How we cre­at­ed Lamb’s creepy human-sheep hybrid child

What if a lamb was stuck in a human body? How would it com­mu­ni­cate with its moth­er? How would it emote? This was the dilem­ma faced by pro­duc­tion VFX super­vi­sor Peter Hjorth and post-pro­duc­tion VFX super­vi­sor Fredrik Nord on Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb.

Ada, the human-sheep hybrid child at the heart of the film, was played on set by local chil­dren wear­ing a sort of green-screen hel­met, while lambs from a local farm pro­vid­ed the basis for its head. Com­bin­ing these two ele­ments in a sin­gle body pre­sent­ed myr­i­ad tech­ni­cal chal­lenges. Here, Hjorth and Nord reveal how they brought this creepy vision to life. (Mild spoil­ers ahead…)

Peter Hjorth: ​“The key to the whole thing was: how do you cre­ate a char­ac­ter that you can love, and where you can under­stand that the oth­er char­ac­ters feel love and respect for this crea­ture, but it’s not human, and it has very lit­tle human behav­iour? She exper­i­ments with try­ing to align with the humans and it doesn’t go too well.

“I love Dis­ney, and I love the way they do things, but what they always do is a human that’s trapped in an animal’s body. And we thought, ​‘Can we do the reverse? Can we have an ani­mal who is actu­al­ly trapped in human parts of the body?’ There was no way to turn that down, even though it was hor­ren­dous­ly difficult.”

Fredrik Nord: ​“Ada express­es her­self with very lit­tle means. In an ear­ly ver­sion of the script she was sup­posed to try to speak a bit and not real­ly man­age, but deci­sions were made to make her more ani­mal-like – to not speak. So that meant what we had to work with was the small emo­tions through the eyes, flut­ter­ing winks, her nose and stuff like that; her lips and ears giv­ing away the emo­tion if she’s scared or excited.

“We tried to pin­point those things and use them as best we could in the scenes. In some sense, when she gets real­ly scared it’s easy, but there are a lot of scenes where she’s sub­tle, where she just stands there and tries to go through the sit­u­a­tion, and it’s very fine and del­i­cate animation-wise.”

FN: ​“While they were film­ing in Ice­land, we stud­ied all the real lambs that were on set, which was real­ly help­ful because I just took all the dailies and scrubbed through and checked how the real lambs on set moved. That was prob­a­bly the biggest resource of under­stand­ing how she moved, and how the ears pull back when she’s scared or agi­tat­ed and those kinds of things.

“In the begin­ning we tried to check real lambs, but then we got into this ques­tion of, what is a real lamb? Valdimar has a lot of knowl­edge in that area appar­ent­ly, because he said, ​‘You’re prob­a­bly doing a Swedish lamb – it should be an Ice­landic lamb.’ And we were like, ​‘I don’t know the dif­fer­ence. What do you mean? We’re not going for a Swedish lamb, we’re just going for a lamb. We’re just googling images of lambs and try­ing to build a real lamb.’ But then when the mate­r­i­al start­ed rolling in from their shoot, we got a real idea of how the Ice­landic lambs look.

PH: ​“Dur­ing the birthing sea­son, some lambs are reject­ed by their moth­ers, and we took in three orphaned lambs very, very ear­ly. They were liv­ing on the farm that was our set, and the pro­duc­tion peo­ple man­aged to sched­ule every­thing around how the lambs were age­ing, and we made this a sys­tem for how Ada ages. For every scene where we had a major action with Ada, we could actu­al­ly bring the lamb in front of the cam­era and film a spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence for Fredrik that con­nect­ed with the scene.

“Because I was there for the birthing, I actu­al­ly saw one of the lit­tle lambs die at birth. It was a real­ly strange thing to wit­ness. We had it packed up, refrig­er­at­ed and sent it to Den­mark, where a taxi­der­mist dis­as­sem­bled and dis­in­fect­ed it. We then had the pros­thet­ics guys and the pup­peteers put it back togeth­er – so it was actu­al­ly an artic­u­late prop. That turned out to be real­ly nice for the actors and for the whole crew just to see the size of it.”

PH: ​“We had been work­ing on his design for a long time. Our crea­ture design­er, Morten Jacob­sen, was work­ing in clay, and at one point he just went off by him­self and we didn’t hear any­thing for a while. Every­body was like, ​‘Is he angry? What’s wrong?’ Then one morn­ing these pic­tures came back, and it was the final Ram Man. We thought, ​‘Whoa, this is dif­fer­ent from what we expect­ed – maybe it’s a bit over the top.’ But then we looked at each oth­er and I was like, ​‘Yeah, but it’s awe­some! We want it on screen.’

“He’s played by Ing­var E Sig­urðss­son, one of the biggest actors in Ice­land, and I have to con­fess, I was a lit­tle bit scared of him when we start­ed because I just knew we were gonna put him through hell. Because he was wear­ing that [hel­met], he was out­side in the cold, he was almost naked, he was blind, he had to be walked around every time he was suit­ed up and had the mask on. When I did the first ses­sion with him where we took some stills of him, I asked, ​‘What would you rather be, a lit­tle bit too hot or a lit­tle bit too cold?’ He just said, ​‘I’m fine with both, I’ve been inside a crea­ture before, I know it’s not going to be com­fort­able. Don’t wor­ry about it, let’s just get the work done.’”

PH: ​“When we stopped pro­duc­tion, it was actu­al­ly real­ly sad, because it was like a fam­i­ly. I’m not going to tell you who, but one of the peo­ple who worked with the ani­mals was actu­al­ly cry­ing at the wrap par­ty, say­ing, ​‘I had no idea I could con­nect so close­ly with a four-legged crea­ture. I’ve had dogs, I’ve had cats, I’ve con­nect­ed with them, but nev­er in this way.’ After pro­duc­tion, our lambs went back to the farms that they came from, and our hero lamb had a lit­tle lamb of her own. It was so emotional.”

Lamb is in UK cin­e­mas now and will be avail­able to stream on MUBI ear­ly in the New Year.