This Resident Evil Scene Was 'The Most Complicated' Of The VFX Supervisor's Career [Exclusive]
by Ben Pearson · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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"Barbarian" and "Weapons" director Zach Cregger's rip-roaring "Resident Evil" movie is an entertaining, pedal-to-the-medal experience which proved that Cregger is on an undeniable hot streak. The movie dominated the box office and became the highest-rated video game movie of all time, aided by its creative script, a stellar central performance from Austin Abrams, and enough goopy monsters to delight even the most seasoned horror cinephile. Those creatures came together thanks to the hard work of multiple teams of visual effects artists, and when I spoke with Weta's Kevin Smith, one of the movie's visual effects supervisors, earlier this week, I simply had to ask him about my favorite monster in the movie, which was internally referred to as the "Fat Man."
In the movie, Bryan (Abrams) takes a detour through the sewers of Raccoon City and stumbles across a gigantic bald, hairless man who's about eight feet tall and sitting in the pipes. (He looks like "Dune" villain Baron Harkonnen after a hot dog eating contest.) As Bryan slowly approaches this creature, the man's stomach bursts open and hundreds of live rats pour out of him, racing straight for Bryan and inspiring our hero to make a quick escape.
"There were some people in production that were like, 'All right, we're going to schedule these shots. We're going to get them out of here in the next four weeks,'" Smith recalled, with their implication being that the shots of this character should be totally completed in a month's time. "I said, 'Nope, you're going to schedule these shots for literally the last day of the [film]. This is the most complicated thing as a supervisor I've ever done.'"
Why the Fat Man scene was so difficult to achieve
Smith has been working in visual effects since the early 1990s and has been a VFX supervisor since 2015, having worked on films like "Krampus," "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," "Godzilla vs. Kong," "The Flash," and more. Those projects required some heavy lifts in terms of their effects work, so why did the Fat Man scene from "Resident Evil" prove to be so challenging?
"We generally replaced [that character digitally] from about the pecs down because they filmed it with this internal thing trying to push the [chest out], and it just didn't really work," Smith explained. "So we basically had to put in all the rats and animate the rats and then animate the skin bulging out and then tearing and then there's fluid in there, and it all has to interact. And that's really complicated because you want to do the rats in the animation department because you want the rats to move in a very specific rat-like way."
The problem Smith and his colleagues ran into was that the animation component would happen early in the process, but when the shot would be passed to the effects department that would try to simulate the skin tearing open, they'd be simulating that on top of rats that were animated by hand, and those two components didn't always look realistic.
"When it didn't work together, it had to go all the way back to the beginning [of the process]," he sighed. "We got stuck in a little bit of this circular dependency [...] we honestly ended up, the tearing was actually driven a little by effects and a lot of just modeled by hand, frame by frame."
There was one additional aspect of the Fat Man scene that proved difficult
Crafting the animation around the Fat Man's stomach with enough accuracy and detail that it looks and feels real sounds difficult enough, but there was one other component of the sequence that sounds like an extra nightmare to achieve ... especially if you have musophobia.
"Then there's blood and goop coming out, and it's all got to stick to parts of the guy. And then the rats have to splash in the water. All the rats pour out and they start running towards Bryan and that water is all CG because the rats have to splash it up, and the rats have to look like there's goop stuck to them. There's so many little things and so many little things to get it right. And it's just so time-consuming with our circular dependencies that we really did [complete] the last of those shots in the last week of the [movie]. It just took a long, long time to get it right."
Smith's 35+ years of experience paid off, especially when he demanded that these shots be moved to the end of the schedule. Finalizing them in the last week was cutting it close, but feels fitting for a movie about a guy who spends most of the film barely dodging mutants and monsters.
"Resident Evil" is still in theaters nationwide.