ALL VFX REMOVED! Doctor Strange VFX Breakdown
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As the release of the sequel "Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness" approaches, we thought we'd take a look back at the first film to see what made it worthy of a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination and what we can expect from the sequel. For Dr. Strange, VFX superheroes: ILM, Framestore, Rise FX, Crafty Apes, Luma Pictures, Method Studios, Lola VFX, and SPOV joined forces to produce nearly 1500 VFX shots.
Framestore
Framestore produced 365 VFX shots which included: the creation of the Astral Form, the complicated warping, bending, and moving of sets, the creation of high-resolution digital doubles for key characters, and the animation of Dr. Strange's cape (which was so extensive and expressive that they ended up treating it as its own character named "Capey the cape"). When Dr. Strange is in his astral form he can still be in the real world but he is not visible to humans. Even though the look of this effect is fairly well established in the comics, bringing the effect into the real world was an entirely different matter.
Capey the Cape
Capey is its own character and has its own personality, kind of like the hero's horse in western films or Aladdin's flying carpet. The VFX team once again had to play a delicate balancing game, they had to animate the cloth to express its personality but it couldn't look too much like a cartoon. It had to move how they wanted it to and yet still remain a piece of cloth, this meant that Capey ended up being a complicated mix of animation and simulation. In a lot of shots where Dr. Strange is wearing the cape, he was actually shot wearing just a collar with shoulder sections, the fabric of which had to be digitally matched for the CG version.
ILM.
ILM worked mainly on the New York and Hong Kong sequences delivering around 350 VFX Shots that were tremendously challenging.
The Hong Kong sequence was a confusing one, a gigantic puzzle that required exhaustive planning to execute correctly.
The main actors in this sequence were moving forwards in time whilst the extras were moving backward in time and the city itself was reconstructing itself.
Each sequence was shot with motion control so only 5 or 6 could be shot a night and it took them 23 nights to shoot it all.
The basic principle was to first shoot the Hero actors whilst recording the movement of the camera from starting point to the finish point.
Next, they'd shoot the extras and the destruction of the set but have the camera move from the finishing point back to the starting point.
When both plates were composited with the camera moving from start to finish, the Heros would be moving forward and the extras and destruction would be reversed.
Extra complications were that in some sequences the extras were moving at "half time" so different frame rates had to be used. They also had to carefully plan the routes the extras were running to avoid them colliding with the Hero Actors when the two plates were combined.
Luma Pictures.
Luma worked on around 200 shots including both the opening sequence of the film and the final sequence.
For the London sequence, in addition to creating 14 Digi-doubles, Luma's animation department hand keyed and choreographed the architecture of the buildings with the actor's motions.
For both the London and the Cathedral sequence, they developed and built tools to duplicate and render the fractals of the buildings thousands of times over as well as in-house tools that enabled them to direct the speed and movement of the fractals and visualize the scenes inside the viewport of Maya.
Dormammu.
Just like Framestore did with the Astral form, Luma also had to translate the 2D comic book look of Dormammu into the 3D real world.
Dormammu is a solid, yet constantly changing shape, he is liquid, solid, and gas all at the same time, and yet at the same time, he is none of these.
In order to create Dormammu, Luma basically had to combine every department's expertise into one being.
Performance capture from Cumberbatch was combined with hand-keyed animation, this was combined with a complex rigging technique to liquefy Dormammu, deformer sets were used to make his face ripple as if reality was distorting and then lots of FX layering, all this was driven by Cumberbatch's performance changes and choreographed and triggered by Luma's artists.
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