Originally, when Mark S. (Adam Scott) returns to the cut-off floor of Lumon Industries, and he and his former colleagues would see surveillance footage of them all exploring a new and improved Break Room. While the idea of a friendly, safe version of the Break Room was tantalizingly ominous in the script, “Departure” did not have surveillance-like footage from relevant Season 1 scenes. So production designer Jeremy Hindle pitched the showrunner Ben Stiller in an alternative way to make the Innies see themselves through Lumon’s eyes: A children’s show.
“I was particularly inspired by the visual aesthetics of puppets and stop-motion, reminiscent of classic stop-motion animationand finally settled on a style that merged elements of ‘Davey and Goliath’ with ‘Anomalisa,’” Hindle told IndieWire, for reasons very relevant to Innie’s situation, performing tasks and exploring the contours of the company they work for without the whole context of what it does or what their life is like outside of work.
“(Stiller) informed me of his connection with Duke Johnson of Starburns, the director behind ‘Anomalisa.’ Ben reached out to Duke and we then started collaborating on the location,” Hindle said.
“Severance pay” the Starburns team enlisted to create the particularly fast-paced absurdity of the video celebrating the “MDR Revolt” of season 1. The stop-motion is painstaking — indeed, it takes 24 frames to produce one second of footage — but it’s actually not that different 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 regular hair to the fiery version? What is the fire made of and how does we lights flickering from within it?The problem solving never ends,” Starburn animation director Michael Granberry told IndieWire.
The Starburn team lined up dozens of visual gags like Irving’s hair to somewhat infantilize the Innies inside the cartoon, but perhaps the element that took the most training for the animators wasn’t adapting a Season 1 moment into animation at all. “The one that really bothered us was the Lumon building itself: How would it talk? Should it have a mouth that can be separated, like a hand puppet? We finally landed on the elegant solution of magnetic properties on a flat metal surface, which gave us a surprising amount of facial performance and emotional range,” Granberry says.
The stop-motion Lumon building externalizes the feeling that the live-action “Severance” is so good at creating in its audience — that feeling of being able to switch from happy to angry to happy again for unknown reasons. The animators could adjust the mood of the Lumon building just by changing the shape of the mouth or the angle of an eyebrow. Hindle provided the animators Apple TV+ the show’s existing set drawings and these digital files helped the animators 3D print at the exact scale they needed to bring the stop motion to life.
The MDR Revolt sequence took nine weeks to build and shoot, so Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), Irv and Dylan (Zach Cherry) weren’t confronted with it live on set, but the Season 1 cast recordings really helped shape the performances for their stop-motion avatars as they recreated these live-action sequences.
“(The Season 1 dialogue recordings) remove any doubt that Lumon is recording his employees, providing a chilling contrast to the cute and friendly visuals. For the Lumon building itself, we had a temporary dialogue track recorded by Ben that we used until we got the final voice track with a certain, uncredited yet legendary A-list superstar that the internet has already identified,” says Granberry. “Suffice it to say, both versions produced powerful voice acting to come through your headphones every day!”
“Severance” has a sharp, distinct visual style that’s meant to be quite powerful — or perhaps imperial (as Keir would like). But when Hindle visited the stop-motion scene, he was impressed by how well that style holds up in different media. Of course, it may be that “Severance”, like any good company, is only as good as its employees and contributors.
“We’re obsessive and detail-oriented while being open to new ideas and collaboration — (which) allowed us to effectively translate the show’s unique vision to the screen,” Hindle said.
New episodes of “Severance” premiere on Apple TV+ every Friday until the end of the season on March 21.
