The Miniature Wife was an exercise in visual trickery

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.

“We understand the premise that there is a miniaturization process that has happened, but how miniature is she?” Bernes explained. “Ultimately, we landed on a scale of 12:1 meaning that she is approximately 5.5-6 inches, and all of the props and sets were very regimented with this 12:1 scale. That’s a scale where things are still pretty recognizable. We’re seeing weaves in the fabric and oversized dust bunnies on the ground, but we still know what they are.”

Though there was an understanding that the scale rule could be bent a little in certain situations for dramatic effect, Bernes had to ground his work even further in reality for some of The Miniature Wife’s more action-heavy set pieces, like a scene involving her riding a toy train. Bernes told me that sequences like those are strong examples of how digital and practical effects can blend together to create visuals that are as fantastical as they are rooted in actual physics.

“The realities of this scale relationship makes it so that, in the big world of 1:1, when you move a camera one foot, that means you have to move it 12 feet in the small world,” Bernes said, describing how the train scene came together. “Now picture yourself tracking with a train. So we’re having to move hundreds and hundreds of feet at the same speed as the big world, which means 12 times faster.”

While crafting each of The Miniature Wife’s VFX shots was a huge undertaking, Bernes and his team chose not to use generative AI in the name of making things faster or more efficient. Bernes told me that even though he has used AI tools in the past on other projects and seen how it can be a valuable asset, he still thinks the technology isn’t suited to replace human creativity “because there’s too many steps in the process and too much control needed.”

“Is generative AI a tool that enables us to rapidly prototype ideas and then go to a more traditional visual effects vendor with a clearer idea of what we want to do?” Bernes said. “For sure. But there is not a single VFX frame in this show that was made with generative AI. This is all the result of artists and hundreds of visual effects workers putting things together themselves.”

The Miniature Wife premieres on Peacock on April 9th.