Insider Reveals TRUTH Of Netflix Resident Evil
3. Director Ignored VFX Advice Causing Ballooning Budget
Lingenfelser wasn’t afraid to get into the troubles that had plagued the production of the show and clearly had some frustrating experiences from the start. Speaking on the director of the show’s first two episodes, Lingenfelser recalled that they had wanted to essentially throw out storyboarded sequences for visual effects.
This meant that the VFX supervisor felt he had to stay on-set to make sure the shots captured were correct to fit with the pre-visualization models he had done for the first episode’s gargantuan caterpillar creature, rather than move onto his next set of work.
He also recounted telling the director to make sure to shoot certain scenes in Cape Town at ground-level due to the distressed effects applied to buildings only going so high. When they then decided to point the camera up, it gave the visual effects team much more work to outsource to vendors.
Lingenfelser found himself repeatedly clashing with the director who was capturing “redundant” footage for the infected dog whilst he got the work that he needed done.
“In the interest of making sure we got what I needed, we ended up creating a second unit that all we did was shot the plates for the dog ourselves. It was me and another gentleman, James Adey, and he and I worked and we [story]boarded all that s*** out and we shot it separately with no involvement from the first unit.”
By the sounds of things, the visual effects budget for the show ballooned constantly. Repeated issues on set, such as a surgery scene and a scene with a mirror were filmed in such ways that required more post-production than originally anticipated.
Naturally, Netflix is more likely to renew a show that is cheaper over one that has a budget that gets out of control.