In Your Dreams VFX artist Nikki Lavender and production designer Steve Pilcher reveal how they created the world of the upcoming Netflix film.
The world of dreams is a chaotic, unpredictable place, and bringing that to life on screen was a significant challenge for the creators of Netflix’s In Your Dreams. Mama’s Geeky was invited to a recent press event at one of the Los Angeles Netflix Studios where the filmmakers revealed new secrets and behind-the-scenes details of the upcoming movie.
During the deep dive into the film’s animation and design session, VFX artist Nikki Lavender and production designer Steve Pilcher shared how they created a cohesive, visually stunning world that feels both fantastical and grounded in reality.
Creating a World of Memories and Dreams
The core visual concept for In Your Dreams was to connect the dream world to the characters’ real-world experiences. As Steve Pilcher explained, the big challenge was “to relate and differentiate between the real world and the dream world.” The filmmakers did this by seeding the dreams with elements from the children’s memories.
“We all know that things that we experience in the real world, we often see them show up in some manifest way in our dreams,” Pilcher said.
A prime example is Breakfast Town, one of the film’s most imaginative dreamscapes. The entire town is based on the family’s Sunday morning tradition of a French toast breakfast. To avoid the literal interpretation of food as buildings, they made a creative rule. “Let’s make it craft-based,” said Pilcher, suggesting it was inspired by a child’s imagination. “So it’s from a memory where Stevie might play as a kid and use popsicle sticks and milk cartons and make a little town up.”
The reasoning behind this? The residents of the town are breakfast foods, so then the buildings would be made of residents – that becomes a horror movie.
The Fine Line Between Dream and Nightmare
Without giving too much away, a key element of the film is the transformation of dreams into nightmares. To make this shift psychologically impactful, the team focused on color theory. “To have something go into a nightmare, usually we’ll start to drain the color out,” Pilcher explained. “It takes the color out of everything… you make it more gray and drain it out.”
This is vividly illustrated in the Polly’s Pizzeria scene, one that the filmmakers showed to the press over and over again, so that we could really understand how they subtly changed things in a way that shifts the entire tone of the movie.
What starts as a fun, brightly colored place where the family used to go for family outings takes a dark turn. The colors shift, the badgers from the arcade game grow to a terrifying size, and the upbeat mood gives way to a sense of danger. As Lavender notes, “We changed the color palette, created more intensity, and, as you see, the badgers are 10 times bigger. They’re going to get their psychological revenge on Elliot.”
The Technical Challenges of Sand and Style
The film’s ambitious visual scope presented numerous technical hurdles. One of the biggest challenges was the Sandman’s castle, an immense structure with an M.C. Escher-inspired interior. The team created a whole system at Imageworks to simulate the sand, which had to be split into over 40 different layers to render properly. “It was so big,” said Lavender.
The team also had to create the Sandlings for In Your Dreams, adorable creatures made of sand, which was one of the hardest things to do on the film. They developed a unique technique to soften the edges of the characters to make them more appealing. They needed to all look a little bit different than one another, so some are talle, while others are stalkier.
Another major technical feat was the film’s anime sequence, which required a hybrid animation style. The animators used a “toon shader” on the 3D models to make them look like 2D animation, with hand-drawn facial features. “It is the 3D model, the same model with a toon shader on it,” said Pilcher, adding that the team spent weeks to achieve the perfect look.
The Power of Subliminal Details
Every detail in In Your Dreams was meticulously planned to add depth to the story and characters. Lavender revealed that Stevie’s favorite t-shirt, which features her parents’ band logo, was carefully designed. “That shirt color was always thought about contextually,” she explained. “Does it say a lot about her personality? Everything relates to the characters and to everything else around it.”
The filmmakers also hid subtle visual clues throughout the film that most viewers might not consciously notice but that add to the rich, immersive experience. For example, a drawing of Baloney Tony can be seen on a pillow, suggesting he is a figment of Elliot’s imagination, not a separate entity. “You don’t catch that,” Pilcher said. “These films always have so much.”
Pilcher concluded by emphasizing the dedication required for animated filmmaking. “These films take four and a half years to make. There’s so much thought everywhere, all the time, that when you watch it as an audience, we hope that you just let go and just enjoy it.”
A new trailer for In Your Dreams has just released, where you can see Breakfast Town come to life, as well as the stunning animation the filmmakers discussed.
In Your Dreams comes to Netflix on November 14th. You don’t want to miss it.
