The plates were shot with a mockup of the Licker as a lighting reference. Animation of the CG creature turned out to be much trickier than expected, due to the unique nature of the character. “The Licker is supposed to be half man, half frog!” O’Brien remarks. “How is such a creature supposed to move? There was absolutely no real-life animal that we could use as a reference, which made the animation very complicated. In the end, I asked the animators to look at monkeys and frogs for the jumps and the landings, and to study lions and tigers for facial animation. Also, the fact that the Licker had no eyes made it very difficult for us to convey expressions. As a result, we mainly used the elongated tongue of the character to express attitudes.” Rendered in RenderMan, the Licker was composited in live-action plates with Digital Fusion.

Digital Make-up
During the course of the action, Alice gets to team up with Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), another beloved character from the Resident Evil videogame series. In a tense sequence, Jill comes face to face with a group of mean virus-infected Dobermans. The dogs were real animals that had been trained to perform the action while wearing heavy make-up. However, director Alexander Witt deemed that the results were not scary enough and C.O.R.E. was asked to digitally enhance the look of the creatures. Using Digital Fusion and combustion, CG artists painted new textures that were meant to be as repulsive as possible. After meticulous tracking of the dogs’ movements, the digital textures were warped to precisely fit the shape of the bodies. Close-ups of the growling animals required heavy touch ups: teeth were made sharper; tendons, bones or ribs were partially exposed; eyes were digitally injured; and layers upon layers of bloody textures were added onto the bodies. “The end result is deliciously gruesome!” O’Brien laughs. Besides creature animation, C.O.R.E. also handled several crowd duplication scenes, turning 400 extras into a crowd of 6,000.

Director Alexander Witt (right) shows actresses Sienna Guillory and Sophie Vavasseur how it’s done. Photo by Rolf Konow.

The remainder of the effects workload — about 80 shots — was awarded to Frantic Films supervised by Chris Bond. The Winnipeg-based company focused on muzzle flashes, tracer bullets and speed changes. The final shot of the movie was the one and only effect for which O’Brien was actually able to choose the facility: “For this end shot, they allowed me to choose a company in the U.K. I selected Double Negative, London, and they delivered an impressive 50-seconds long pull back starting from a tight shot of Milla Jojovich and ending up in outer space. The first 10 seconds are a live-action plate photographed from a 22-foot crane, but after that, the shot becomes completely digital and, as we get out into space, it is as photoreal as it gets.” The assignment was supervised by Rick Leary and executed in Maya, RenderMan and Shake.

For O’Brien, the project leaves memories of intense pressure, but a sense of great pride too: “I was faced with an extraordinary amount of limitations. It was an extremely hard job. Yet, given that I didn’t have the choice of the companies I could work with, I’m very happy with the final result. They all delivered. I should point out that we did more than 500 shots for less than $3 million in digital costs. That’s a huge feat!”

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex.