The creative mandate for the VFX team on “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” was to deliver a premium film with a singing and dancing CG character that both adults and children could believe was real.

Based on the children’s book by Bernard Weber, the film follows Josh (Winslow Fegley), a young boy struggling to fit in, his dad (Scoot McNairy) and stepmother (Constance Wu). Upon moving to the city, the family finds out their new home is inhabited by a singing crocodile named Lyle, voiced by Shawn Mendes.

Josh Gordon, who co-directed the film with Will Speck, says it was important that Lyle didn’t come off mean or menacing. Gordon explains, “That’s part of the character — he scares people — but Lyle is somebody who people judge by his cover. They don’t understand that underneath he is incredibly soulful and sweet.”

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Numerous factors needed to be taken into account when bringing Lyle to life, but it started with getting his eyes right. Once the animators found that soulful expression, the team then had to make sure he wasn’t cartoonishly cute. “Otherwise, people would ask, ‘Where’s the threat?’” Gordon says.

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Visual effects supervisor Joe Bauer says the team went through numerous iterations of the computer-generated Lyle. “When it was wrong, it was really wrong,” he admits. Gordon then commissioned vendors to provide artwork, and from there, he could see what was working and what wasn’t.

Next, a combination of having a stand-in actor and Shawn Mendes’ vocals helped make Lyle believable. Speck says they didn’t want the cast to act opposite tennis balls or guide marks. Instead, they brought in an on-set actor, Ben Palacios, to play Lyle. He wore the face of Lyle as well as the tail and appendages of a crocodile. A camera bolted onto his helmet could track his facial expressions. “He was there giving each actor their Lyle moment, and it was so helpful to have someone processing the emotions,” Speck says.

A lot of capturing the nuances came from blocking and choreography. For the bathtub scene where Lyle takes a bath and starts singing, Palacios acted the scene out. Bauer says, “We shot a video-specific camera on his face, and that was helpful. Once we had that, it was the procedural stuff as far as the water and suds and the other things Lyle interacts with.”

Once Shawn Mendes came in and recorded his singing sessions, the animators could draw from that and reflect the intonation of his voice in Lyle’s face.

Finally, the approach to the set was not to treat it as VFX, but like a performance. “There was a lot of flexibility in the process that made it feel like it was performance-based,” Speck says. “We wanted it to feel as if it was a theatrical performance.”

The set of the family’s brownstone apartment helped with that. Gordon says, “The brownstone was a real set made up of several pieces. [So was] the entire back alleyway, and the buildings across the street.” He adds, “What that does is it immediately puts everybody in a place of realism — the actors don’t have to imagine where things are and where fire escapes are.”

The success of the film, Speck says, is based on the collaboration between vendors and storytelling. “It was a great partnership. You have to have that to do great VFX effects work,” he says. “The VFX artists are in service of story and emotion first.”

Adds Bauer, “We’re telling an emotional story between real people — and Lyle was one of those people — and the visual effects need to embrace it. But they also need to stand back a little bit and let the other magic happen, and that’s how we constructed our approach.”

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