Collision of realities

Trevor Hogg encounters Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness from the perspective of Digital Domain

- Trevor Hogg

Known for his comedic spin on the horror genre, filmmaker Sam Raimi (Army of Darkness) brings that cinematic sensibility to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with support provided by Marvel Studios VFX supervisor Janek Sirrs (The Avengers) and vendors such as Digital Domain, which had to create colliding worlds, a hexed apple orchard, Sinister Sanctum Sanctorum, a mirror trap, and high-resolution digital doubles that totalled 100 complex shots.

“We were handed over a package of concept art for the various scenes that we were going to be working on, so we had a rough idea, but it was a lot of different ideas that we had to narrow down and sort through,” states Digital Domain VFX supervisor Joel Behrens. “Sam and Janek had a clear idea of what they wanted for these sequences. As far as us coming up with ideas and running stuff by them, that was fluid and smooth.”

Digital Domain had to come up with how effects simulations would work, to show what a universe looks like after a secondary universe has collided with it and is being ripped apart. “There is definitely a way that we build it so that it’s effectsfriendly. We call it ‘water tight’ so surfaces have backings to them and it’s not just a hollow shell of a building. The client had a backlot location in London that was our basic intersection and street that you see multiple times throughout the movie in various universes. We had the ground level of buildings built as set pieces and dressed accordingly per universe, and then they would do a LiDAR scan of that.