The extremely talented team at SPIN under the guidance of VFX Supervisor Wesley Sewell entered the madness of the multiverses and brought to life some breathtaking environments and shots. The complexity of the stellar vortex required a visual balancing act. Story-wise, we were challenged with bringing all of these elements to a crescendo to underline the imminent danger our characters were in. We had highly detailed foreground asset destruction of the wall and pillars, choreographed brick destruction, black strands of vortex energy, and multiple layers of debris; all of which had to blend into the motion of our hero vortex setup, which in itself was made up of multiple high-resolution volume simulations. Getting all of these elements to play together cohesively without it being visually overwhelming or introducing continuity issues required extensive planning and flexible effects setups that could be art-directed with quick turnaround times.
The second challenge was creating the “Multiverse Map” simulations. Doctor Strange summons this map from an ancient book which creates a sprawling three-dimensional visage around him. Each “orb” represents a time/place/universe that Doctor Strange can examine. The orb look was realized with multiple levels of procedural volumes, simulated volumes and particles, and internal lights to cast volumetric rays. ID passes were also critical to allow our compositing team to tune the renders per orb and per component to achieve the desired look. The “orbs” that we created were so successful that Marvel shared them with all the other VFX vendors for a beautiful continuity throughout the film.
- Director: Sam Raimi
- Client: Marvel Studios / The Walt Disney Studios
- Links: IMDB
