[Editor’s Note: This piece contains spoilers for “I Love Boosters.”]
“I Love Boosters” has a lot going on. From a luxe San Francisco apartment tilted 17 degrees (a compromise between the 25 degrees written into the script at the initial 15 degrees that production designer Christopher Glass proposed) to a reality-altering innertube that operates on the principles of dialectical materialism, writer/director Boots Riley has thrown everything in this world — plus one lonely, horny demon — for his second feature film.
But the filmmaking team at least debated throwing the “Bodies” exhibit into the mix as stop-motion-animated antagonists who end up chasing designer-clothes booster Corvette (Keke Palmer) all over Oakland in the film’s finale.
Seriously, spoilers: Led by Don Cheadle’s seemingly benign pyramid schemer Dr. Jack, these willing instruments of capital/designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore) wear literal skin suits in order to destabilize the community and thwart Corvette and her crew’s attempt to expose Smith’s exploitation of workers across the globe. But the larger the objection being stop-motion animated, the more time it takes, and it’s probably for the best that the VFX team got to work at a smaller scale.
Riley told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast that he’s always had a love for visceral special effects and stop-motion animation, ever since his older brother showed him films like the Ray Harryhausen “Sinbad,” “Clash of the Titans,” and “Jason and the Argonauts.” There’s something about the imperfections and the living sense of movement in stop motion that Riley says an audience can feel, like music, that makes it perfect for absurd, larger-than-life action moments.
“I often say that with CGI, you could have a skyscraper stand up, walk over, and take a shit, and it wouldn’t be amazing, you know? There’s something about it. It’s not about us thinking it’s not real, because that’s fine. We know it’s not real. But there’s something about the way we know the light is hitting it, something that feels less tangible to us and too smooth in the wrong ways,” Riley told IndieWire.
By contrast, there is an in-built sense of humanity and human touch in stop-motion, even as we often buy into the illusion of whole stop-motion worlds. And that can be particularly useful when dramatizing moments that should feel a little off, or when some sinister force is invading the characters’ space. Riley’s used stop-motion to create that feeling in all his visual work, “Sorry to Bother You,” “I’m a Virgo,” and “I Love Boosters.”
“ I’m not about stuff having to seem real. It’s just more that I want it to seem unreal in a different way than we’re used to,” Riley said.
Riley and the VFX team push the director’s own tendencies on “I Love Boosters” by pairing stop-motion sequences against the work of real actors and intercutting between them, a rarity even when stop-motion sometimes takes over from live-action. Animators Ri Crawford and David Lauer needed to be super precise about facial structures and mouth movements, especially, so that the stop-motion felt distinct but not too disconnected from the live-action work.
“They’re always down for a challenge, and with this, it is not the norm — I’d be interested to figure out when the last time was where you’re comping stop-motion in with live-action actors,” Riley said.
On top of all that, “I Love Boosters” is also building in a complex chase sequence via miniatures. Off a recommendation from Roman Coppola, Riley turned to Blind Beagle VFX lead Chris Warren and his miniatures team, which has worked on Hollywood special effects all the way back to Warren’s grandfather winning an Academy Award for “The Time Machine” and, even more impressively, making sure to hire folks who’d been blacklisted in the 1950s.
“Chris Warren is actually the kid poking the Pillsbury Doughboy, because they were also doing stop motion, but that’s not how they were employed here. Then his father won the Academy Award for ‘Terminator 2’ and was like the head of the DSA in Hollywood. He recruited LA skater punks getting into trouble and was like, ‘I’m gonna teach you how to do this stuff,’ and they all worked on ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ together. They do effects, often in miniature,” Riley said.
Warren and his team used many very old-school techniques to pull off the miniatures sequence and ensure it aligned with the animation on the naked skinsuits and the live-action work on Corvette and her crew. The commitment to shooting small, using old school miniatures, and grabbing flares in miniature (with a bit of contortion) ultimately expanded the amount of action that “I Love Boosters” could have, too.
“We had to get the [car chase] cost down. Then it was like, ‘OK, maybe we could find a really interesting way to make 90 percent of it happen within the car.’ But it was just getting not good. And while we’re in these meetings, Chris is sitting there, like, ‘We could just do it in miniature. I got the buildings, man. We would just make a few more; we put it on a board and slant it,’” Riley said. “It became this whole thing in miniature, and that then expanded what we could do — cars jumping over hills, things like that.”
If there is one thing that “I Love Boosters” does better than anything else, it is figuring out cool ways to expand what the film — and film itself — can do.
“I Love Boosters” is now playing in theaters.
