I think, for me, it’s Cosmo. I was a big fan of the book before, and I was fortunate enough to be involved in bringing him to life on the screen. I love the character that Simon created in the book, and I think the life and soul that Liz and her team put into his performance really cements him as my favorite. Liz Bernard: I’m going to do a top three because it’s too hard to choose: Herman for his sarcasm, Cosmo for his charm, and Perplexo for his bombast (plus, it was a geeky childhood dream come true to work on a character voiced by the great Hank Azaria). The Haunted Amusement Park has such a unique and eerie feel. How did you approach the design and VFX work to make the park come to life, especially with the blend of horror and nostalgia? Joel Behrens: Happyland was a pretty incredible set to go to every day for a couple weeks. The production design team did an amazing job of turning an Atlanta water park parking lot into this retro fun fair environment. Honestly, we didn’t have to do much. The set was pretty much fully built and for the exteriors we did some minor environment extensions, some fx fog and smoke, and added all of our scavenger bots, of course. For the interior of the haunted house, the set was built for principal photography with full scale tesla coils with LED’s in the core of them to give us our interactive light on the environment and actors, which we later replaced with the crackling blue lightning. However, new choreography and a revised scene was created during additional photography that necessitated us building the whole environment in cg to complete the Mister Peanut and Marshall fight. The Mall Sequence appears to be a huge moment in the film. What were the key elements you focused on to ensure the mall’s scale and its deserted nature were effectively conveyed through VFX? Joel Behrens: The interiors of the mall were, once again, some brilliant production design from Dennis Gassner and his team. We took over a large portion of an essentially abandoned mall in Atlanta. The interior was decorated beautifully, so we had to augment very, very little. For the exterior, we used the footprint of the actual Atlanta mall as a base which had a partially dressed facade and parking lot, and did a lot of environment extension and matte painting combined with footage that was shot in Utah by our splinter unit for the deeper bg mesas and desert. For wider establishing shots of the mall when our heroes first come upon it, we placed a 3D version of our mall and surroundings along with digital matte painting extension from our outstanding environment department led by Juan Pablo Allgeier into the bg plates shot in and around Moab, Utah. The Walk Across the Exclusion Zone desert feels like a desolate yet fascinating location. What kind of challenges did you face in creating such a barren, expansive environment, and how did you use VFX to enhance its storytelling potential? Joel Behrens: That was a fun environment to build out. It was a great mix of practical plates, re-projected photography on geometry, digital matte painting, and full cg builds of terrain. We shot the VW bus with our actors on a large gimbal since they were being carried by Herman 20 on his shoulder. We would end up replacing the VW to add reflections/shadows/light interaction, and went full CG for everything on some of the wider shots we couldn’t get on the bluescreen stage. JP and his enviro team then built various pieces of desert terrain and background mesas along with the incredible giant dead robot skeleton we walk through at the beginning of the scene. How did you collaborate with the director and production team to ensure the environments felt cohesive with the tone and emotional beats of the story? Joel Behrens: The directors and production designer had a pretty clear vision for the design from the start, which stayed very true to the original source material. The practical set builds that Dennis and his team built were really beautiful and helped ground us in that world. We took our cues from that and really tried to maintain the look that Simon had created for the book. Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of? Joel Behrens: Looking back, I’m most proud of how our visual effects helped create such a compelling and immersive world that truly brought the unique, dystopian atmosphere of Simon’s book to life. I’m very proud of our team for managing that many assets so well and all the work that was put into the characters. I think our characters played a pivotal role in communicating the emotional weight of the story, holding their own with the human actors, and that’s something I’m really proud of. How long have you worked on this show? Joel Behrens: It ended up being a little over 2.5 years for me from pre-production, shoot, and through post. What’s the VFX shots count? Joel Behrens: 857 shots finaled, and worked on a little over 1000. What is your next project? Joel Behrens: Onto another exciting project, but unfortunately can’t share what it is yet. Liz Bernard: Joel and I are keeping the party going and working together again on the next one, a sci-fi feature film. We can’t say more right now. A big thanks for your time. WANT TO KNOW MORE?Digital Domain: Dedicated page about The Electric State in Digital Domain website. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025