Doctor Strange VFX Boss Talks Key Death In Movie

Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness was meant to be a truly supernatural horror film in many respects. With the villain causing the most pain and suffering being the Scarlet Witch, who had been driven made by the Darkhold. A key scene, and a very controversial one still, was when Scarlet Witch went to the Illuminati and systematically killed them one by one until only Baron Mordo was left. One of these shocking deaths was the death of Black Bolt, making his true MCU debut (and being replayed by Anson Mount).

In the movie, he died after Wanda erased his mouth from his body, causing a “scream” that activated his powers and thus got his head to implode. Gruesome.

ILM VFX supervisor Julian Foddy detailed what it took to make that death scene come to life:

“For Black Bolt, it starts off with Wanda sealing his mouth shut, or rather ‘removing’ his mouth all together,” the filmmaker said in a recent chat. “That was a CG patch that we created using the texture photography from the actor. Then to create the sonic blast that bounces back into his head, and effectively scrambles his brain, before blowing the back of his skull off, the way we approached that was to almost do it for real.”

They watched all sorts of videos to try and get the “right feel” before they went full tilt:

“We also looked at human faces in wind tunnels and the amount of ripple it does to your cheeks,” he added. “We found that it was impossible to sim that and get realistic results at 24 frames a second. So the FX team, instead, stretched out the timeline in Houdini and worked at something like 120 frames a second.”

The results speak for themselves…so to speech. And even though it’s one of the more controversial elements in the Doctor Strange movie, you can’t deny that it made an impact.

Source: Before & Afters