Polygon speaks to a trio of Wētā Workshop artists about Zach Cregger's latest movie

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?

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