‘Wednesday’ Brought a Tim Burton Twist to the Addams Family Aesthetic
Curated by the IndieWire Crafts team, Craft Considerations is a platform for filmmakers to talk about recent work we believe is worthy of awards consideration. In partnership with Netflix, for this edition, we look at how production design, costume design, and visual effects of “Wednesday” all came together to build a world worthy of Wednesday Addams.
If there isn’t already, one day there will be an “Addams Family” filter on Instagram: something that makes you look gaunter and paler and turns all your clothing black and white. There’s a nebulous pop culture idea of what an Addams Family story looks like — some combination of spooky mist and gothic arches and a lot of eyeshadow — but executing a contemporary version of Charles Addams’ creations and shaping it around precocious daughter Wednesday requires a level of specificity that goes beyond an all-black mandate — although adapting everything up to and including the Rolling Stones version of “Paint It Black” certainly helps.
The Netflix series “Wednesday” does just that, and the production team found that getting the Addams Family look just right for Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) was as much about creating contrasts and blending styles as it was about trying to make everything look dark. The show’s setting, Nevermore Academy, achieves an appropriately arch level of supernatural mystery, magical boarding school vibes, and tense, New England-flavored town-gown relations; it does this courtesy of a Hitchcockian headmaster (Gwendoline Christie), students that represent the antithesis to Wednesday, and villains hiding among the too-perfect, too-cheerful brightness of the normal world in addition to the perfect(ly twisted) silhouettes of the Addams Family’s “house style.”
In the videos below, production designer Mark Scruton and costume designer Colleen Atwood discuss how they balanced Wednesday’s aesthetic with the world around her so that the Addams scion could cast a long shadow. Then, VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull and VFX producer Kent Johnson discuss how they ensured the dark forces lurking inside (and outside) Nevermore also fit the Addams Family filter.
The Production Design of ‘Wednesday’
In order to create Nevermore, production designer Mark Scruton had to find a classic American gothic/Victorian roofline with the sharp garrets and turrets of Addams family lore, and he had to do it in Romania. But that wasn’t necessarily as impossible as it sounds; Romania’s blend of architectural influences — Byzantine to Ottoman and everything in between — shaped Scruton’s perspective on the boarding school and inspired a kind of design freedom. Scruton turned the quad into a pentagon and blended shape languages so that the school can contain very different-looking spaces and still read as its slightly spooky self.
Scruton was able to up the contrasts, in both style and color, when it came to Wednesday’s dorm room. “Outside of the set you always have trestle tables set up with all the props on them before you put them onto the set. They’re all just laid out and you have everything in front of you to look at; you can pick pieces, you have options on things. And Wednesday’s was two tables with about six items on [each of them]. And Enid’s (Emma Myers) just went on for miles,” Scruton told IndieWire. “The trick became adding [Enid’s] elements to [the room] in such a way that it didn’t become just a mush. It’s like a painting. If you add too many colors, eventually, it’d just become brown. And we didn’t want that. We wanted to keep the vibrancy going.”
In the video above, watch Scruton discuss creating the different pieces of Nevermore, from the (not) quad to Principal Weems’s office, where Scruton was able to bring weave together the different architectural styles to reflect the school as a whole.
The Costumes of ‘Wednesday’
For costume designer Colleen Atwood, “Wednesday” was a kind of family reunion with certain members of the team: notably director Tim Burton and actor Christina Ricci, who plays Wednesday’s plant-obsessed “dorm mom” Ms. Thornhill. But it is her work with Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday that accomplishes the most storytelling of all the costumes, and Atwood found nuance in tone and texture to empower Wednesday, even and especially given the limits of her monochrome wardrobe.
“With Wednesday, she needed to be set apart from the others, kind of a rebellious look, but she still has a power in those clothes. They don’t look like she’s wearing someone else’s clothes. She owns them,” Atwood told IndieWire.
Power is important in all of Wednesday’s clothes, and Atwood made sure that the patterns, textures, and cuts of Wednesday’s “street” leisure clothes were sharp and stylish to a contemporary eye; although she uses a typewriter, Wednesday’s sweaters and sneakers (and prom dress!) are always on point. And this allowed Atwood to subtly unsettle Wednesday once she gets to Nevermore and puts on (her version) of the school uniform. That was the first thing Atwood designed for the character, defining her both as a part of and against the world of the school.
“All her costumes were handmade, hand-screened. So the stripes [of the uniform] had different shades and variations,” Atwood said. “It’s hard to put your finger on it when you’re watching the show, but there’s a little bit of softness to it that makes her seem more vulnerable next to everybody else in their uniforms.” In the video above, watch Atwood detail her approach to Wednesday’s and other core characters’ clothing, revealing who they are underneath what they choose to wear.
The Visual Effects of ‘Wednesday’
It’s all fun and games on “Wednesday” until someone decides to bring back an evil Puritan wizard from the dead in order to do a little genocide. The season finale, “A Murder of Woes,” brings together all the supernatural elements the Netflix show has been playing with across its run, from the frantic travels Wednesday’s hand companion Thing (physically acted by magician Victor Dorobantu) to a full-on monster fight in the woods.
Visual effects often act as a cost-saving replacement for production details, but VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull and VFX producer Kent Johnson are proud of how much their work bled into production and vice versa. The final fight between the sinister Hyde, which was murdering young people in the woods all season, and Enid as a werewolf was acted by the stunt team on stilts, brandishing crutches as elongated limbs, before the VFX team came in to paint out the humans.
“It certainly was above and beyond what you would normally do on a TV show,” Turnbull told IndieWire. “We actually went out into the woods and recreated that fight on location. That allowed us to shoot the plates in a way that was compatible with the real choreography, in the real physics of the fight. [It] allowed us to go into the last episode with a whole series of shots we could give the editor and the editor could craft the sequence and all we had to do was follow that. So it was actually a really great way to do it. It saved us a lot of time and I think it gave us a much more realistic result than if we had just done the whole thing in CG.”
In the video above, watch how Turnbull and Johnson visually amped up each set piece in the final episode of “Wednesday” while staying true to the show’s overall look and feel.
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