How M3GAN Was Brought To LIFE! #vfxbreakdown

The movie M3GAN is both smart and stupid, it's scary but funny, innovative yet unoriginal, surprising, and at the same time, predictable.
It manages to balance opposite sides of the spectrum perfectly, and the way they did this, was actually pretty clever, but the reason for doing it was even more so.

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The movie M3GAN is designed to be unnerving.
Throughout the entire movie it constantly makes the audience feel that something isn't quite right and achieves this by using a variety of clever techniques:

Scenery And Set Design.
Something you probably didn't notice whilst watching the film is that the type of furniture and color palette chosen for Gemma's house are predominately masculine.
The furniture, textiles, and lighting are cold and somber and give the house more of a feel of a bachelor's pad rather than the warm and pretty atmosphere you'd expect in a more feminine household.
This gave the viewer a feeling of contradiction, that this residence wasn't really a comforting place, and that it was a generic house, rather than a family home.

The high-tech toy factory was also designed to be contradictory by combining the looks of a toy factory and science lab.

The room where Cady first meets M3GANwas made to look colorful, childlike, and happy but the walls, furniture, ceiling, and lighting were designed to be sterile, ordered, and minimalistic, this makes for a scene that, on the face of it should be endearing, but instead, feels somewhat unsettling.

This intentional discordance continued with the actual M3GAN doll itself.

Animatronics And CGI.

To achieve the illusion that M3GAN was a real android they used 3 different methods:
For long shots or shots where M3GAN had to move quickly or broadly, they used a child actor in a mask.

When these shots also had a close-up of M3GAN's face, they used the same method but the mask was replaced with a digital version of the M3GAN doll's face.

For all the other shots animatronic puppets were used.

For the movie, Morot FX studios built various animatronic puppets, and as you can see from their work on the babies for the 2017 film Mother, they could have easily made the M3GAN doll to be hyperrealistic, however, the filmmakers wanted the M3GAN doll to be just on the edge of reality, in a place that the industry calls "Uncanny Valley".
The term "Uncanny Valley" originally comes from a paper written by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori where he maps out on a graph how we can feel an affinity for humans and we can feel an affinity for something that's not human, but as it becomes more and more humanlike there's a drop off point where we begin to feel repulsion, this fall and rise in the graph is known as "Uncanny Valley".

Films like Final Fantasy and Polar Express are infamous for having accidentally fallen into Uncanny Valley, but M3GAN, did so on purpose.
Another subtle discordance they achieved (although this one may not have been intentional) arose from the different methods used for the M3GAN doll.

As you may have noticed earlier. The actor in the mask, the animatronic puppet, and the visual effect, are all just slightly different.

And this inconsistency adds to M3GAN's unsettling appearance.
But it wasn't M3GAN's looks alone that were inconsistent, the way she moved also varied.

In some scenes, it was clearly robotic, in others, it was elegant and humanlike, other times it was wild and bestial, and others, completely alien.
This variety of movement gave M3GAN an unpredictability that left the audience never quite knowing what to expect.

Sound Design.
Sound design is an extremely important component of any movie but perhaps even more so within the horror genre.

M3GAN used sound design to increase the tension of a scene, like here in the forest scene, where the sudden silence brings a sense of impending doom and the introduction of the low rumbling bass adds menace. Then later they used it to reinforce an action or motion to give the impression of something powerful charging up, and later when M3GAN runs on all fours, to give her motion a more aggressive bestial feeling.

M3GAN also used clever sound design to trigger our imagination

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