Framestore CFC handled character animation and creature work in 130 shots for Doom. All Framestore CFC images courtesy of Framestore CFC/Universal Pictures.

Once upon a time, playing an action videogame meant controlling the action of a character running, jumping and fighting on screen. It was fun, it was cool, but something was missing. The game experience was not really immersive. That all changed on Dec. 10, 1993, when id Software unleashed a revolutionary game that broke all the rules. Wolfenstein 3D initiated the First Person Shooter perspective, a game concept in which the player explored an environment and annihilated his enemies through the eyes of his on-screen avatar. You no longer played the character; you were the character.

The FPS concept then exploded with Doom. In the film version of the videogame (released by Universal on Oct. 21), a team of Marines is sent to a research facility on Mars to answer a distress call. When they arrive, they find out that an experiment has gone awry and that a “portal” with another dimension has been opened. Horrific creatures now run amok in the facility, picking off the survivors — and soon the Marines — one by one.

For director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave), it was clear from the beginning that visual effects should be kept to a minimum. He wanted to capture most of the action in camera, which included favoring special make-up effects to visualize most of the creatures. The suits were designed and fabricated by Stan Winston Studios under the supervision of John Rosengrant. When practical effects didn’t suffice, Bartkowiak relied on the expertise of visual effects supervisor Jon Farhat (The Mask, Dr. Dolittle). The 350 effects shots were split among two British vendors: Framestore CFC handled character animation and creature work in 130 shots, while Double Negative focused primarily on environments, dimensional effects and futuristic weapons in about 200 shots.

Framestore CFC created Pinky, whose torso is grafted into a hi-tech wheelchair by using a real actor and a CG chair.

Meet Pinky
Part of Framestore CFC’s creature effects assignment was to digitally augment the make-up effects, which included animating the CG tongue of the Imps characters. However, no CG animation was used to create the characters themselves — except for Pinky. This was a character that could not be realized by practical means. Played by Dexter Fletcher, Pinky is a scientist who has lost his legs in an earlier accident and had his torso grafted into a hi-tech wheelchair. “The actor was shot in situ on a remote control wheelchair rig,” Framestore CFC visual effects producer Tim Keene reveals. “CG supervisor Laurent Hugueniot and his crew created a CG chair that was tracked to the action plate. We then painted up clean background plates, and rotoscoped the character off. After that, he was composited along with the CG wheel chair back into the clean plate.” The scene was realized, like the rest of Framestore CFC’s shots, using the facility’s customary Maya/RenderMan/Shake pipeline, with particle animation and fire effects being created in Houdini.

Pinky soon meets his fate when the Baron, the largest of all creatures, attacks him. For this scene, Framestore CFC used a CG double of the actor, as the character had to be violently swung around in a room. “The Baron was shot in situ swinging an object, with the approximate length that Pinky would have been, into set objects,” Keene explains. “We created, animated and composited in the full CG Pinky double into the live-action plates, adding interaction sparks and debris as required. The main challenge here was to re-create Fletcher photorealistically, including clothes and hair.”