Kevin Smith would like to set the record straight. (Not that Kevin Smith, the Wētā Workshop visual effects veteran who served as VFX Supervisor on Zach Cregger's Resident Evil.) In the weeks after the release of Resident Evil, a viral clip showed several acrobatic performers tied together at the waist and practicing the movements of the mutated, cartwheeling mass of limbs known as the "Pedestrian" in Cregger's adaptation of the horror video game franchise. This has led some people online to assume that the creature in the film was actually a practical effect, with a bit of CGI on top. But as Smith explains, that is an incorrect assumption.
"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 first joined Wētā in 2000 to work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, a film that helped establish the New Zealand studio as a VFX powerhouse. In the decades since, that simple question — What would it look like? — has defined the visuals of iconic films from James Cameron's Avatar franchise to M3GAN and Resident Evil. To discover the process behind bringing that latest movie to life, Polygon caught up with Smith along with two of his Wētā coworkers — animation supervisor Eric Reynolds and VFX producer Janet Walters — to learn more about the Pedestrian and the various other horrors of Raccoon City.
The Pedestrian appears early in Resident Evil after the film's protagonist Bryan (Austin Abrams) comes across a dead couple in a remote farmhouse who become infected and fused together by the T-Virus. Throughout the course of the movie, more mutated bodies become attached to the creature, resulting in a terrifying zombie-like monster with arms, legs, and heads pointing in every possible direction. The biggest issue with the practical, Cirque du Soleil-style version of the Pedestrian was that it simply looked too normal with all the legs facing down and all the heads pointed up.
"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." It just looks creepier if it's more bodies. This change also helped explain the most unique aspect of the Pedestrian: the way it hypnotically rolls across the landscape thanks to a cluster of limbs pointed in every direction. "Zach had a very specific idea about how this thing should move," Smith says.
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