Resident Evil VFX Team Added a Third Body to the Pedestrian Monster’s First Appearance

Kevin Smith, the Wētā Workshop visual effects veteran who supervised VFX on Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil, wants to clear up a misconception about one of the film’s monsters.

In the weeks after the film’s release, a viral clip showed acrobatic performers tied together at the waist, practicing the movements of the Pedestrian. The mutated mass of limbs cartwheels through Cregger’s adaptation of the horror video game franchise. Some people online assumed the creature was a practical effect with a little CGI added, but Smith says that is incorrect.

“We’ve all seen that motion test,” Smith tells Polygon. “That’s an exploration of an idea. It’s kind of cool that you can strap people together and roll around, but obviously, you can look at those tests and understand what the limitations are. You’re never gonna put that in the movie.”

“For us, it’s really just the idea that, if you didn’t have all the limitations of trying to strap circus performers together to do this, what would it look like?”

Smith joined Wētā in 2000 to work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which helped establish the New Zealand studio as a visual effects powerhouse. In the decades since, the question of what an idea might look like has helped define the visuals of films ranging from James Cameron’s Avatar franchise to M3GAN and Resident Evil.

Polygon spoke with Smith and two Wētā colleagues, animation supervisor Eric Reynolds and VFX producer Janet Walters, about the Pedestrian and the other horrors of Raccoon City.

The Pedestrian: ‘You start losing track of limbs’

The Pedestrian appears early in Resident Evil, after Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, finds a dead couple in a remote farmhouse. The T-Virus infects and fuses them together. As the film continues, more mutated bodies join the creature, creating a zombie-like monster with arms, legs, and heads pointing in every direction.

The practical, Cirque du Soleil-style version looked too normal, with its legs facing down and its heads pointing up. Wētā gave the bodies a less orderly arrangement.

“In those videos, it was pretty symmetrical how they hooked everybody up,” Reynolds says. “The monster needed to look messier. So when we stuck our bodies together, we didn’t have them all lined up. They’re all coming in at different angles to make it seem a little more unnatural.”

The arrangement also helped explain how the Pedestrian rolls across the landscape on limbs pointing in different directions.

“Zach had a very specific idea about how this thing should move,” Smith says.

“He really did mean that it’s gonna roll,” Reynolds adds. “There was no guesswork. This is really what he wants.”

Wētā made another change for the creature’s first appearance. When the Pedestrian emerges from the farmhouse and chases Bryan down the road, it has already fused with a third body. The team added the body to make the creature look scarier and more unnatural.

“The first time we saw the Pedestrian, it was gonna just be the two bodies: the farmer and the original woman,” Reynolds says. “We did some tests, and it just looks creepier if it’s more bodies, so we added the girl. Now you start losing track of limbs.”

The Fat Man: ‘That thing was huge’

Bryan finds the creature Wētā calls the “Fat Man” sitting quietly in a sewer. The giant, bald monster appears not to notice him. Then its stomach explodes, releasing hundreds of mutant rats that race toward Bryan.

Legacy Effects and creature designer Shane Mahan created the Fat Man as a 2,000-pound prop. The rats were entirely CGI. Wētā photographed the set extensively and made a digital scan of the Fat Man before adding the vermin.

“We can animate the rats and have the skin tear and stuff comes out and the blood and guts that splatter down onto his legs,” Walters says. “It’s a lot easier to do if that’s all digital.”

Smith recalls being struck by the prop’s size.

“That thing was huge,” he says. “I’m about six feet tall, and when I was standing next to that thing, our heads were basically at the same height — and that guy was sitting down. If you stood the Fat Man up, he’s like eight and a half feet tall. There’s four people under there puppeteering him.”

Mutant Bryan: ‘We cheated a bit’

After an infected girl bites Bryan earlier in the film, he slowly begins to mutate. By the end, in a secret lab where Umbrella Corporation scientists are working on an antidote, he has transformed into a monster with tentacle arms, one giant bloodshot eye, and a large mouth full of sharp teeth where his stomach should be.

“It’s kind of a final monster, but it’s built off the framework of Austin, the actor,” Reynolds says.

During the transformation, Bryan appears to fight the monster he is becoming as he struggles over a syringe containing the scientists’ newly completed antidote.

“He’s always pulling one way, the monster’s pulling the other,” Reynolds says. “We worked through some stuff with Zach about how he’s always grabbing for the syringe and the monster’s essentially trying to swat it away. It doesn’t want the cure. So he’s almost trapped by his own body. He’s getting pulled away from the cure by his own legs because he doesn’t have control over any of that anymore.”

Abrams is 5 feet 8 inches tall, but Wētā needed the monster to be much larger for the final scene.

“I think our Bryan monster is about eight and a half feet tall,” Walters says. “He’s pretty big.”

“Austin’s head that’s on the monster is quite a bit bigger than it probably should be because everything scales up kind of uniformly,” Reynolds adds. “He’s not a tall actor, and the guy he was fighting was taller. So we scaled up the Bryan monster because he had to seem imposing. We cheated a bit.”

Resident Evil is available digitally to rent or own.

Source: Polygon