Paul Lasaine is the production designer on Marvel Studios’ What If? and at the press junket, he discussed the challenges of the show with a panel including Paul Simpson…

What If? is a show that’s building on everything that’s come before in the MCU. How much is that a constraint for you? The episodes we’ve seen so far amalgamate the various different production designs that went into their initial creation but which have to be evoked very quickly in these cartoons.

It’s actually the thing that has been the saving grace for us because if you’re familiar at all with designing a world, it takes years and we usually have six weeks per episode. So we take as much of the information that was already created for the live action films including the production design, set designs, props, costumes, all sorts of stuff and we just basically import it and put our own spin on it.

Obviously there’s a few episodes when you get further into the season where there’s stuff we had to come up with from scratch. Those obviously take a bit longer because we have to design them ourselves, bu t no, it’s fantastic to have that gigantic library of design that’s already been done before us.

What was the most challenging episode to work on and which is your favourite?

Well, the stock answer is they’ve all been challenging, I like all of them. There are definitely some things where we’ve got to go off script, off of what was already handled in the MCU and design stuff from scratch. It’s not that it’s that hard, it’s just time consuming.

I don’t want to give too many spoilers but as we get later into the season, everything gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the episodes become extremely complex, let’s put it that way, so that obviously is tricky.

My favourite episode so far is [episode 3], the one where all of our heroes get murdered. I’m not entirely sure why I like it, I think there’s a simplicity to it that was intriguing to me, very film noir.

I imagine you worked apart during the last year, because of Covid. How did you go about this and how was it a challenge for you in terms of your way of working?

That’s a fantastic question and yes for me it was quite difficult.

Being a team leader it’s really hard to lead a team when you’re not there. I know for a lot of the artists they really enjoyed it – they get up late and can work in their pyjamas. For me it was a little hard, kind of like herding cats.

We figured it out – I think the entire world had to figure out how to do this – but there were difficulties that you don’t really expect. People would get depressed – nobody is interacting with people. We [used to] solve a lot of our problems during lunchtime meetings, we’d go out to lunch with our crew and we’d have fun, and there’s a certain amount of camaraderie that happens just during lunch or walking and getting coffee and there was none of that. Every time we had to talk with an artist we had to schedule it – and we did and it worked – but it’s not the same and I’ve personally found that things were a lot slower. People weren’t as productive, I wasn’t as productive. But obviously we figured it out, we got it done, we’re moving forward and we’ll see where all this lands in the future. I’m hoping we all come back together again.

We’re going to try and get our crew into a new building later after hopefully everything settles down a little bit.

How did you and your team define the look and visual language of the show given that it’s somewhat constrained to what’s come before in live action? J.C. Leyendecker’s obviously an influence and in general the look of the show is very much with depth. It’s almost the opposite of flat animation – light behaves very realistically and so on – so I was wondering how did you get to that look? What stages did you go through? Did you look at live action for inspiration or did you look at comics as inspiration?

A little bit of everything. Leyendecker was obviously the start of it and that was very much for the character designers and we went a long way getting the Leyendecker shape language. Then we started realising of course that if we’re going to get that in the characters we needed to get that in the environments.

As realistic as our show is – and it is very realistic – it’s very much a live action style filmmaking style. We would start with a lot of 3D models for our sets, and translate that into 2D for our background paintings… It really did become this kind of cool hybrid.

We had a number of constraints: we have the MCU movies, we have the existing sets, we have a live action basic look that we knew we wanted an animated spin on.

A lot of it just came down to illustration style. We looked at Leyendecker, we looked at Dean Cornwell, we looked at Mead Schaeffer, all the cool American illustrators from the 20s and 30s, NC Wyeth but those are always references for most animated films.

My team is fantastic, a crack squad of designers. Kristina Vardazaryan is our painting supervisor and art director now and she was the one who really came up with our painting style. Cynthia Halley is our 2D layout and design supervisor and she’s the one who really made sure that the Leyendecker shape language was maintained. So again, you get this team together, everybody brings their own thing to it and you end up with what you end up with.

I don’t think anybody had an idea of what it was going to look like when we started and that’s half the fun, it is an evolution.

One thing that is new to this of course is The Watcher. What were the influences on the background for him? Were you going back to that original Jack Kirby, Stan Lee stuff from the 60s or was it other influences?

I will answer this as well as I can; the real person to ask on this one would be Ryan Meinerding who was the character designer on this. I wasn’t involved in the characters too much. Obviously the Jack Kirby thing is the base for all of it because all the Marvel stuff comes from Jack Kirby ultimately.

What I remember when they were coming up with The Watcher was they also wanted a little bit of Jeffrey Wright in there because he was going to be voicing the character so getting a dark skinned character look and bone structure was also important.

What was the main inspiration for the design of the Doctor Strange episode?

There is an evolution that happens while you’re dealing with a script. We had certain key locations that were from the original Doctor Strange movie. We had the Sanctum Sanctorum, we had New York City, we had the waterfront where his car crashes down, so those were touchstones for the episode. We have some new locations and they were completely imagined by the writers and the producers and the director. The look of it was all my team but there’s a lot of description even in the storyboards, in the script, so a certain amount of it we’re coming off of the storyboards. That’s always a nice little crutch for a design team.

Our storyboards are descriptive in some ways, they’re actually very cinematic. I don’t know if they’re going to be posting the story reels – that would be really cool to see – so you can actually see where we would get our direct inspiration from. Our director Bryan Andrews is also a fantastic storyboard artist so his storyboards, even though they are very rough, they really do explain the volume and the scale of the place so it was actually very easy to figure out where we’re going to go.

Then of course, we have our specific designers, the guy who designed the interior space of the library, is Ryan Magno and he’s a fantastic designer on my team. Even though we had description, it was basically his brain child, this place. We all directed him: ‘We want some big columns’, ‘Oh maybe we should make it look like a limestone cavern with stalactites and stalagmites, let’s try that…’ ‘Oh that doesn’t work, let’s get rid of that and just make it look like sandstone’.

A whole evolution happens in a given set design.

How important is your relationship with the source material? How big a fan of Marvel are you? Do you think that’s important in a role like yours for this kind of project?

I do think it’s important. Am I a fan? I would say I was never a comic book fan at all as a kid. I wasn’t even an artist as a kid – I was a musician and came to art a little bit later. Comic books weren’t the thing for me, I was way more into sci-fi illustration and sci-fi art and sci-fi movies.

The Marvel movies themselves, I am a big fan and interestingly enough, much to the chagrin of one of my good friends who is a huge Marvel movie fan, I hadn’t seen that many before I got this job. I’d seen a few of them – my daughter was a fan so she started getting me going. I think I’d only seen Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, I’d seen Civil War and had no understanding of how it worked because I hadn’t seen Captain America or Winter Soldier first, so I was completely lost.

I got the job because I actually knew the director before and I’ve done this job in the past. Then I went back and I studied and I watched all the movies many many many times. In fact, in my apartment, we had a TV that was playing them literally 24 hours a day just on a constant loop, to get the whole team really into the thing.

So yes, to answer your question in a very roundabout way it’s extremely important to know the history and the culture of this universe but because our What If…? version is a What If..? specifically on the MCU as opposed to the What If…? comics books which are What If of the comic books. We found that it’s actually more important to be really up on the MCU more so than the comics.

That said, some of our team are complete Marvel nerds and can quote you every single Marvel comic from the beginning of time, as are the filmmakers. You go into the Marvel Studios, they have this gigantic library of all, and I literally mean all of the comic books. It takes up this huge wall, and these guys study this stuff tremendously. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, we don’t have to do as much research.

What’s the process like for adding to the MCU in the sense of new locations? Obviously you’re dealing with something that could potentially be repurposed or show up again…

There is a certain look to things obviously within the universe and our style for our entire show has a certain look. There’s a shape language that we’ve come up with that makes sense for everything. We don’t make things blobby and gloopy looking; everything has a lot of linear aspects, a lot of long elegant shapes. We think of our design style mimicking the look of our heroes: they’re fit, they’re athletic, they’re like crossfit champions these people. They’re athletes, so our designs are very athletic also. Nothing is squishy and nothing is too kid-like. It doesn’t look like Saturday morning cartoons. It’s the animated version of the MCU, so stylistically that’s fairly easy, we just stick within our style.

In terms of a new location, it’s funny because I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms, ever. We’ve got a team of location designers, and we do the things that you would do for any movie. We start researching. We had this episode 4 location, this library and it’s supposed to take place thousands of years ago – Doctor Strange has the time stone, he can do whatever he wants. We didn’t even know how far back, it could have been ten thousand years ago, we don’t really know. So then we start researching ancient temples, ancient libraries, cliff faces. We start looking for landscape references – a lot of photo references that’s where we begin.

We’ll start looking at ancient civilization architecture, columns, doorways, bookshelves, anything you can find. That’s pretty much the job of the design team anyway, doing a ton of research. We’ll get a bunch of it – and we’ll get a pretty broad range, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, ancient Greek, ancient Thailand – and show them to the director and see what they think. Then they’ll usually narrow it down and we’ll start plugging away with a more focused direction.

We also do have our storyboard panels which tells the whole story in a pretty loose and rough way but we know that we’re entering through a doorway, we’re walking through a big hall, we open up into a giant room, there’s a bunch of columns… These things are usually in the storyboards.

Oftentimes we’ll work ahead of the story team and we’ll give the story team ideas as well. That’s usually blue sky development, just coming up with a bunch of stuff but it really is led by the director and their vision.

What If? streams on Disney+, with new episodes released each Wednesday