Baby Love: Behind the scenes with the com­pa­ny cre­at­ing real­is­tic mater­ni­ty props

In the 2004 crime caper sequel Ocean’s Twelve, part of the plot involved the char­ac­ter Tess Ocean (Julia Roberts) shov­ing a cush­ion up her dress to pass her­self off as then-preg­nant megastar…Julia Roberts. The meta scene gave the audi­ence a laugh, but also did what many movies and TV shows do: it glossed over the com­plex­i­ty of mater­ni­ty by reduc­ing it to a com­ic aside.

“We spend a lot of time talk­ing to film­mak­ers and pro­duc­ers, and telling them: ​‘No, after giv­ing birth, a woman doesn’t have a pret­ty flat bel­ly. No.” says Jus­tine Ray Le Sol­liec, the co-own­er of Cineba­by. The UK and France-based com­pa­ny spe­cialis­es in mak­ing and hir­ing out eeri­ly life­like babies, as well as oth­er hyper-accu­rate mater­ni­ty props, includ­ing bel­lies, breasts and pla­cen­tas, for tele­vi­sion and film.

Orig­i­nal­ly estab­lished in 2008 by Virid­i­ana Fer­rière, Cineba­by allowed Fer­rière to com­bine her expe­ri­ence as a trainee nurse, spe­cial­is­ing in babies and mater­ni­ty, with her artis­tic skills as a reborn artist: paint­ing the heads and limbs for hyper-real­is­tic plas­tic dolls. In 2017, she met spe­cial effects make­up artist Julie Bar­rère, who took over the run­ning of the com­pa­ny the year after, when Virid­i­ana left.

Jus­tine joined in 2020, tak­ing care of sales, mar­ket­ing and project man­age­ment so Julie could focus on the babies and bel­lies. The pair began to grow the busi­ness, hir­ing Nol­wenn Caro, Céline Lalle­ment and Vir­ginie Dah­mane who, as Jus­tine explains, have a range of dif­fer­ent skills. ​“Nol­wenn used to work in Italy, then in the UK in work­shops, doing huge props and set dec­o­ra­tion, but she also does some paint­ing as well. Céline used to be a prop mas­ter and was a pro­duc­er in ani­ma­tion, while Vir­ginie start­ed as a make­up artist, did some spe­cial effects and also den­tal pros­thet­ics. She is our sculptor.”

Any­one brows­ing the Cineba­by web­site can’t help but be a lit­tle freaked out by – there’s no oth­er word for it – the real­ness of their work. The home page fea­tures a video of the team casu­al­ly pulling a fake baby that is emerg­ing from a fake vagi­na, inter­cut with the mod­el-mak­ing process­es and footage of a baby being packed into a box, pre­sum­ably before being sent off to set for its close up.

But why is this nec­es­sary? How many view­ers real­ly raise a brow when a scrupu­lous­ly clean infant the size of a six-month-old is plonked into its TV mother’s arms sec­onds after birth? How many scoff when what is obvi­ous­ly a doll that has been bun­dled up in a blan­ket, appears on screen for a few fleet­ing moments? Prob­a­bly not many – so why does Cinebaby’s accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of mater­ni­ty matter?

“The more real­is­tic it is, the more you can shoot with it,” Jus­tine argues, before explain­ing how it’s not the only advan­tage. ​“First, you don’t have to bring real babies on set. Sec­ond, which is so impor­tant to us, is we want to see more accu­rate babies, mater­ni­ty and women’s bod­ies rep­re­sent­ed on screen. If we have some­thing that is very real­is­tic, accu­rate and easy to show, then they are going to show it. I mean, that’s why we exist!”

The women at Cineba­by also work with med­ical staff, pro­vid­ing babies for staff train­ing, first aid and even to help par­ents. That extra knowl­edge gives them the edge when it comes to help­ing out – and giv­ing instruc­tions – on set. ​“We start work­ing from the script and tell the teams ​‘the accu­rate way to do this is more like that or more like that’. We have all this med­ical knowl­edge so it’s legit­i­mate to say some­thing like ​‘this is not the right way to show this, because it’s not what’s hap­pen­ing in real life’. It depends on who is in front of us, but they lis­ten to us most of the time.”

In a stark dif­fer­ence to real life, it takes the Cineba­by team between two weeks and two months to cre­ate a baby, and around a week to make a preg­nan­cy bel­ly, depend­ing on whether the team uses an exist­ing mould or makes one from scratch. For their work as Stu­dio Junon, which makes a vari­ety of oth­er organ­ic pros­thet­ics and props, they can cre­ate a cast of a real per­son, for exam­ple, a hand or leg, but ​“we don’t cast tod­dlers or babies,” Jus­tine explains. ​“We cast the per­son and put some sil­i­cone on it, so we have the exact repli­ca of a body part. Then from this we make the sculp­ture, we do all the micro changes and every­thing we need. Then we cre­ate a mould, which is basi­cal­ly the neg­a­tive of the sculp­ture, put some sil­i­cone in, wait for a cou­ple of hours, extract the sil­i­cone and paint it. Paint­ing is a very long process, around two or three days for a baby, then we have to punch the hair in one strand at a time with a lit­tle nee­dle, and that’s it.”

Each infant is unique and cre­at­ed after mix­ing and match­ing fea­tures from pho­tos of dif­fer­ent (but very real) babies. ​“We have a huge, huge file with a lot of pho­tos, though we nev­er repro­duce exact­ly one baby because it’s not eth­i­cal,” Jus­tine says. ​“Obvi­ous­ly we use real babies because this is accu­rate but we nev­er copy any­thing. One time a pro­duc­tion asked us to copy real twins but we made some changes in the sculp­ture and in the paint­ing so they were not exact­ly the same. I think it’s not real­ly okay to have a prop­er dou­ble. The baby didn’t give any consent.”

Cineba­by makes fake babies with sil­i­cone limbs and a fab­ric body, as well as full sil­i­cone mod­els, in sizes rang­ing from from pre­ma­ture and birth size, to 18 months, while their fake bel­lies come in foam and sil­i­cone, and go from four to nine months – com­plete with lin­ea nigra, the dis­tinc­tive line that runs down the front of many women’s bel­lies. One thing that imme­di­ate­ly stands out is the diver­si­ty of skin colour, some­thing that Jus­tine and the team believe is anoth­er impor­tant facet of their work. ​“We have to, because if we don’t have any diver­si­ty in what we have in props then it just sends the mes­sage that skin colours oth­er than Cau­casian are not as impor­tant,” Jus­tine says. ​“It’s absolute­ly not okay. If we already have mul­ti­ple skin tones and dif­fer­ent hair, the film mak­ers can show it. They have a choice and they don’t have to think about it. If we want a baby with this skin tone and this hair, it’s pos­si­ble to show it on screen. It’s our job to have the most diver­si­ty we can. I think it’s some­thing we real­ly need to do. It starts from us.”

That brings the con­ver­sa­tion round to arguably the biggest ele­phant in the room: Cineba­by isn’t just rare because of the spe­cial effects work they spe­cialise in. It is rare because they are women in a male-dom­i­nat­ed indus­try. Though, as Jus­tine qui­et­ly points out, the land­scape is chang­ing. ​“I see more and more women, that’s for sure, so that’s some­thing good. But we don’t have any par­i­ty; there are so many more men but there is progress. The thing is, we are a team of women, but we are also spe­cial­ists in babies and mater­ni­ty. We’re also very engaged in the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women’s bod­ies and fem­i­nism, so it’s not just spe­cial effects.”

Jus­tine goes on: ​“The sub­ject and our val­ues attract more women. We see it every time we offer a job: we receive a lot of women’s CVs, we have very few men. We used to have a man in the team, so it’s per­fect­ly fine, but it’s both val­ues and the sub­ject, I think. Also because our team is made up of just women, it attracts more women because they know it’s safe. But what we see on set is that when we work on a pro­duc­tion, most of the time it’s men that han­dle the super­vi­sion in spe­cial effects, and it has to change. But, you know, it’s a work in progress.”

When asked if she sees the Cineba­by team as pio­neers, Jus­tine says: ​“Not real­ly. I wouldn’t say that. It’s more that we are very spe­cialised, very niche. It’s more like we are very focused on a sub­ject. We’re not pio­neers, we’re more like focused experts.”

Their CV is an increas­ing­ly glit­ter­ing demon­stra­tion of their tal­ent: along­side Emi­ly in Paris and the French block­buster The Count of Monte Cristo, the team also worked on Titane, direct­ed by Julia Ducour­nau, In 2021 she became the sec­ond woman after Jane Cam­pi­on to be hon­oured with the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In 2022, dur­ing their first vis­it to the pres­ti­gious fes­ti­val, a del­e­ga­tion from Cineba­by were among the atten­dees – though the fake baby they took with them (to show­case what they do to poten­tial clients) con­cerned so many peo­ple that they were ques­tioned by the police. ​“Peo­ple report­ed that two women at the fes­ti­val had a baby and it wasn’t mov­ing,” Jus­tine recalls. ​“They told us that they were look­ing for us for two hours. The entire city with the police, with the secu­ri­ty and all the cam­eras. I was like, ​‘Okay, I’m so sor­ry!’ Now, every time we go, we have to let the secu­ri­ty and the fes­ti­val organ­is­ers know when we’re in Cannes and not to wor­ry if they hear about a baby in a bag.”

Away from the glit­ter and glam­our of Cannes and back at the work­shop, one ques­tion remained: if Cineba­by could work with any­one from the enter­tain­ment indus­try, who would it be? For Jus­tine, it would be one of the biggest icons of Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma: ​“Oh my God, Quentin Taran­ti­no, because I’m a huge fan of his films. Julie and I are both very fond of Denis Villeneuve’s work, too.”