Warning: There are spoilers ahead of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness! Doctor Strange 2 vfx
Although Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness spent the bulk of its two-hour runtime exploring Earth-838, the film visited several other realities along the way. In one of its most memorable scenes, Stephen Strange and America Chavez jump through 20 different universes in 40 seconds. Since many of these dimensions defy both logic and physics, they required a capable team of visual effects designers to render them in live-action. That’s why Marvel tasked multiple VFX houses with bringing these universes (and some of their otherworldly occupants) to life.
Many of the film’s designers revealed which scenes they worked on in a new interview with Variety. The multiverse jump, for instance, fell to Alexis Wajsbrot’s team at Framestore VFX. Wajsbrot’s crew spent “months and months” perfecting every little detail in the scene. But this also allowed them to include a number of Easter eggs for longtime Marvel fans.
“One was an Incan statue world, which ended up in the movie because Kevin Feige thought, ‘Well, that could be a great world to put the Living Tribunal in,’” explained Wajsbrot. “So that world became the Living Tribunal world. We proposed a jungle and Kevin Feige said, ‘Well, it could be cool if it was Savage World.’ It’s a world that exists in the Marvel Universe. So we had to add dinosaurs. We had to model and texture and render and animate dinosaurs for two seconds, which is extremely not cost-efficient.”
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A separate VFX company, Luma Pictures, handled other scenes in the movie, including the opening fight scene against Gargantos. According to senior VFX supervisor and creative director Olivier Dumont, animating all eight of Gargantos’ legs was a “challenge,” especially in the middle of a busy street in New York. But luckily, senior VFX producer Michael Perdew is a Marvel junkie himself, and he had his own goals for the creature’s big-screen debut.
“I’ve been personally begging for this character for years, since about 2014,” said Perdew. “And the character in the comics has two names: Gargantos is a variant of another character called Shuma-Gorath. So if you see the design, it’s more an allusion to that character.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now playing in theaters everywhere.
What was your favorite VFX shot in the film? Tell us your picks in the comment section below!
Recommended Reading: Doctor Strange Vol. 1: The Way of the Weird
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