Doctor Strange had unique visuals, and a big part of it was because of Dormammu’s dark dimension. In a recent chat with IGN, VFX supervisor Stephane Ceretti laid out how they created the design on-screen.
“We didn’t want to do that because it had been done before,” Ceretti said of the fiery head trope. “The whole idea is he’s a character that lives in-between dimensions. He can also take whatever shapes he wants to take. But in order to talk to Strange at the end of the film, he’s taking that shape [and] you can feel all these ripples in his face and all that stuff… these kind of opening windows to other dimensions, and all the reflective qualities of it. We really wanted to add the evocation of that fire, but we didn’t want to do fire so we went for [a] multicolored approach to try and keep the psychedelic [look] of the entire space. [That] was pretty difficult because when you start putting too many colors together it becomes very, very muddy and kind of painterly very fast. We had to find the right balance of colors within the lighting of Benedict when he was on our stage and trying to find the best way to kind of make it all work together, which is actually not very easy.”
Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the look. It just felt like another large cloud similar to that of Galactus in Fantastic Four.
How did you feel about Dormammu’s design? Let us know in the comments section.
Doctor Strange is in theaters now.
